here is the note that the Centre Pomidu wrote about the Janus peice below, for their 2008 retrospective:

nus fleuri, 1968
Bronze, gold patina, hanging piece,
25.7 x 31.7 x 21.3 cm

It is above all the work’s intrinsic plastic ambiguity that enables transformation, the passage from one form to another and from one meaning to another. “In perpetual metamorphosis, Louise Bourgeois’ forms provide an inventory of the apparently inexhaustible permutations of sexual oppositions (…)”, emphasises R. Storr (in Art Press, n°175, art. cit.) accentuating the oft-erotic connotations of her work. If Fillette was simultaneously penis and little girl, the flaccid penis of Sleep (1967) underlines the femininity of men, through the formal analogy that the work maintains with the female breast.

In the same year as Fillette, Louise Bourgeois produced other hanging works consisting of human body parts with sexual connotation. Here we have a series of four sculptures in phallic form, with the evocative title of Janus, including Janus fleuri [Flowered Janus]. As the reference to the Ancient Roman divinity indicates, Janus was the god with two faces, one turned towards the past and the other towards the future, the divinity of gates (janua); those of his temple were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Everything opened and shut according to his desires. It was the bipolar aspect that fascinated the artist in her choice of title. “Janus is a reference to the kind of polarity we represent…The polarity I experience is a drive towards extreme violence and revolt…and a retiring,” writes the artist who also sees in it “a double facial mask, two breasts, two knees.”

The work, in bronze, represents two flaccid penises linked by a central almost formless element that evokes the feminine slit and pubic hair. It is this junctional element whose exuberant matter overflows without precise limits onto the other two parts with their impeccable finish, that makes this work stand out in the series, the adjective “flowered” referring through visual metaphor to the female genitalia as a blossom. Masculine and feminine are once again united in this work with two faces in which, through a subsequent formal shift, penis becomes breast.

As for the modalities of its suspended presentation, it translates for the artist “passivity”, whereas “its interior mass expresses strength and hardness. It is perhaps a self-portrait – one of many”, she notes. Exceeding the limits and the identities of things, Janus fleuri might thus be a self-portrait of the artist, “an undoer of narcissism and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included," as defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 208).