Louise Bourgeois an Unfolding Portrait Prints, Books, and the Creative Process

Louise Bourgeois Louise An Unfolding WYE Portrait Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait explores this celebrated artist’s prints and books, a li le Bourgeois known but highly signifi cant part of Bourgeois’s larger practice. Her copious production in these mediums — addressing themes that perennially occupied her, including memory, trauma, and the body —is examined here within the context of Bourgeois Louise related sculptures, drawings, and paintings.  is investigation sheds light on Bourgeois’s creative process, which is uniquely and vividly apparent through the evolving states and variants of her prints; seeing these sequences unfold is akin to looking over the artist’s shoulder as she worked. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at  e Museum of Modern Art, this catalogue features Portrait An Unfolding an insight l essay by curator (and longtime friend of the artist) Deborah Wye, examining Bourgeois’s involvement with these mediums alongside the developments of her long life and career. Interviews with three of the artist’s close collaborators  rther illuminate her artistic practice and output, some three hundred examples of which are presented in this volume. An 248 pages, 330 color and 27 black-and-white illustrations Unfolding Portrait Deborah Wye Louise Bourgeois An Unfolding Portrait Prints, Books, and the Creative Process

The Museum of Modern Art | New York

2 Louise Bourgeois Contents Working Relationships 195 Jerry Gorovoy, Assistant 203 Felix Harlan of Harlan & Weaver, Inc., Printer 6 Foreword 208 Benjamin Shiff glenn d. lowry of Osiris, Publisher 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 214 Notes “ time stopped, time remembered, 221 Chronology time recreated” — 231 Checklist of Plates Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books deborah wye 240 Selected Bibliography 243 Index Themes and Variations 246 Lenders to the Exhibition 36 Architecture Embodied 248 Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art 62 Abstracted Emotions 90 Fabric of Memory 114 Alone and Together 146 Forces of Nature 176 Lasting Impressions Louise Bourgeois revisiting an early copper plate for Champfleurette, the White Cat (1994), at her home/studio on 20th Street, New York, 1995. Photograph by and © Mathias Johansson Deborah Wye

“time stopped, Bourgeois’s approach to printmaking sheds light on her creative process overall. She constantly revisited the themes and forms of time remembered, her art, in all mediums, as she sought to grapple with the troubling emotions that motivated her. Since printed images can be replicated, it was time recreated” easy to go back over her compositions and branch out in any direction. She tirelessly altered her Louise Bourgeois: proofs with pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache additions as she envisioned subsequent steps. Prints and Books Many prints went through fifteen, twenty, or even thirty stages of development, with states, variants, and versions. This unfolding progression The deeply affecting art of Louise Bourgeois of the artistic process has usually disappeared (1911 – 2010) encompasses multiple mediums. The by the final stage of a painting or sculpture, but artist is most celebrated for sculpture, particularly it remains visible in printmaking because these her iconic Spiders, provocative figures and body evolving proofs survive. Reviewing them is parts, and room-size Cells. But Bourgeois also akin to looking over Bourgeois’s shoulder as she drew continuously and, most importantly for worked — a rare opportunity for insight into an this study, created a vast body of prints and artist’s vision. illustrated books. Her printed œuvre comprises Just as she was inclined toward the dynamics some 1,200 individual compositions and, with of printmaking, Bourgeois also favored traditional their evolving states and variants, approximately print formats — the series, portfolio, and illustrated 4,800 sheets in all.1 Her printmaking took place book. These involve the gathering of related primarily in the last two decades of her very long images and their sequencing, with or without life, but also for a period at the beginning of her added text. Sequencing generates a form of career. In the 1940s, while raising three small narration, and this suited Bourgeois, who was a children, she printed on a small press at home vivid speaker, writer, and storyteller. She was and also at outside facilities. Later, in the 1990s highly articulate in describing the motivations for and 2000s, specialized printers and publishers her work and kept copious notes in appointment Louise Bourgeois at the came directly to her to work on projects. The diaries and notebooks, on countless loose sheets, printing press in the lower small printing press was resurrected in the level of her home/studio on 20th Street, New York, 1995. lower level of her house and another one added. Photograph by and © Mathias Proofing and editioning were also carried out at Johansson professional printshops.

