Louise Bourgeois & Henri Matisse

Left: “Bédouine – Souvenir de Manon” (1947), an aquatint by Henri Matisse. © Sucession H. Matisse. Photo: Michael Matisse. Right: “Eugénie Grandet” (2009), a gouache drawing by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Adagp, Paris 2010. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who died this year at the age of 98, freely admitted that for her art was therapy – “a series of exorcisms” – and she spoke compellingly …

Left: “Bédouine – Souvenir de Manon” (1947), an aquatint by Henri Matisse. © Sucession H. Matisse. Photo: Michael Matisse. Right: “Eugénie Grandet” (2009), a gouache drawing by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Adagp, Paris 2010. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who died this year at the age of 98, freely admitted that for her art was therapy – “a series of exorcisms” – and she spoke compellingly about it. A 1993 quotation, posted on the wall at the Maison de Balzac’s current exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Moi, Eugénie Grandet,” sums it up beautifully: “Every morning, when I set to work, I exorcise a trauma – the word is not too strong. But that is not something you talk about; it’s something you do…. when I look at my work, I say to myself, ‘Louise, you have transformed a trauma into something very human, very joyful’.”

That joy may not always be evident in Bourgeois’s work, which can be disturbing to look at, but there is also a certain playfulness in the wry juxtapositions – of male and female sexual characteristics, for example – or tortured forms that can elicit a smile or a discomfited laugh.

This show was instigated by Bourgeois herself, who suggested to the Maison de Balzac that she create an exhibition of works based on Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet, whose main character she had always identified with as the “prototype of a woman unable to fulfill herself… the prisoner of her father, who needed a maid.” Bourgeois’s trauma stemmed from the same source: an abusive father who needed a maid and who humiliated her mother, in this case by moving his mistress into their home.

The works made for the show are integrated into the rooms of Balzac’s former home, furnished with some of his belongings and numerous portraits of him by various artists. In one of Bourgeois’s portraits of Eugénie Grandet, she looks relatively happy, with long hair and a Mona Lisa smile. This quickly changes to great sadness in the blood-red portrait pictured above. Another blood-red drawing shows a standing naked woman with a flailing, screaming upside-down baby in her stomach. The unending umbilical cord winds all around the woman’s body, and a phallic shape protrudes beneath her stomach.

On a large drawing of a plant with long spiky leaves is written a litany of phrases that sum up a housewife’s life: “I have spent my life going up and down.” “I have spent my life smelling the burning of the stove and listening to the starting of the refrigerator.” “I have spent my life washing dishes and vegetables.” “Has the mail man come?” “I am not stupid I am only unhappy fearful foolish a washer woman.” “I have spent my life washing socks and handkerchiefs.” And so on.

In the basement, a group of simple needlework pieces adorned with dried flowers, tacks, hooks and eyes, buttons, etc. – many of which form clock faces – testify to monotony of such a woman’s life. Other pieces offer chilling quotations from Eugénie Grandet in embroidery, among them “My mother was right: suffer and die.”

Bourgeois’s trauma was very much her own, and she was unique in the way she could turn it into wholly original works of art that not only exorcised her own traumas but may just help others exorcise their own.

No such trauma is evident in the work of Henri Matisse, which is more often than not full of joy or at least has a feeling of tranquility, but in the lovely exhibition of his little-known prints, most of them portraits, currently on show at the Mona Bismarck Foundation, there is a certain echo between the extreme economy of line in the drawings of the two artists.

Matisse, who said that “details diminish the purity of lines and detract from their emotional intensity,” reduced most of his drawings to the very minimum, sometimes clumsily but most often elegantly. Some of the most wonderful prints in this show are from the powerful series made in 1931-32, which capture the movements of dancers and acrobats.

The exhibition, called “Une Autre Langue: Matisse et la Gravure,” covers Matisse’s entire career as a printmaker – he made some 900 graphic works using all the different printing techniques and illustrated over 80 books with his prints, including the famous Jazz, a copy of which is included here.

Heidi Ellison

Maison de Balzac: 47 rue Raynouard, 75016 Paris. Tel.: 01 55 74 41 80. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-6pm. Admission: €4. Through February 6. www.balzac.paris.fr

Mona Bismarck Foundation: 34 avenue de New-York, 75016 Paris. Tel.: 01 47 23 38 88. Open Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6:30pm. Free admission. Through February 15. www.monabismarck.org

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