Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings

About this book

Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she has committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs inspiring her work. "The Insomnia Drawings" show the artist's mind at drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the hustle-bustle of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman's life and beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor. As soon as the artist agreed to entrust "The Insomnia Drawings" to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Louise Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places "The Insomnia Drawings" in context of Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois' imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. Furthermore, the second volume offers a chronology and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. This landmark publication is a must for everyone wanting to take part in the imaginative journeys of one of today's most important artists. "The Insomnia Drawings" are part of the Daros Collection. 13 x 10.25 inches, 220 illustrations. Author "She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while here sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions-between plentitude and lack, proximity and absence, agreement and contradiction." -Elisabeth Bronfen "L'art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / Art / est le / contraire / du acting. Les paysages de nuit on / envahi les jours. Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it can be worse / / M is for mother / in the water / it is subject / to change / or even to reversal." -Louise Bourgeois