Frémon’s style is poetic and often poignant. There’s a rhythm and internal logic to the flow of the book that’s all the more impressive because of its purposeful fragmentation. The text loops back on certain subjects and motifs, the way humans do in their minds. The most important of these, unsurprisingly, is art. Frémon clearly understands how much creating art informed Bourgeois’s life, and his writing about her work is often his most insightful.
Jean Frémon is a renowned French gallerist and writer and has written art-historical works on artists including Robert Ryman, Antoni Tàpies, and Robert Walser. He worked with Louise Bourgeois on her first European exhibition in 1985 at the Galerie Lelong, and on the last exhibition she organized herself, at the Maison de Balzac.
Translated by Cole Swensen
The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.
This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911– 2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can.
Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.
Frémon’s style is poetic and often poignant. There’s a rhythm and internal logic to the flow of the book that’s all the more impressive because of its purposeful fragmentation. The text loops back on certain subjects and motifs, the way humans do in their minds. The most important of these, unsurprisingly, is art. Frémon clearly understands how much creating art informed Bourgeois’s life, and his writing about her work is often his most insightful.
An art critic who uses fiction to expose the limitations of the interpretation and understanding of art, all done with humor and insight—now that’s not something you encounter every day. And, when I say that Frémon is an art critic, I, of course, know that he is far more than that.
Dark, intimate, and sneakily touching: there is gold to be found in this collection.
