Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is celebrated today for her sculptures. Less known are the paintings she produced between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to three-dimensional media in 1949. Crucial to her artistic practice, these early works--the focus of this groundbreaking publication--show how Bourgeois evolved her deeply personal artistic lexicon, and how the themes and motifs she explored in her paintings coalesced into symbols of her sculptural practice. Informed by new archival research and the artist's extensive diaries, Louise Bourgeois: Paintings explores Bourgeois's relationship to the New York art world of the 1940s and her development of a unique pictorial language, adding a key element to our understanding of this crucial artist's career.