Louise Bourgeois’ New York home, a modest brownstone in a quiet Chelsea street
near the Hudson river, gives no hint of its owner’s titanic reputation. This
indomitable lady is a unique figure in contemporary art, a true original who
enjoys international acclaim at the age of 95. Frances Morris, who is
curating a retrospective at Tate Modern, says: “She ranks among the major
sculptors of the 20th century. She rides lots of waves. Even now she’s
hungry for new challenges.”
The four-storey house shows no sign of ostentation, or of the wealth her
highly priced art has brought her: last year, one of her giant spider
sculptures sold for $4m. The house number has been roughly painted on the
wall. Ironwork railings flank the steep steps to her door. A plain metal
outer door designed by Bourgeois herself has a sequence of curving lines
reminiscent of burgeoning leaves or fertile hillsides. They are discreet
compared with the damaged bodies, cruel cages and torn dolls which so often
erupt in the rest of her work, unnerving us with their angry memories of
childhood trauma.
Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’s long-time assistant, answers the door. Tall,
soft-voiced, with long hair and a beard, he is the man Bourgeois trusted to
install her three towers in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, to mark its opening
in 2000. Bourgeois was in her eighties then, and had created the work with
obsessive audacity in her studio.
He leads me, today, along a corridor into the shadowy heart of the house.
Fashionably designed interiors clearly do not matter to Bourgeois.
Unashamedly bohemian, it looks like the home of someone who lives inside her
own head, and has not bothered to change her surroundings since she moved
here nearly half a century ago.
The house, erected in the 1860s, was originally occupied by sailors. The
basement is built with rocks, because the Hudson used to flow nearer than it
does now. If the basement flooded, the stubborn old rocks would refuse to
rot. This toughness seems wholly appropriate, as the woman living here is
nothing if not resilient. She insists on continuing to work with great
single-mindedness. Most of us are either dead or decrepit well before we
reach her age. But Bourgeois defies all thought of senility as she devotes
herself to work-in-progress. At present she is producing prints, on
sackcloth, linen or banana paper – fascinated, after a lifetime of working
in three dimensions, by making images on a flat surface. She has sold her
enormous studio in Brooklyn, where her sculpture was made in the vastness of
a converted industrial building, but retains a large portion of a foundry in
Queens. Her strong sense of continuity is proclaimed by a painting that
invades my vision on a bare brick wall. It depicts flowers exploding with
convulsive energy from a tiny vase. Bourgeois made it in 1945, but the
painting hangs just outside the room where she works today, affirming the
vitality that still drives her forward with an obstinate determination.
Jerry is astonished that Bourgeois agreed to see me today. She no longer gives
interviews, and has been suffering from chronic insomnia.
Yet here she is, in a fascinatingly cluttered room at the back of the house,
sitting at one end of a large, well-worn sofa. Even smaller than I remember
from my previous visit, several years ago, Bourgeois is nevertheless very upright.
Sipping water from an old enamel cup, she clutches a plain white
handkerchief in her pale hand. Although she wears small gold-hoop earrings,
there is not a trace of make-up on her face. She appears self-contained. An
ample red velour dressing gown covers her legs.
Directly in front of her stands a sturdy revolving table with thick wooden
legs and a circular piece of metal set into the top. It is custom-built for
making sculpture, but at the moment the only new work visible in the room is
an etching propped on the floor opposite her. Its bare contours and pale
salmon colours testify to Bourgeois’ eloquence as a draughtsman. I tell her
the forms in the etching remind me of the trees in her back yard, visible
through the window. She responds very simply, with an accent still
distinctively French even after nearly 70 years in America: “I see. Right.”
From this clipped reply, it’s obvious that she wants to conserve her energy by
keeping conversation to a minimum. She is frustratingly reticent, though her
need to conserve energy is understandable. Is her art changing direction?
“No,” she replies firmly, “it is not changing at all.” Her recent maquette
of a five-legged dog surely issues from the same imagination that produced
her celebrated sculptures of spiders.
She tells me crisply that she intends to carry on working, live to 100. “We
are all doing that,” she smiles, as if confident of her ability to achieve
this goal. The strength of her will to survive is abundantly clear, and her
mind is truly vibrant. When I explain that, while in New York, I am
presenting a BBC programme on Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
there is a pause. Bourgeois goes silent. She appears to be meditating, and
preparing herself for an utterance.
