Louise Bourgeois

Cheim & Read, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheets are securely attached to the backing board in several places on the reverse. In keeping with the artist’s working process and choice of media, the paper undulates slightly. Very close inspection reveals a very faint rub mark to the centre of the upper right quadrant of the fifth work in the bottom row.
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Impressive in scope and scale, Les Fleurs, dating from 2010, is a significant work from Louise Bourgeois’ later oeuvre. Composed of twenty-eight separate sheets, the artist regarded them as an indivisible whole, and intended their collective presentation in two rows of fourteen to echo a musical score. Closely connected yet each subtly different, the format of the suite allowed Bourgeois to establish a rhythmic sequence. Les Fleurs
exerts a powerful impact on the viewer when displayed in its entirety: the eye darts from one image to another absorbing the discreet but crucial variations within each of the
exquisitely painted arrangements of flower stems. Bourgeois believed that repetition within life or art was extremely important when striving for ‘perfection’. She explained, “Repetition gives a physical reality to experience. To repeat, to try again, over and over again towards perfection” (the artist cited in: Penny Isaac, Ed., Louise Bourgeois, Paris,
2006, p. 178).

Five blooms adorn each piece of paper, either as single entities or entwined together in sinuous, blossoming curves of stem and leaf. Bourgeois used botanical imagery to symbolise the family in her work, a concept that plays a central and vital role in her work. References to her life run throughout her practice, from early childhood memories to her own experiences as a woman and a mother. In an interview in 1989, the artist explained; “I have three frames of reference. I have the frame of reference of my father and mother, and that of my own experience. I have the frame of reference of my children. And the three are stuck together” (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Modern (and travelling), Louise Bourgeois, 2008-09, p. 127). In her later years, the family as an artistic subject returned to Bourgeois’ work in a repetitive, almost obsessive fashion, exemplified in her extraordinary series of Spiders, used as areference to her mother, or the disquieting series of stuffed-fabric couples. Here, Bourgeois’ poetic response to her personal experiences is presented as a powerful and searing artistic confessional.

Bourgeois regarded each flower as evocative of the human body; the stems and leaves standing as substitutes for arteries, veins and organs, but also, for the invisible lines drawn between each family member, all of which forming part of one familiar nucleus. In Les Fleurs, she employed only a single tone of crimson to depict these connections. Red was a colour of particular importance for the artist, and she believed the hue to be imbued with diverse signifiers of passion and strength of feeling and it was precisely emotions that interested Bourgeois the most. Bourgeois stated, “Red is an affirmation at any cost - regardless of the dangers in fighting - of contradiction, of aggression. It’s symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved” (the artist cited in: Marie-Laure Bernadac and
Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father. Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, p. 222). The apparent contradiction between the artist’s belief in the ‘aggressive’ qualities of red and the delicate grace of Les Fleurs adds yet another reading to this multi-faceted work.

In its almost naïve style, Les Fleurs perhaps recalls the innocence of childhood creativity, unmarred by adult associations. Yet the bloodred washes of pigment that make up each composition, as opposed to a more traditional floral pastel palette, arguably imbue the work with darker connotations when the artist’s belief in the symbolic associations of red
as a colour are evaluated. Ultimately, in its exquisite inter-dependence and overarching compositional grace, when viewed as an integral whole, Les Fleurs stands as a highly
important and ambitious work from Bourgeois’ venerated corpus of late work.