Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois

Novesky (Me, Friday) details the creative and passionate life of artist Louise Bourgeois. Arsenault’s mixed-media collages feature textile patterns and spider-web designs, evoking the influence of her family’s work restoring tapestries. The reds and blues common to the artist’s paintings and drawings dominate, accenting moments of melancholy and drama, as when a young Bourgeois threw herself into a river, angry about her father’s frequent absences. When her mother died, Bourgeois turned to making art: “She drew, she painted, she wove. She missed her mother so much, she sculpted giant spiders made of bronze, steel, and marble she named maman.” Poetic and experimental, the text and art capture the delicate, powerful quality of Bourgeois’s work across multiple media, as well as her ideas about order, symmetry, memory, and reparation. Ages 5–7. [em]Author’s agent: Caryn Wiseman, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Illustrator’s agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Productions. (Mar.) [/em]