Abstract

Through a focus on ‘Moi, Eugénie Grandet’, one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist’s writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois’s dialogues with Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac’s work—from Paul Cézanne’s ‘Frenhofer, c’est moi!’ to Pablo Picasso’s illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois’s visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist’s archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes’s definition of the literary text as a ‘new cloth woven with old quotations’ and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes’s own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois’s literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois’s words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists’ writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard’s 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their ‘heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse’ and the way they ‘bear the trace of this consciousness’.

摘要

通过关注“ Moi，Eugénie Grandet ”，这是路易丝·布尔乔亚在 2010 年去世前的最后一次展览之一，本文探讨了这位艺术家的公开和私人作品，以及她与作家的互动，以评估潜在的文学性质她的书面和视觉作品。认为布尔乔亚与奥诺雷·德·巴尔扎克的小说欧仁妮·格朗台的对话是当代和女权主义对巴尔扎克作品的长期绘画传统的回应——来自保罗·塞尚的“Frenhofer，c'est moi！” 巴勃罗·毕加索为巴尔扎克的《无名杰作》百年版画的插图——这篇文章揭示了布尔乔亚视觉作品的文学互文，并认为这是她作品的一个重要方面。考虑到人们对这位艺术家档案的日益浓厚的兴趣，以及越来越多专门用于她作品的编辑卷，本文考虑了将布尔乔亚认定为作家和诗人的现有主张。与罗兰·巴特将文学文本定义为“旧语录织成的新布”以及巴特自己与巴尔扎克对话中发展出的活跃读者形象相一致，本文认为资产阶级的文学性体现在同时写作、阅读和视觉实践中，在对他们所依赖的词的依赖和抵抗之间的矛盾心理中。归根结底，对布尔乔亚话语的这种探索参与了关于艺术家作品地位的更广泛的辩论，