John Biscello

Review of Jean Fremon’s Now, Now, Louison, a “life imagined” of the artist and sculptor, Louise Bourgeois.

There once was a little girl named Louise. Sweet, endangered, watchful and tragic, this little girl, who in her permeable nomenclature was also referred to as Lousion, bore the embryonic shadow of the son and heir that her father desired. Louise and her mother, Louison and her father, a baleful diet of scissors and stones, a garden overgrown with weeds, Here is where the myth begins.

1. Louise exiled herself to an unlit corner where she was raised by spiders.

2. The moon was broken before Louise got there. She admired how unfit it was for human habitation. How elegantly cold.

3. Louise painted. And sculpted. And remade herself according to the laws of symmetry.

4. Louise fell off the earth into some kind of strange, polarized dream; she became the plaything to hands stronger and larger and surer than her own.

5. Names were shed. Childhood skinned. There was no more Louise or Louison. Only “The Spider-Woman.”

Through textual portraiture and curvilinear interiority, the writer, Jean Frémon, elliptically renders “a life imagined” of the iconoclastic artist and sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, in his new book Now, Now, Louison.

Read the full review here.