Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Ode à la Bièvre’

The 1819 poem Ode to Psyche by romantic poet John Keats is an ode to love itself. With his sensual imagery of devotion and neglect, Keats promises to build a temple for Psyche in his mind – the goddess of the soul coming to represent Keats’ inner thoughts and desires.

The classical form of the ode, with its expression of deep feeling through homage, finds a unique contemporary visual expression in the hands of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). Examination of her own emotions, relationships, and memories powered Bourgeois’s artistic output for more than 70 years.

While Bourgeois’s iconic tribute to her mother (a weaver and feminist), Maman 1999, graces the forecourt of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ South Building, a much smaller but exquisitely lyrical tribute, in the form of a 25-page fabric book, can be found at the heart of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? in the North Building.

The repairing river

Ode à la Bièvre 2007 is a visual poem for the river that flowed through the garden of Bourgeois’s childhood home. The property, on the outskirts of Paris, was also the site of the family’s tapestry restoration atelier, run by a small labour force of women overseen by Bourgeois’s mother, Josephine. Bourgeois noted, ‘It was because of that river that we bought the house in Antony.’ Its tannin-rich waters were useful for washing dilapidated tapestries and fixing the dyes used in the restoration process. The soil from the river sustained a beautifully planted garden.

The river was a source of happy and troubled memories for Bourgeois – of boat rides and gardening with her siblings, of assisting the weavers with restoration work and, as a young Bourgeois matured, of mediating her parents’ complex relationship. Her father’s many infidelities and her mother’s chronic illness were a source of anxiety; even as a child, she ‘felt great tension between them’. Following the premature death of her mother in 1932, Bourgeois, distraught, attempted suicide in the river Bievre and was saved by her father, Louis.

Arranged horizontally, Ode à la Bièvre devotedly renders a body of water that is ceaselessly changing with the weather or mood of the day. Bookending the abstract compositions are two screenprinted texts recording Bourgeois’s memories of this place – a youthful recollection of blooming colours and ‘sweet’ smells, and a later memory of returning to find ‘the river was gone’.

The Bievre left a lasting impression on Bourgeois. Today, it’s known by locals as Paris’ lost river and is the subject of ‘daylighting’ plans to resurface the historic waterway – a conservation strategy to increase blue and green spaces to aid urban cooling.

A soft touch

Made late in Bourgeois’s life, the fabric book, with its worn linens and button-hole binding, is a warm and sensuous object. As children, fabric books are often the first kind of book we engage with – the softness welcome and familiar for small and curious hands. Bourgeois was highly sensitive to this relationship between feeling, textiles and memory. Around 1963, she wrote: ‘It gives me great pleasure to hold on to my clothes, my dresses, my stockings … it’s my past and as rotten as it was I would like to take it and hold it tight in my arms.’

In 1995, Bourgeois retrieved all her old clothes from the closets of her New York home and proceeded to organise them in piles by colour. Garments that held particularly evocative memories were left whole, while others were cut up to make new compositions. In the first, unique version of Ode à la Bièvre 2002, the fabric collages are constructed from Bourgeois’s dresses, as well as napkins and handkerchiefs from her trousseau. The 2007 editioned version is an example of Bourgeois’s endless experimentation with printing processes. Reproducing the original with digital prints and screenprints on fabric, Bourgeois captured the distinctive qualities of the vintage textiles, from delicate, drawn-thread embroidery to the stains of a past life.

The fabric compositions are serene in their horizontal movement and, awash with blue, they are also reassuring. Even Bourgeois’s signature motifs appear to show their softer sides. The spiral – a dual symbol which sometimes represents tightening or entrapping in her work – finds its peaceful counterpoint in a gentle ripple or unwinding, and tells us that this is a book about time as much as memory. Near the end of the book, a cloud of Bourgeois’s organic cumul forms nestle tenderly, a stitched horizon line separating reality from the reflection below.

My colour, blue

In the 1993 film by Krzysztof Kieślowski Three colours: blue, the colour blue pervades, at first, as a sea of despair that overcomes the newly widowed Julie. (Julie’s insistence on swimming across the lanes in the public pool even has echoes in Bourgeois’s book, where two vertical strips of tailor’s tape traverse Breton stripes.) As time passes in the film, blue comes to represent hope and emotional freedom.

In Ode à la Bièvre, we can read similar ebbs and flows in the way different colours are constantly taking over or giving in. A murky red ground is almost engulfed by indigo; pink and blue meet in relative stillness; and a mountainous formation in deep blue reaches triumphantly upwards. Ultimately, it is the colour blue that prevails. Plagued with anxiety for much of her life, artmaking for Bourgeois was a reliable and necessary source of transformation. As she put it, ‘I transform hate into love’. On the expansive potential of one of her favourite colours, Bourgeois said: ‘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 … but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like.’

Ode à la Bièvre is one of three ‘odes’ made by the artist in her lifetime, including an ode to her mother and an ode to forgetting. Amidst loss and anxiety, this peaceful remembrance demonstrates Bourgeois’s eternal attempt to, in Keats’ words, ‘let the warm Love in’.

Louise Bourgeois’s quotes and writings are courtesy the Louise Bourgeois Archive © The Easton Foundation, New York

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine