Representing the Unrepresented: Rethinking the Catalogue Raisonné

8th January 2026

At the @International Catalogue Raisonné Association’s seventh annual conference, held at @Mishcon de Reya in London, scholars, curators, foundation leaders, publishers, technologists, and legal experts gathered to confront a central question facing the field today: how can catalogue raisonné scholarship address historic exclusion without reproducing the hierarchies that caused it?

Under the theme “The Catalogue Raisonné: Representing the Unrepresented,” the conference examined how the form—long considered an indispensable scholarly tool—has also functioned as a mechanism of market validation, cultural power, and exclusion. Speakers interrogated whether a model developed around white, male, Western artists with extensive archives can adequately serve artists whose practices, identities, and material conditions fall outside those norms.

Keynotes by Griselda Pollock and Mary Jane Jacob framed the catalogue raisonné as both necessary and deeply problematic: a bridge between archive and public life that simultaneously supports scholarship and capitalist value systems. Panels explored gender and value bias, the erasure of women collectors from provenance histories, alternative foundation-led funding models, legal vulnerabilities faced by under-documented artists, and the role of structured data, digital platforms, and archives in expanding what documentation can mean.

Case studies—from Helene Kröller-Müller and Lillie P. Bliss to Indigenous, neurodivergent, and Nordic women artists—demonstrated how absence from records produces lasting cultural and economic consequences. Discussions also addressed living artists shaping their own legacies, notably through the Cindy Sherman Legacy Project, which offers a model for artist-led documentation, conservation, and sustainable funding.

Across disciplines, a shared understanding emerged: catalogues raisonnés are no longer definitive endpoints, but provisional, collaborative, and ethical acts of stewardship. As the field evolves, the challenge remains how to document marginalized artistic practices without reinscribing the very systems that excluded them—while ensuring that artistic memory as well as scholarship and justice endure.

Visit to Louise Bourgeois' Easton Foundation

Image: Louise Bourgeois in the backyard of her home, New York, 1980. Photo: Mark Setteducati, © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Further to the ICRA December 2023 Annual Conference ‘On Paper’ and the presentation by Sewon Kang, archivist and cataloguer of Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, ICRA would like to invite members to join Sharon Hecker and Matthew Stephenson on a visit to the Easton Foundation and townhouse of Louise Bourgeois on 3rd May at 10.30am at 349 West 20th Street, New York.

Sewon will lead the visit, which usually lasts an hour. Due to the intimate nature of Bourgeois’s house, places are limited to ten places and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Easton Foundation was established by Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s as a non-profit and charitable organization. Upon her death in 2010, at the age of 98, Bourgeois bequeathed her home and an adjacent townhouse to become the Foundation’s center.

For select visitors, the Foundation is pleased to present a comprehensive survey of photographs, exhibition announcements, and personal writings from Bourgeois’s life and career. These documents hint at the breadth and scope of the Louise Bourgeois Archive, and provide unique insight to the artist’s creative process. A selection of Bourgeois’s artworks from the Foundation’s extensive collection will also be on display, and the backyard sculpture garden will be open, weather permitting. In addition, Louise Bourgeois’s home, where many works were conceived or made, will be accessible by guided tour.