25 lithographs and dye on fabric
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on loan
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-bourgeois-2351" aria-label="More by Louise Bourgeois" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Louise Bourgeois</a>
Ode à la Bièvre
Presented by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of The Easton Foundation 2016
<p><span>Ode à la Bièvre</span> is a cloth book that contain abstract fabric geometric ‘drawings’ stitched onto items such as the napkins from Louise Bourgeois’s bridal trousseau. Often the fabrics show signs of wear and tear, stains or yellowing. The twenty-five pages of <span>Ode à la Bièvre</span> are buttoned at the binding so that they can be taken out of their covers for display. The book<span> </span>is Bourgeois’s visual and narrative autobiographic poem to the river Bièvre and to the origins of her fascination with textiles and their ability to conjure complex associations and memories. The fabric drawings that make up each page are abstractions patched together from mostly blue fabrics that reflect the watery theme. The Bièvre river ran alongside Bourgeois’s childhood home in the French town of Antony. The first and last pages contain two texts written by the artist which read as follows:</p>
paper print 25 lithographs dye fabric
16 June 2014 – 12 April 2015
2015-04-12
16 June 2014 – 12 April 2015
2015-04-12
2014-06-16
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2014-06-16
Louise Bourgeois Drawings
Collection based display
23 July 2022 – 6 October 2024
2024-10-06
23 July 2022 – 19 November 2022
2022-11-19
2022-07-23
Rugby Art Gallery and Museum (Rugby, UK)
18 March 2023 – 26 June 2023
2023-06-26
2023-03-18
Dorset Museum (Dorchester, UK)
8 July 2023 – 9 September 2023
2023-09-09
2023-07-08
Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool, UK)
18 November 2023 – 11 February 2024
2024-02-11
2023-11-18
Burton Art Gallery and Museum (Bideford, UK)
2 March 2024 – 9 June 2024
2024-06-09
2024-03-02
Aberdeen Art Gallery (Aberdeen, UK)
http://www.aagm.co.uk
6 July 2024 – 6 October 2024
2024-10-06
2024-07-06
Compton Verney (Compton Verney, UK)
2022-07-23
Louise Bourgeois
Loan-out
23 July 2022 – 19 November 2022
2022-11-19
23 July 2022 – 20 November 2022
2022-11-20
2022-07-23
Rugby Art Gallery and Museum (Rugby, UK)
2022-07-23
ARTIST ROOMS 2022: Louise Bourgeois
Loan-out
Ode à la Bièvre
support: 288 × 397 mm each
frame: 364 × 472 × 37 mm each
Presented by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of The Easton Foundation 2016
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Ode à la Bièvre</i> is a cloth book that contain abstract fabric geometric ‘drawings’ stitched onto items such as the napkins from Louise Bourgeois’s bridal trousseau. Often the fabrics show signs of wear and tear, stains or yellowing. The twenty-five pages of <i>Ode à la Bièvre</i> are buttoned at the binding so that they can be taken out of their covers for display. The book<i> </i>is Bourgeois’s visual and narrative autobiographic poem to the river Bièvre and to the origins of her fascination with textiles and their ability to conjure complex associations and memories. The fabric drawings that make up each page are abstractions patched together from mostly blue fabrics that reflect the watery theme. The Bièvre river ran alongside Bourgeois’s childhood home in the French town of Antony. The first and last pages contain two texts written by the artist which read as follows:</p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>
<i>The Bièvre River</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>It was because of that river that we bought the </i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>house in Antony. The Bièvre cut across the gardens </i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>in a straight line. With the soil from that river</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>we planted geraniums, masses of peonies</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>and beds of asparagus. There were hawthorns,</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>pink and white, and purple tamarisk </i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>and trees of cherries. Pears and apples</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>grew on espaliers on the stone wall.</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>There were boxwoods, and honeysuckle </i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>that smelled so sweet in the rain.</i>
</blockquote>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>
<i>I had gone back to </i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>Antony with my children</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>to see the house where I had grown up</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>and where the river Bièvre flowed</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>through the backyard.</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>But the river was gone.</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>Only the trees</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>that my father had planted</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>along its edge</i>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>remained as a witness.</i>
</blockquote>
<p>Bourgeois recalled that as a teenager she once attempted to drown herself in this river following a family row. She also explained that the Bièvre was particularly high in tannin, which helps to fix the dyes in the wool-fibres used for tapestry restoration. Curator Germano Celant has pointed out that Bourgeois’s fabric works stem from such memories and the artist’s need to repair their damage: ‘if we include her childhood and adolescence in her parent’s tapestry workshop … her work on the mending of those tapestries, then we could say that fabric has been the locus of a desire to “repair” memory and the past. A recourse to weaving as a narration of the self.’ (Celant 2010, pp.13–14.)</p>
<p>The book belongs to a strand of Louise Bourgeois’s practice that has since become known as ‘the fabric works’ (the title of an exhibition in 2010, curated by Germano Celant for Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London) or ‘fabric drawings’. Although fabric and textiles were significant throughout the artist’s career, Bourgeois only began to use fabrics extensively to make sculpture and drawing in the last two decades of her life. The drawings using fabric as a form of collage begin with simple pieces such as <i>Untitled (I Have Been to Hell and Back)</i> 1996 (see fig.249, Frances Morris, ed., <i>Louise Bourgeois</i>, Tate, exh. cat.,2007, p.266.)  – an embroidered blue and white cotton handkerchief – and culminate in a series of untitled wall-based works of various scales she made between 2002 and 2010 (see Celant, <i>Louise Bourgeois, The Fabric Works</i>). Most of these fabric pieces were made with the help of the seamstress Mercedes Katz. The two original fabric books Bourgeois made in 2002, <i>Ode à l’Oubli</i> and <i>Ode à la Bièvre</i>, were then painstakingly reproduced as limited editions, the proposed gift being number thirteen in an edition of fourteen.<b> </b>The artist’s assistant Jerry Gorovoy has explained the role of the seamstress in producing the original fabric works:</p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>By employing Mercedes Katz, and sometimes one or two other women, Louise has set up a situation that is similar to the tapestry workshop of her mother. Because of the neat, precise cutting and fine stitch work of Mercedes, the sewing aspects are de-emphasized. This is why Mercedes was especially perfect to work on the abstract drawings as Louise wanted to remove the expressive nature of the hand … Louise decides on the cutting of the garment, and the pieces are then pinned with a loose stitch allowing Louise to modify, add or alter the composition until she is satisfied. At that point, Mercedes adds her stitch work. Louise considers Mercedes’s participation as occuring after the creative process has been completed. In her mind, Mercedes’s sewing is reduced simply to execution.<br/>(Letter from Jerry Gorovoy to Germano Celant, New York, May 22 2010, cited in Celant 2010, p.25.)</blockquote>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Germano Celant, <i>Louise Bourgeois, The Fabric Works</i>, exhibition catalogue, Hauser &amp; Wirth, London 2010 (<i>Ode à la Bièvre</i> 2002 [original] reproduced pp.126–7).</p>
<p>Ann Coxon<br/>January 2013</p>
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Summary
2024-02-02T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT