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拍品专文
One of her final creative acts, Louise Bourgeois’s Les Fleurs is a powerful tapestry of singular forms in which the petals of a blossoming flower became a stand-in for her greatest memories, desires and fears. This profound, elegiac body of work finds the artist returning to her childhood, amongst the flowers in Choisy-le-roi in France, engaged in the practice of drawing leaves and flowers that her mother later sewed into medieval tapestries. With its expansive scale and lush, red pigment, the present work is a compelling, late-in-life triumph.
For Bourgeois, the color red was one of the most significant and frequently used in her considerable arsenal of artistic tools, evoking blood, violence, danger, shame and jealousy. Here, she works to showcase the intense emotional resonance of the color red; each individual flowering form is limited to only five blooms, and yet each one is imbued with its own distinctive spirit - be it jaunty and proud or ponderous with the fullness of its weighty blossoms. Expressing her vision across twelve distinct sheets, Les Fleurs reveals the delicate yet mighty qualities of her medium, driving home the talent and vigor of the ninety-seven year old artist.
Like many great artists before her, Bourgeois was interested in capturing the fleeting beauty of flowers, saying “flowers mean new life. They let us forget about death” (L. Bourgeois, quoted by Catherine Wagley, “Louise Bourgeois Left Nothing to Be Desired,” Art21 Magazine, June 3, 2010, online). For Bourgeois, flowers represented the flow of nature but they were also personal, as she could still name the flowers that her family grew along the banks of the Seine river. As early as 1945, flowering forms invaded her paintings. In Reparation (1945) and New Orleans (1946), she depicts herself holding a small bouquet of flowers, and in others she painted a woman with a giant, flowering head. For Bourgeois, it was common for the artist to repeat the same motifs throughout her life, making the enduring refrain of her major installation, “I Do, I Undo, I Redo” (1999-2000; Tate Modern) somewhat of a personal mantra.
The last years of her life saw Louise Bourgeois exceptionally busy and innovative. She tirelessly explored an array of new techniques and the present medium of gouache proved to be fleeting and ephemeral, but also—paradoxically—permanent. Working at the simple butcher-block table in her Chelsea apartment, Bourgeois therapeutically executed one sheet at a time, working through many versions until she chose her final favorites. She preferred to work “wet on wet,” which meant that the wet medium pooled and expanded at its edges, necessitating an assuredness and speed that resulted from decades of practice and refinement. In Les Fleurs, she took solace in repeating an image so fruitful that it proved to be endlessly fulfilling. A beautiful marriage of chance and control, Les Fleurs represent the artist’s long-abiding interest in natural forms as a way to express deeper emotional truths.
As she had done with the insomnia drawings, created over an eight-month period between November 1994 and June 1995, Bourgeois immersed herself in the process of making Les Fleurs, finding endless renewal and enjoyment in the flowering forms. “The pace of Bourgeois’s graphic activity accelerated noticeably in those last years,” the artist’s friend and biographer, Robert Storr has written. “During the furious drawing marathons of her final decade, she would cover the floor of her parlor room with sheets of roughly identical images (R. Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, New York, 2016, p. 535). Storr also notes that Bourgeois had “never before made drawings as washy or amorphous as these evocations of a liquid universe, nor ever before repeated herself in this manner or to this extent” (R. Storr, Ibid., p. 536).
Throughout the history of Western art, it is only the greatest artists who are able to continually reinvent themselves whilst staying true to their own iconic vernacular. Additionally, the special challenge of late-in-life greatness is reserved for only a select few: Matisse, Monet, Michelangelo and Titian achieved some of their best work in their last decade. Much like Matisse, who developed his celebrated body of work known as the cut-outs only because he was confined to a wheelchair, Bourgeois used the limitations that her advancing years imposed on her to push forward to create something new – with extraordinarily moving and poignant results.
For Bourgeois, the color red was one of the most significant and frequently used in her considerable arsenal of artistic tools, evoking blood, violence, danger, shame and jealousy. Here, she works to showcase the intense emotional resonance of the color red; each individual flowering form is limited to only five blooms, and yet each one is imbued with its own distinctive spirit - be it jaunty and proud or ponderous with the fullness of its weighty blossoms. Expressing her vision across twelve distinct sheets, Les Fleurs reveals the delicate yet mighty qualities of her medium, driving home the talent and vigor of the ninety-seven year old artist.
Like many great artists before her, Bourgeois was interested in capturing the fleeting beauty of flowers, saying “flowers mean new life. They let us forget about death” (L. Bourgeois, quoted by Catherine Wagley, “Louise Bourgeois Left Nothing to Be Desired,” Art21 Magazine, June 3, 2010, online). For Bourgeois, flowers represented the flow of nature but they were also personal, as she could still name the flowers that her family grew along the banks of the Seine river. As early as 1945, flowering forms invaded her paintings. In Reparation (1945) and New Orleans (1946), she depicts herself holding a small bouquet of flowers, and in others she painted a woman with a giant, flowering head. For Bourgeois, it was common for the artist to repeat the same motifs throughout her life, making the enduring refrain of her major installation, “I Do, I Undo, I Redo” (1999-2000; Tate Modern) somewhat of a personal mantra.
The last years of her life saw Louise Bourgeois exceptionally busy and innovative. She tirelessly explored an array of new techniques and the present medium of gouache proved to be fleeting and ephemeral, but also—paradoxically—permanent. Working at the simple butcher-block table in her Chelsea apartment, Bourgeois therapeutically executed one sheet at a time, working through many versions until she chose her final favorites. She preferred to work “wet on wet,” which meant that the wet medium pooled and expanded at its edges, necessitating an assuredness and speed that resulted from decades of practice and refinement. In Les Fleurs, she took solace in repeating an image so fruitful that it proved to be endlessly fulfilling. A beautiful marriage of chance and control, Les Fleurs represent the artist’s long-abiding interest in natural forms as a way to express deeper emotional truths.
As she had done with the insomnia drawings, created over an eight-month period between November 1994 and June 1995, Bourgeois immersed herself in the process of making Les Fleurs, finding endless renewal and enjoyment in the flowering forms. “The pace of Bourgeois’s graphic activity accelerated noticeably in those last years,” the artist’s friend and biographer, Robert Storr has written. “During the furious drawing marathons of her final decade, she would cover the floor of her parlor room with sheets of roughly identical images (R. Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, New York, 2016, p. 535). Storr also notes that Bourgeois had “never before made drawings as washy or amorphous as these evocations of a liquid universe, nor ever before repeated herself in this manner or to this extent” (R. Storr, Ibid., p. 536).
Throughout the history of Western art, it is only the greatest artists who are able to continually reinvent themselves whilst staying true to their own iconic vernacular. Additionally, the special challenge of late-in-life greatness is reserved for only a select few: Matisse, Monet, Michelangelo and Titian achieved some of their best work in their last decade. Much like Matisse, who developed his celebrated body of work known as the cut-outs only because he was confined to a wheelchair, Bourgeois used the limitations that her advancing years imposed on her to push forward to create something new – with extraordinarily moving and poignant results.