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.
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. These days you can create something similar on the best Cricut machines, but here the original dates from 1996, and in 2007 Tate Modern 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Best Louise Bourgeois books:
