Louise Bourgeois: Aller-Retour

by Louise Bourgeois, Gerald Matt

Over the past intensely productive decade, Louise Bourgeois's drawings have been dominated by diary-like work in which text and sign often mix. This extensive compendium of that work and its antecedents shares a series design with her recent book of sculpture, and the dialogue between mediums is lively in both titles, which also share a determination to put Bourgeois's current work in the context of her oeuvre, not just her work in other mediums but her work of other eras. Long denied due recognition, Bourgeois became an avant-garde superstar late in life, and is today, at 94, considered "a great figure of the postmodern" (Peter Weiermair). Since the 1980s, her work has followed the prevalent notion of art that rejects universal style and formal understanding in favor of a personal approach. Her central concern lies in establishing an intense, open discussion on the dialectics of thoughts and feelings, on the internal conflict wrought by external relationships. Here, some 150 works are grouped thematically around motifs such as "rivers," "spiders" and "proverbs/aper¡us." A separate retrospective section of older works allows the rest of the book to shift toward the present, which is full of dark and dervish-like activity. Of her prominence, Bourgeois has said, "My luck was that I became famous so late that fame could not destroy me." On the contrary, readers will agree that fame--or is it time?--has invigorated and animated Bourgeois to an exceptional degree.

Genres: Art

216 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2006

About the author

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and print-maker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a lot of her more recent drawings with text and some cloth books I had never seen before. Intriguing work.

[Mandy E]

desperately, desperately, desperately...