Suddenly, out of the blue, the atmosphere in the room is transformed by the
sound of her high, clear voice singing the old French song Sur le Pont
d’Avignon. Perfectly in tune, very fast and word-perfect, it is a
magical performance. Bourgeois must be remembering it from her early years
in Paris, where she was born on Christmas Day, 1911. And the song’s sudden
resurfacing today has a haunting power, testifying to the extraordinary
spirit of the woman who so unexpectedly sings it to me.
The shelves lining the walls opposite her sofa are heavy with books and files,
reflecting a lifetime of commitment to work, and wherever I look in this
room my eyes are invaded by heaps of accumulated documents. On the cracked
wall above her, a vast notice board is festooned with old posters, cards and
other material.
The hugely potent art she produced in the 1940s and 50s is barely known in
Britain. So the new Tate show – starting with her early work through to her
latest sculpture – will be a revelation. This highly focused woman is now
reserving her energy almost entirely for the overriding priority of art.
She was not always so quiet. Eight years ago, when the Tate installation was
in preparation, Bourgeois – speaking quickly and clearly, with a sharp sense
of humour – responded with relish when I asked her how she felt about the
venture. “It’s very exciting and a great pleasure,” she said. “You’re very
lucky in London that the government lets you do it, and that the Tate has
not fallen into the hands of private people.”
When asked about the work, she was coy. “I’m ready for it but I don’t want to
tell,” she said with a warm, tantalising and even flirtatious laugh.
“If I did, it would take away from the surprise element. That’s important: if
you receive a gift of candy, and there’s a red ribbon round it – you want to
attack it quickly. It’s a sudden thing.” So does she always think a great
deal about how the viewer will respond to her work? “I care very much about
the viewer,” she replied. “Everything I do goes towards you, the spectator,
not myself.”
But, as she says, her work is all about herself. That show was composed of
circular staircases. “The metaphor is three elements representing a working
family relationship. A happy metaphor, a happy relationship, which is
unusual for me.”
It certainly is. Most of Bourgeois’ work has been riddled with anxiety. Death,
loneliness and paternal disloyalty give her sculpture much of its haunting
power, and she is still obsessed by traumatised feelings about her father’s
shameless philandering with the children’s governess during her girlhood in
France.
She grew up in a family dedicated to restoring antique textiles. Her mother,
Josephine, worked as a weaver repairing tapestries. Bourgeois, who thought
of her mother as a benevolent spider and “my best friend”, remembers
wrapping herself in these heavy fabrics to play hide-and-seek. But childhood
games soon gave way to a deep-seated feeling of betrayal.
For her father, Louis, who ran the textile business, had several affairs, and
indulged in a protracted, 10-year relationship with a young Englishwoman
called Sadie Gordon Richmond.
Sadie taught English to Bourgeois and her brother, Pierre. “England is very,
very important to me,” she told me, with irony audible in her voice,
“because in my family the English could do no wrong. When my father picked a
mistress, it was always an English girl: if he made her pregnant, she could
be shipped back to England and he would not be held responsible. It never
happened, but I’ve made a lot of work called The English Can Do No Wrong.”
Once Bourgeois discovered this liaison, the pain was almost unbearable. Her
mother knew about the affair, lived with it and later succumbed to Spanish
flu, which left her an invalid. She died when Louise was only 21, and
Bourgeois fantasised about exacting revenge. Her family photos are
disquieting: in one, of her father with an associate, she scratched out her
father’s face because the shot was taken by his mistress.
Bourgeois met her future husband, the distinguished American art historian
Robert Goldwater, when he visited a small gallery that she ran for a while
in Paris. After moving to New York with him in 1938, leaving war-threatened
Europe just in time, Bourgeois learnt how to place her formative nightmare at
the turbulent centre of her work.
“All the art that I make,” she told me, “comes from my childhood and
adolescence.”
