There is a poet underneath here: Louise Bourgeois’s Unknown Masterpiece 1

Abstract

Through a focus on ‘Moi, Eugénie Grandet’, one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist’s writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois’s dialogues with Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac’s work—from Paul Cézanne’s ‘Frenhofer, c’est moi!’ to Pablo Picasso’s illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois’s visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist’s archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes’s definition of the literary text as a ‘new cloth woven with old quotations’ and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes’s own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois’s literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois’s words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists’ writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard’s 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their ‘heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse’ and the way they ‘bear the trace of this consciousness’.