9 and on the backs of drawings. Her pithy phrases This discussion of Bourgeois’s prints and also appear on individual prints, in series (figs. 1, illustrated books proceeds chronologically, 2), and on multipanel prints, while her parables placing them within the arc of her life and artistic and stories provide the texts for illustrated books. development, and within the broader art world Bourgeois was also well served by the context. The visual and thematic correspondences collaborative nature of printmaking. It is not a found in her printmaking — and in all her work medium often attempted alone in an artist’s across decades — will be examined in later studio, although Bourgeois did some of that chapters. Bourgeois’s situation was unusual in in her early years. Usually prints require that she gained recognition late in life and her technical expertise from professional printers early work was discovered at the same time as and support from adventurous publishers. her new work. This simultaneity certainly had Bourgeois fostered several close and creative an influence on her revisiting of earlier themes, relationships through printmaking. In fact, the but in fact she was always concerned with a printers and publishers with whom she had a recurring set of issues and emotions.13 While special rapport were able to buoy her spirits and most artists are wrapped up in their latest lift her from recurring bleak and debilitating efforts, for Bourgeois the past and present were moods. When they were scheduled to arrive at In the final analysis, however, her descriptions figs. 1, 2 Bourgeois fought against despair with a fierce intertwined. As she said: “For a lifetime I have her home she was most often energized. Such may be limiting: they can make it difficult Nos. 5 and 9 of 9 from the will and directed her formidable intelligence to wanted to say the same thing.” 14 To interpret this stimulating collaborations became part of the to see her art with fresh eyes. Eventually, an series What Is the Shape of comprehending her emotions. Art was the tool, body of work, scholars now have access to the This Problem? 1999. daily routine in her late years. overdependence on Bourgeois’s captivating and making it was empowering. It allowed her, appointment diaries and notebooks she kept over Letterpress.sheets (each): tales led to a justifiable critical backlash among she said, “to re-experience the fear, to give it a the course of her life, letters, family photographs 12 × 17" (30.5 × 43.2 cm). Interpretations those who believed her art’s formal, historical, publisher: Galerie Lelong, physicality so I am able to hack away at it. Fear going back to the early twentieth century, and 8 There are many approaches to Bourgeois’s art, and theoretical dimensions were being Paris and New York. printer: becomes a manageable reality.” Yet she never more than fifteen hundred handwritten sheets yet, as her fame grew, it was her own words overshadowed.5 SOLO Impression, New York. fully alleviated the pain, even though very old she never parted with.15 “Nothing is lost,” she that occupied center stage in interpreting it. That said, Bourgeois’s words still must be edition: 25. Gift of the artist age brought a certain mellowing. For much said, “there is something sacred about things that Her riveting explanations captured the interest taken into consideration. In addition to those of her life she dealt with anger and aggression, are your past.” 16 of many critics, curators, and scholars, this she spoke, she left a voluminous body of writing, guilt and anxiety, depression and loneliness. author among them. She dwelled on compelling matched by almost no other artist. She conveys Some part of Bourgeois’s fragile temperament A Formative Childhood episodes in her biography as motivators of her powerful sentiments in both and, in particular, was surely inborn, and family history supports Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, often talked art, and they were indeed difficult to ignore. reveals the distress she suffered and the struggles that premise. In addition, she experienced events about the early years of her life. She could She also described her art in intimate terms as she had in coping. These emotions were in her young life that appear unmistakably be moved to tears describing a childhood “a guaranty of sanity” and a form of “survival.” 2 clearly the force behind her art; to release and traumatic.9 Such events, according to current incident, even some five, six, or seven decades I interviewed Bourgeois extensively in understand them was her goal. As she said: thinking, could affect a child’s developing brain later.17 Events of the here and now stirred up preparation for her first retrospective held at “It is not an image. . . . It’s not an idea. It is an and have long-lasting repercussions.10 As she old memories and feelings not sufficiently The Museum of Modern Art in 1982, and again emotion you want to recreate.” 6 In a search for said: “I have been a prisoner of my memories buried. Her youngest years were beset by war about each of the 150 compositions in her print the forms of her art, she asked herself: and my aim is to get rid of them.” 11 This constant and family conflicts that certainly would have catalogue raisonné of 1994. Her instinctual fighting back infused her art with the raw power adversely affected almost anyone to some degree. responses and disturbing memories were how this given vocabulary can be made to and penetrating hold that are its hallmarks, and But Bourgeois had a deeply sensitive nature, revelatory for me,3 and many others have found express elemental emotions . . . also led to an inventive multiplicity of forms vulnerable to emotional upset, and may have them similarly meaningful. Although she was the hunger rather than a clear stylistic path. As Bourgeois been predisposed to psychological affliction. Her speaking about herself — and one was moved the envy told herself in one of her writings: “Your formal brother, Pierre, just thirteen months her junior, to feel empathy — the concerns she expressed the disgust inventions are not the meaning of the work suffered debilitating psychological breakdowns were universal. In addition, for those unfamiliar the indignation whereas other artists have exploited those formal that led to his confinement in an institution for with her strange and disquieting aesthetic, her the violence ideas as the meaning and very essence of their much of his adult life.18 She recognized their statements provide an accessible entry point.4 the revenge. . . . works . . . that is the reason I do not have one similarities. “I have Pierre’s trouble and will fall no one could fail to be shaken by the emotion style medium.” 12 conveyed.7