One of her fêted installations was brazenly entitled Destruction of the
Father. The primal urge to kill and devour gave Bourgeois’ sculpture much of
its outspoken, macabre energy. And in 1982 she published a memoir called
Child Abuse, revealing how her father’s 10-year infatuation with Sadie had
profoundly affected her. “Sadie, if you don’t mind, was mine,” she wrote in
this outspoken document. “She was engaged to teach me English. I thought she
was going to like me. Instead of which she betrayed me. I was betrayed not
only by my father, damn it, but by her too. It was a double betrayal.”
The wound festers, Bourgeois admitted with a sigh. “My memories still bother
me. All this should have been cleared away by psychoanalysis, but I never
had it. Only making art really works for me: my friends were worse after
their analysis than before.” Then, swiftly, her mood lightened. “But I am in
a forgiving mood at the moment, because you are happier if you’re on good
terms with people who live around you. I forgive their boo-boos, and I’m
more relaxed.” Perhaps age is mellowing her? “I won’t tell you how old I
am,” she laughed. “But I’m old enough to know better than to answer such a
question.”
She was fortunate that America became her home just before the second world
war, when she was 27. “If I’d stayed in France, I’d not have become an
artist,” she said. “I’d have been earning my living in other ways. I’m a
runaway child, because I was absolutely delighted to leave the old country.
I never feel at ease when I return there.”
She and her husband, who wrote a landmark book on primitivism and modern art
and went on to enjoy an outstanding academic career, adopted a boy, Michel,
in 1939. Over the following two years she gave birth to Jean-Louis and then
Alain. Motherhood confronted her with a daunting challenge, and it must have
been a struggle to raise three boys while trying to establish herself as an
artist in a strange country.
Bourgeois knew many key artists, ranging from early encounters with Brancusi
and Léger through to an especially warm friendship with Miro. She was never
a recluse and enjoyed the company of younger artists like Warhol from the
emergent pop generation in the 1960s. Even so, she still found it a struggle
to win a reputation in her adopted land. Her first solo show of paintings
was held at a New York gallery in 1945. In 1951 her hated father died, and
Bourgeois became an American citizen; that same year, Alfred Barr, the
director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired one of her
sculptures for the collection.
But it was not until the 1970s that she began to receive wider recognition.
She became involved with the feminist movement, participating in
demonstrations and political activities. Her consistently supportive
husband, whom she described as “a feminist”, died in 1973. The Museum of
Modern Art only got round to staging a large survey of her work in 1982,
when she had already passed her 70th birthday. It was the first
retrospective given to a woman at the museum, and marked a dramatic turning
point in the art world’s awareness of her achievements.
Since then, Bourgeois has won ever-widening international acclaim, celebrated
by Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photograph where she clutches her
outrageously phallic sculpture Fillette with an impish grin. Her late
success made me wonder if she was a victim, earlier on, of the male
prejudice against women artists. “It’s not that the men were against us,”
she said. “They didn’t know we existed. They couldn’t be bothered to look at
little women. I was an insider, but men had great power as gallery owners
and taste-makers. It doesn’t bring much butter to the spinach to be an
artist, so women tended to have other jobs.”
Now, by contrast, Bourgeois is basking in the accolade of exhibitions across
the world, and I wondered if she ever regrets her inability in old age to
visit all these shows herself. “I’m there in spirit,” she said stoically,
before revealing in a mischievous voice that “I lived in Putney for several
periods in the 1930s. In England it rains all the time, the food is strange,
and people drive on the wrong side of the street.”
Besides, Bourgeois is far too busy to waste time on travelling across the
Atlantic: “I have a dozen projects at the moment, and almost too much to do.
I only manage because of a very rigid work programme. But I have lots of
energy, perseverance and curiosity.”
Her influence extends to younger artists who feel a kinship with her feisty
irreverence. Tracey Emin, whose own work echoes Bourgeois in its
concentration on autobiographical issues, and girlhood in particular, is
quick to pay tribute. “I saw a film clip of Louise Bourgeois swearing at the
camera in French,” Emin says. “She looked really angry and she was very old.
It made me realise you must never give up working. Yes, the woman certainly
has edge.”
Spiders on show
Louise Bourgeois is at Tate Modern from October 10 to January 20, 2008. Visit:
www.tate.org.uk. Four paperbacks of Richard Cork’s writings on modern
artists, including Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, are published by Yale
