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The BnF exhibits Louise Bourgeois's graphic work at Richelieu
La Bibliothèque nationale de France consacre une exposition à l'œuvre graphique de Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), sur son site Richelieu, à Paris. Pour la première fois, les fonds de la BnF et ceux du Centre Pompidou y sont réunis.
Par la rédaction Walensky · 3 min de lecture
- 2008year of the last retrospective at Beaubourg
- 11large panels make up the ensemble Extreme Tension
- 1938the artist's arrival in the United States
The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) presents Louise Bourgeois – Extreme Tension. Drawings and Prints at its Richelieu site in Paris. The exhibition is devoted to the artist's graphic work; she was born in 1911 and passed away in 2010. For the first time, the holdings of the BnF and those of the Centre Pompidou are brought together.
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Nearly twenty years have passed, according to Beaux Arts, without a Bourgeois exhibition in a public institution: the last retrospective, at Beaubourg, dates from 2008, shortly before her death. The general public mostly knows Louise Bourgeois for her Maman, spider sculptures with slender legs installed around the world.
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Drawings and prints, according to Beaux Arts, are the source of her work, yet they were long overshadowed by her monumental creations. The exhibition reveals a little-known facet of her output, in a chronological journey covering her entire career.
A career born in the United States
Louise Bourgeois arrives in the United States in 1938, after marrying the art historian Robert Goldwater. She trained in drawing and printmaking at the Art Students League, then in the studio of Stanley William Hayter. This studio was frequented by Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson and European artists in exile during the war, including Joan Miró and Max Ernst.
Her first artist's book, He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, alternates texts and prints. Her taste for irony already shines through, according to Beaux Arts.
"While drawing is the foundation of her art, it also allows one to traverse all the themes of Louise Bourgeois's work."
Marie-Laure Bernadac, general curator of the exhibition
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Among these themes, the curator cites writing, architectural motifs, sexuality and motherhood. One encounters the spider, the woman-house, a hybrid figure combining the female body and architecture, and the wounded body, bruised then repaired. Red gouaches from the end of her life address pregnancy and childbirth, subjects considered taboo according to Beaux Arts.
Extreme Tension, the highlight of the exhibition
The large formats titled Extreme Tension, which give the exhibition its name, are its centerpiece according to Beaux Arts. Created three years before the artist's death, the ensemble comprises eleven large panels. They feature prints retouched with gouache, ink or graphite, accompanied by words written in the artist's trembling hand.
The text draws on a piece of writing from 1959 and lists body parts, from the skull to the toes, including the esophagus and the rectum. It evokes the sensations of a body that ages and deteriorates. According to Beaux Arts, Bourgeois appears there as an animal hunted by death, fighting to survive.
Her graphic work is obsessive: the matrices, that is to say the engraved plates, are endlessly reworked and revisited. MoMA has made its catalogue raisonné freely available online. For the artist, drawings are feather-thoughts, that is to say ideas caught in flight and put on paper, since all her thoughts were visual. Drawing also served her as a journal, to exorcise or analyze her everyday fears.
Our view
This exhibition reminds us that a sheet of paper, modest in appearance, can hold the full force of a work. A drawing hung at home can be looked at for a long time, much like rereading a page of a journal.
Source: Beaux Arts.