10 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 11 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books When Bourgeois was five, her mother, who figs. 3, 4 headed the family’s tapestry restoration business, Cover and no. 9 of 12 from fig. 5 the difficulties she endured in her relationships, fell ill with what may have been influenza related the fabric illustrated book The St. Germain. 1938. and the anxiety, despair, and depression that Trauma of Abandonment. 2001. 15 Lithograph. sheet: 5 × 6 ⁄ 16" to the pandemic of 1918. Thus, at an early age, 1 plagued her throughout her life. These were the Cover: 2006, stitched text, 12 ⁄ 2 (12.8 × 17.7 cm). publisher: Bourgeois had seen and felt the vulnerabilities of 3 maladies she exorcised through her art. “Do not × 9 ⁄ 4" (31.8 × 24.8 cm). No. 9: the artist. printer: commercial apart, slowly and surely, so the sooner the better, both her parents. Her mother never completely look for a rational treatise,” she said. “Life is made digital print with stitched circle. printshop. edition: c. 250. 19 1 1 and let us be thru with it.” recovered and, starting in 1922, the family sought page: 7 ⁄ 2 × 8 ⁄ 2" (19.1 × 21.6 Gift of the artist of experiences and emotions. The objects I have Bourgeois’s experience of World War I out the more healthful climate in the South of cm). publisher: unpublished. created make them tangible.” 25 New York. Nonetheless, that is how it happened, undoubtedly had a lasting impact. She was just France during winters. At eleven, acting as a printer: commercial printshop. fig. 6 and Bourgeois moved to New York City in edition: unique. Private under three years old when her father joined companion, Bourgeois began to help care for her During the War: Shortage of A Turn to Art October 1938, and would live there for the rest collection Food in Easton, state III of IV. the military, following his brother who had mother, a task that continued until Louise was After her mother died, Bourgeois returned to her of her life. 1942 – 44. been killed almost immediately. Her aunt and twenty. “I took her from spa to spa,” Bourgeois 3 3 interrupted studies. She began in mathematics The early years in New York seem to have Woodcut. sheet: 12 ⁄ 16 × 9 ⁄ 16" two cousins were taken into Bourgeois’s family remembered. “They told me it was a vacation, but (31 × 23.3 cm). publisher: and philosophy but eventually turned to art, been happy and fulfilling for Bourgeois. She 22 household for a time. For other periods, she, Pierre, it really was a way of pushing back death.” Also unpublished. printer: the studying painting with a number of artists in quickly enrolled at the Art Students League, and their older sister, Henriette, were displaced at this time, her father brought an English tutor artist. edition: 4 impressions the studio training system of Paris. Letters to a where she continued her studies in painting and to relatives in Aubusson, in central France, which into the household for Louise and her siblings. of all states. Gift of the artist friend at the time indicate that she was an eager also took up printmaking for the first time with Bourgeois later described as “the safest place in Sadie Gordon Richmond would stay with the young student and artist, enjoying the various League printer Will Barnet, who was master France.” 20 During the fighting, her mother visited family for the better part of ten years. As a young exhibitions and films around town.26 In 1938, lithographer there.28 She depended on Barnet as her father near his encampments, with the very adolescent, Bourgeois certainly would have her father cordoned off a section of his tapestry a printer for several of her earliest prints. This young Louise in tow. There are photographs of looked up to the youthful tutor, only six years her gallery on the Boulevard St. Germain to provide new direction is not altogether surprising, given the trip to the hospital in Chartres when he was senior. But Sadie also became her father’s mistress, Bourgeois with an area of her own in which her familiarity with the medium. She also began wounded. Bourgeois was four at that time and and Bourgeois reacted bitterly: “I was betrayed not to sell prints, drawings, illustrated books, and creating prints as annual holiday greeting cards. recollects her mother’s jealousy toward the nurses only by my father, damn it, but by her too. It was paintings by a range of well-known artists, and Her first one, St. Germain (1938; fig. 5), made after who fussed over her charming father. Adding a double betrayal.” 23 to earn a living. Her early interest in the rarified only three months in America, depicts her trip more uncertainty to the family’s life, he returned A final, extremely painful event of Bourgeois’s field of prints and illustrated books was likely from Paris to New York.29 She would eventually to action after his recuperation.21 Bourgeois’s youth occurred in 1932, when the mother for nurtured by her father, a dedicated collector and submit prints to competitions at the Print Club close proximity to war’s violence, the realization whom she was caring died at age fifty-three. bibliophile. She actively attended auctions around of Philadelphia, the Brooklyn Museum, and on an emotional level that injury or death could Bourgeois was distraught and even attempted Paris to build up her inventory. Early receipts the Library of Congress. The decade from 1939 be imminent, and the real tensions she perceived suicide. To make matters worse, her father enumerate purchases of posters and prints by to 1949 represents the first of two phases of between her parents, all would have constituted mocked her grief.24 Yet, of all these troubling Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Steinlen, Henri de printmaking in Bourgeois’s career; sixty-nine an ongoing traumatic situation for a young child. details in her family history, it was the incident Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.27 And it was in compositions resulted, with numerous evolving Indeed, Bourgeois has characterized her father’s with the mistress Sadie that Bourgeois cited this gallery that Bourgeois met her future states and variants that bring the total to some war deployment as “The Trauma of Abandonment” repeatedly — starting in the early 1980s — as the husband, Robert Goldwater, who stopped in 250 printed sheets in all. (figs. 3, 4). direct source of the jealousy, anger, and fear of to browse. They married just three weeks later, abandonment that fueled her art. But aspects which might seem plausible for the volatile of any of these early events could have been Bourgeois, but perhaps not for the more staid sources for the loneliness and isolation she felt, Goldwater, a young American art historian from

