Now, Now, Louison

by Cole Swensen (Translator), JeanFremon (Author)

New
Paperback
2018
$12.33

Progressing by image and word associations, Fremon evokes Bourgeois'sss history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist... The art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.

Synopsis

Progressing by image and word associations, Fremon evokes Bourgeois'sss history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist... The art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
Publisher: Les Fugitives
Published: 24 Sep 2018
ISBN 10: 0993009387
ISBN 13: 9780993009389
Book Overview: An ideal short text to introduce readers to one of the greatest artists of our time and reveal her to those who know her work already. A deeply feminist book by a seventy-two-year-old male author. COLE SWENSEN is an American poet, translator, editor, and professor at Brown University, Rhode Island. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. Her ninth collection of poetry, 'Goest' (Alice James Books, 2004) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her translation of Jean Fremon's 'The Island of the Dead' won the 2004 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation.

Media Reviews

'A truly wonderful book... The spider woman, the intellectuel, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the good girl sing together in this exuberant, lithe text, beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.' - SIRI HUSTVEDT. `Now, Now Louison draws the reader in with all of the monstrous elegance of a spider, capturing us in the fine web of the creative process, and revealing, with biting wit and lyrical style, the ego, and sacrifices it takes to make monumental work.' - PRETI TANEJA, laureate of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018 for 'We That Are Young'. `Jean Fremon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.' - PAUL AUSTER. 'Like all the most urgent poetry, it is fragile and momentary, but momentarily invincible. ' JOHN ASHBERY. 'As much a portrait of Bourgeois as it is of one who has outlasted another and is trying, in full knowledge of an impending failure, to reassemble a figure from the fragments. Perhaps life, this life, any life, is best preserved in its many bits, just as it was lived.' - FRIEZE. 'The life of Louise Bourgeois is rendered in ellipsis, quick brush strokes, and a mix of associations of ideas and of sensations waltzing with chronology. An original, sensitive text.' - ArtPress.

Author Bio

JEAN FREMON is a French author born in 1946. The director of a contemporary art gallery by day and a writer by night, he founded the Galerie Lelong in Paris (formerly known as Galerie Maeght), then New York. Some of the artists with whom he has worked the most closely include Antoni Tapies, Donald Judd, Jannis Kounellis, Sean Scully, David Hockney and Louise Bourgeois. In 1985 Fremon commissioned Bourgeois' first European exhibition. Thirty years later, he organised her last exhibition, which she curated, at the Maison de Balzac in Paris. Since 1969 he has had over twenty works published, including novels and poems (some translated by Lydia Davis), as well as essays on art, some of which have been translated into Spanish, German and Norwegian. In English, eight of his books have been published in America by independent presses, receiving praise from John Ashbery and Rosemarie Waldrop. This is his first book published in the UK.