I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful.
Louise Bourgeois discusses one of her vacations with Andy Warhol
“I am a searcher…”
I am a searcher…
I always was… and I still am…
searching for the missing piece.
– Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010)
“I have drawn my whole life.”
“I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.”
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)
“I am still a girl trying to understand myself.”
Louise Bourgeois portrait by Adar Yosef
“The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.”
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)
“And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.”
“At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.”
“I came from a family of repairers…”
“I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
Louise Bourgeois
(1911-2010)
“You have to keep finding new ways to express yourself…”
“What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.”
Louise Bourgeois (Dec 25, 1911 – May 31, 2010)
“I suppose…”
“It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.”
– Louise Bourgeois 1911 – 2010)
Louise Bourgeois (Dec 25, 1911 – May 31, 2010)
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
“To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.”
I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.
It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.
Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.
I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful.
Louise and Andy Warhol
Louise Bourgeois, 28 February 1992 © by Barbara Yoshida
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
Portrait of Louise Bourgeois with Fillette, 1968, by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982
“You learn for yourself not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down/ learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. nobody can take it away…”
― Louise Bourgeois, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed/Psychoanalytic Writings
“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands…”
Annie Leibovitz Photo
’10AM is When You Come to Me’ Insomnia Drawings (2006)
page from journal, 1962
Eye Benches
At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering… To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread, sometimes it was still warm, I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.
Louise Bourgeois. “Arco de Histeria”, 1993
“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
Maman – Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.
When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.
One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.
The subject of pain is the business I am in – to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.
I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.
My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.
Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.
The colour blue – that is my colour – and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue.
If you flatter me, or if you look at me the right way, I will kill myself to please you. It’s very painful to be an overachiever.
Don’t get the green disease of envy. Don’t be fooled by success and money. Don’t let anything come between you and your work.
Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.
My work has to do with a defense against fervor. People are always in a rush. To do what? To do nothing! There is a kind of fervor that is completely meaningless. This drawing is a call for meditation…. I am an insomniac, so for me the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach. But I still try to conquer the insomnia, and to a large extent I have done it; it is conquerable. My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking and an attempt at finding peace. Peaceful rhythm. Like rocking a baby to sleep.
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by Jerry Saltz
b-ray bloggin' 
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