Cloth Lullaby

December 14, 2015
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. Author’s agent: Caryn Wiseman, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Illustrator’s agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Productions.

Starred review from March 15, 2016
This biography of 20th-century French artist Louise Bourgeois explores childhood experiences influencing her work. Growing up beside a river that "wove like a wool thread through everything," Louise observed a "web of stars" from the garden and slept to water's "rhythmic rock and murmur." She learned about form, color, and pattern as well as weaving and making dyes in the family business, which was restoring tapestries. "Useful as a spider" at the family's work, Louise's mother was also her best friend, teaching her to draw missing fragments of fabric like "thread in a spider's web." Studying math in Paris, Louise turned to art following her mother's death, literally reworking the fabric of her life into original paintings, sculptures, drawings, cloth books, and tapestries reflecting the river, garden, weaving, spider, and mother motifs of her childhood. The evocative, hand-lettered text, peppered with quotations in red ink, provides an impressionistic portrait of the memories, colors, sounds, and images propelling Louise's art. These motifs connect the imaginative ink, pencil, pastel, and watercolor illustrations, done in a palette of indigo, red, and gray. Bold, repetitive patterns of stylized flowers, woven crosshatches, spirals, giant spiders, and musical notes form the perfect background for the cloth lullaby Louise weaves for herself. Splendid visual and verbal introduction to little-known artist Louise Bourgeois. (author's note; photos, sources) (Picture book/biography. 6-9)

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February 1, 2016

Gr 2 Up-This picture book biography of artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), who was best known for her installation art and sculpture, highlights the roots of her inspiration. Through text and images, the author and illustrator emphasize the aspects of Bourgeois's childhood that influenced her: the river that flowed past her house, the colors of the flowers and plants in the garden, the "web of stars above her," and her nurturing mother, who taught her how to weave and repair tapestries. Novesky makes excellent use of simile ("Her family lived in a big house on the water that wove like a wool thread through everything.") and alliteration ("She taught her about the warp and the weft and how to weave."). Bourgeois's mother is also compared to a spider-"a repairer of broken things." As the story progresses, the images of flowers and plants, the cloth, and the water become larger, sometimes taking up most of the page. The perspective also changes, as readers see what Bourgeois saw as a young girl-the beauty of nature, her mother at work, and the tools her mother used-and, finally, her creations: giant spiders and webs, spirals and circular webs, and cloth drawings and books. VERDICT An inventive introduction to the work of a celebrated artist and a useful mentor text for exploring how language and imaginative, varied illustrations can work together to convey an idea.-Myra Zarnowski, City University of New York

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Starred review from March 1, 2016
Grades 1-3 *Starred Review* Abstract-expressionist artist Bourgeois seems, at first, like an odd choice for a picture-book biography, given the intense, sometimes bewildering nature of her sculptures. But Novesky and Arsenault keep the focus on her childhood and its influence on her art career, especially as it played out in her later works. Born in France in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in a troubled family of textile artists. Her mother restored worn tapestries, and as a child, Bourgeois helped out, particularly on the bottom edges. In Novesky's book, weaving together torn pieces becomes a powerful metaphor for Bourgeois' life and art, as she stitches together fond memories and love for her mother into stunning, strange sculptures. Arsenault's beautifully scratchy, ink-splotched illustrations, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and pastel, subtly and seamlessly incorporate some of Bourgeois' designs and motifsa bold, inky red flower; arcing strings of blue resembling yarn; concentric geometric shapes; tiled textile patterns; and so on. Novesky's lines, weaving in some of Bourgeois' own words, gently gloss over the harder corners of her childhood to focus instead on the healing power of creativity. With evocative, gorgeous illustrations and an inspirational story of an artist not often covered in children's literature, this arresting volume is an excellent addition to nonfiction picture-book collections, particularly those lacking titles about women artists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2016
Bourgeois, who became most famous for her giant sculptures of spiders, also worked with textiles, and it's at her family's tapestry-restoration workshop in France, along a river "that wove like a wool thread through everything," that the book begins. Novesky sews together the many themes of Bourgeois's art and life into a spare yet lilting narrative. Arsenault's mixed-media illustrations create stylistically and compositionally varied images.

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from May 1, 2016
Novesky returns to territory in which she shines -- picture-book biographies of influential and strong-willed female artists (Georgia in Hawaii; Me, Frida) -- with this exquisite portrait of modern artist Louise Bourgeois, who became most famous for her giant sculptures of spiders. Bourgeois also worked with textiles, and it's at her family's tapestry-restoration workshop in France, along a river "that wove like a wool thread through everything," that the book begins. Much focus is on Louise's close childhood relationship with her mother, who taught her "about form and color and the various styles of textiles. Some bore elaborate patterns; others told stories." While Louise is in college studying mathematics, her mother dies; bereft ("a thread, broken"), Louise turns to art and spends the rest of her life creating works tied to memory that soothe and heal: sculptures of spiders, for instance, because "her mother was not unlike a spider, a repairer of broken things," and cloth items composed of various fabrics from her life, because "weaving was her way to make things whole." Novesky sews together the many themes of Bourgeois's art and life -- weaving, restoration, maternity, domesticity, memory -- into a spare yet lilting narrative. Arsenault taps into these themes in her illustrations, which combine ink, pencil, pastel, watercolor, and Photoshop to create gorgeous images as stylistically and compositionally varied as the tapestries Louise's mother wove. An author's note, which incorporates two photographs of Bourgeois and her spider sculptures, neatly ties up loose ends; quotation sources are included. katrina hedeen

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)