Engraving Mountain lakes - Louise Bourgeois

Since 1989, the Musée du Louvre and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux have been commissioning contemporary artists to create engraved plates for Chalcographie, which has the exclusive right to print an unlimited number of proofs.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. After training as a painter in the Parisian academies and studying under Fernand Léger, she moved to New York in 1938, where she became involved with the Surrealists.

Traversing the major currents of twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois' work eludes classification. Between abstract geometry, organic reality and monumentality, she uses every material and form to work around the emotion aroused by childhood memories, the unique material of her work. Combining burin and color aquatint, Louise Bourgeois depicts a memory of Annecy. Pavilions, mountain paths, clouds, lake: the undulating figures suggest a link between natural and corporeal forms, a characteristic often found in her work. The plate for this print was not created for the Louvre. It already existed among twenty-seven variants of the same composition. Here, the lower part is a soothing blue; in others, as at MoMa in New York, red dominates, giving a totally opposite reading.
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