{"id":789502,"date":"2026-10-02T09:48:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T09:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789502\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T09:48:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T09:48:12","slug":"quote-of-the-day-by-louise-bourgeois-i-have-been-to-hell-and-back-and-let-me-tell-you-it-was-wonderful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789502\/","title":{"rendered":"Quote of the Day by Louise Bourgeois: “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which took the title of its 2024 Bourgeois retrospective from this work. The Van Every\/Smith Galleries at Davidson College also hold an edition and record of the text.<\/p>\n

Bourgeois took these words from a passage in her diary and embroidered them onto a handkerchief that belonged to her late husband, so you get a tiny, soft, very domestic bit of cloth carrying one of the blackest jokes in modern art<\/a>. These days you can create something similar on the best Cricut machines<\/a>, but here the original dates from 1996, and in 2007 Tate Modern<\/a> put out a numbered edition of 1,000 in each of red, blue and pink to go with her retrospective, which goes a long way to explaining why you’ve probably seen the line on a tote bag or a gallery gift shop shelf without ever knowing where it came from.<\/p>\n

The joke works because of how she lived with her material. Her art grew out of a complicated and often traumatic childhood, and she spent decades turning that into work that could hold hope and fear, guilt and repair, tension and release all at once, so a sentence that says hell and wonderful in the same breath is pretty much her whole practice squeezed onto a hanky. Museums tend to read it as ambivalence and black humour, and I think that’s right, since she never says the hell wasn’t hell and never takes back the wonderful.<\/p>\n

\n

\"An\n<\/p>\n

The embroidered hankerchief, the original was made in 1996 but in 2007 Tate Modern created 1,000 numbered editions that now sell for \u00a310,000 and more. (Image credit: Louise Bourgeois \/ Tate Modern)<\/p>\n

What I like about it as a line for anyone making things is that it has no attached lesson. Most of us want a rough patch to turn into something useful before we’ll admit to it, and many inspirational messages in our Quote of the Day<\/a> series have stories with a moral, leading to projects with a neat title, and Bourgeois just says it was wonderful, deadpan, and leaves you to work out what she means.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So if you’re making something out of a bad year and it hasn’t resolved into anything yet, that’s fine, and the gag you can finally crack about it in the margin of a sketchbook is a perfectly good place to start.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

Best Louise Bourgeois books:
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\"Louise\n<\/p>\n

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Hauser & Wirth Publishers<\/p>\n

Louise Bourgeois: the Insomnia Drawings<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\"Louise\n<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Phaidon Press<\/p>\n

Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn’t Sorry<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\"Louise\n<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Skira<\/p>\n

Louise Bourgeois: the Fabric Works<\/p>\n

Our digital art newsletter is your go-to source for the latest news, trends, and inspiration from the worlds of art, illustration, 3D modelling, game design, animation, and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which took the title of its 2024 Bourgeois retrospective from this work. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-789502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}