Perhaps you have wandered through the Tuileries Gardens without ever noticing them… the place houses numerous contemporary works to discover, acquired by the State or installed by foundations. You need to step away from the main avenues and look for them among the trees and flowerbeds. Here are three of them to discover or rediscover during your next stroll.
The Welcoming Hands, sculpture by Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)
The Welcoming Hands, 1996, Louise Bourgeois, work acquired by the French State in 2000 and installed in the Tuileries Garden on the terrace near the Jeu de Paume gallery. Originally, the work was created for Battery Park in NYC opposite Ellis Island, the place of passage for new arrivals where the Statue of Liberty is erected, to which it echoes. A set of sculptures in memory of immigrants, celebrating welcoming, protection, as a gesture of welcome. The work consists of 6 sculptures of intertwined hands in bronze placed on 6 granite bases of different sizes and heights so that, according to the artist’s intentions, each visitor can sit and hold hands, «in the way an adult would hold a child’s hand, with a sense of protection and affection.» «The subject was very moving to me, because I am a first-generation American [in the sense of American immigration, the first member of a family to be naturalized]. The piece was installed in a specific way for a specific purpose.» These hands were modeled after those, already aged, of the artist and a child. A conflict had arisen between Louise Bourgeois and the administration of Battery Park City the year after the work was created. Indeed, the hands sculpted could have been interpreted as parts of the body in reference to the concentration camps. The Welcoming Hands were then moved into the park and placed in an area hidden by branches. The artist, who was not informed, said she was hurt. Through her assistant Jerry Gorovoy, she stated that moving the work without her consent was insulting. For Jerry Gorovoy, ’That’s what art is: people see things in different ways. Art makes us think. Do they think that by hiding the hands in the bushes, people will have a different interpretation?« ». A legal battle ensued with the Battery Park administration, which claimed ownership of the work paid $350,000 and was therefore free to move it. Or does the artist’s intention and creative prerogative stand in the face of the public institution that originated the order?
Born in 1911, Louise Bourgeois settled in NYC in 1938 until her death in 2010. Her organic iconoclastic plastic art is a way of giving substance to the language of the unconscious. For the artist, creation has always been close to therapy and psychoanalysis, which accompanied her existence for more than 30 years. Art is a guarantee of mental health, she said. She conceived and practiced it as a means to exorcise her childhood suffering and traumas. The work is structured by the ambivalence of affect and the duality of emotions. The iconic spiders in her legacy are a metaphor for the maternal figure, both protective and disturbing. As a child, Louise Bourgeois spent hours watching her mother work in her husband’s tapestry restoration workshop. The spider is that mother who weaves, stitches, and protects her canvas. The monumental bronze spiders, worked and twisted on fine steel legs that give them a graceful lightness, are exhibited in the largest museums and art foundations in the world. Very personal themes marked by anguish and desire. «I am not looking for an image or an idea; I want to create desire and emotion.». GPS coordinates of the work Welcoming Hands 48° 51′ 55″ N, 2° 19′ 22″ E
Arcs of complementary circles, Installation by François Morellet
François Morellet (1926-2016)
The work was created and installed in 1999 by the artist at the request of the State. It is an installation composed of six marble arches from Carrare that form a fragmented curve (fragmentation is one of the emblematic figures of the artist’s work; the research on fragmentation, juxtaposition, and interference transcends the entirety of his work). It is arranged in the niches at the top of the vaults along the buttresses at the entrance located in Place de la Concorde. The artist designed this curve in echo of the geometry of the one formed by the large inclined planes that develop along the buttresses of the Tuileries Garden. François Morellet, born in 1926, is one of the major representatives of concrete art, a plastic artist of minimalist geometric abstraction. The circular arcs are part of a movement described by the artist as an architectural disintegration that transforms the perception of spaces through a minimalist play of lines and breaks, of contrasts between materials. The artist subtly plays with formal motifs to disrupt the way we perceive reality and establishes a destabilizing visual game with the viewer. These arrangements all interact with their context while staging a visual experience. The rigorous geometric precision and the simplicity of harmony are not devoid of wit and impudence, however. François Morellet, born in 1926, He is a founding member of the Group of Research in Visual Art (GRAV) in 1960. He is one of the most represented artists in public institutions; numerous commissions have enabled him to deploy his work in privileged spaces, in in situ projects in cities and their systems. Architectural works that he calls «deconstructions». The algorithmic creative process finds its translation in several types of media and materials. The neon installations also link it to the movement of kinetic art. GPS coordinates of the work Arcs de Cercle Complémentaires 48° 51′ 54″ N, 2° 19′ 22″ E
The Tree of Vowels, monumental sculpture by Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone (1947)
The Tree of Vowels, a monumental bronze sculpture by Giuseppe Penone, is a realistic cast of a 28-meter-tall dead tree. At the beginning was the verb ? From the tree to the words, from roots to language, the work is an inspiring allegory, an inexhaustible questioning. The vowels I, E, O, U, A are written with the intertwined roots of the tree. It is up to each person to find them, to deploy their words as the tree does its branches… The branches of the sculpture branch out to the ground to the base of five living trees that will grow and blend nature and sculpture. The five vowels correspond to a Celtic Druid alphabet that associates each letter with a deity. The five planted essences (oak, maple, poplar, hornbeam, and ash) at the ends of the five carved branches/vowels correspond to the trees associated with the five deities. One cannot help but think of the poem Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud: A noir E blanc I Rouge O vert U bleu. Landscape architect Pascal Cribier collaborated with the sculptor to imagine the installation of the work in a vegetal environment that changes with each season, thus allowing the work to be admired from different perspectives and to integrate this vital cycle into the perception.
The mimetic perfection of the work is disturbing and gives a memorable dimension to the dead tree that inspired it. The representation of the life cycle, the natural cycle is eminently present in the work of Giuseppe Penone, who explores the confrontation of natural materials, wood, stone, … To the elements, the wind, the water, and the changes in the weather. The spirit of arte povera permeates the artist’s work even though his work does not consist solely of this approach. The tree of vowels is a public commission from 1999 among other commissions aimed at associating art and nature as part of the renovation of the Tuileries Gardens.
GPS coordinates of the work Arbre des Voyelles 48° 51′ 47″ N, 2° 19′ 34″ E
