Gallery Guide - Worcester Art Museum

Ode à l’oubli, detailquilted, layered.” 17 In addition to silks, knits,tulles, organza, and netting found throughout,Bourgeois’ monogrammed linen napkinsprovided the ground for many of the pages ofthe original book on which the limited editionis based. Here embroidered lines and stitchedseams, even the organic tracery of a lace pattern,act like a kind of three-dimensional drawingon the fabric page. Stripes and checks of dressesand tablecloths infuse the modernist grid withthe intimacy of life’s moments. Artfully interwovenwith the lived histories of the fabrics, whichmark specific relationships, places, and times,is a page of text (one of two) with Bourgeois’enigmatic remark, “I had a flashback of somethingthat never existed.”For a recent homage to mother and child,Bourgeois has composed a visual Lullaby (2006).In this suite of 25 silkscreens on fabric, redsilhouettes sit atop fabric pages patterned withthe staffs of music paper. She frequently hasturned to this “found” pattern for drawings andsketchbooks (such as Memory Traces, 2002, andFugue, 2003), sometimes as an organizing structureand at other times as a foil of regularity toreact against. Here, the swollen and curved shapes,so organic and individual in character, contrastsharply with the strict linearity and repetition ofthe staff. Yet in their translation onto fabric, thestaffs, too, have an element of softness, a bit likethe blue stripes on the ticking of a mattress orpillow. 18 This exquisite coupling of emotionalintimacy and formal bravura calls to mind ArthurMiller’s observation about Bourgeois’ work:“…It is an art, first of the eye of course, butfinally of the interior life into which vision leads.In effect, she is as though talking profoundly toherself, just loudly enough to be overheard.” 19Susan L. StoopsCurator of Contemporary Art