12 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 13 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books The Surrealists are theatrical. New York painting, the painting that wants to be or is fashionable, is theatrical.” 40 Yet theatricality, with its implied drama and narratives, would become fundamental to Bourgeois’s sensibility. Did the Surrealist mood permeating New York finally take hold of her? Although Bourgeois must have been drawn The art world was filled with exiled artists fleeing to the Art Students League for the sense of In 1945 Bourgeois had her first solo show Europe, and prominent venues like the Art of community it provided, especially being new of paintings, at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, This Century gallery were Surrealist gathering to New York, she also made prints at home. and then another in 1947 at the Norlyst Gallery. places.41 With its attention to the unconscious, She taught herself linoleum cut and woodcut of that time display a simplified and abstracted fig. 7 fig. 9 Her paintings and prints included gridded and to psychological content generally, Surrealism (fig. 6), which are relatively simple, but she also realism with flattened forms that relate to the Pierre, state V of VI. 1939. Untitled. 1946 – 47. constructions, a visual device she had in common seemed a natural vehicle for exorcising Bourgeois’s sought out instruction for the more complicated late Cubist-inspired style of Purism fig.( 7). Soft ground etching and Oil on canvas. 26 × 44" with other New York artists at this time (plate demons. While she never acknowledged a debt to 11 7 30 drypoint. plate: 9 ⁄ 16 × 6 ⁄ 8" (66 × 111.8 cm). Collection techniques of etching and aquatint. She came The subjects relate mostly to her everyday life 149). She also took part in group exhibitions this movement — and in fact denied that there was (24.6 × 17.5 cm). publisher: Artist Rooms Foundation, to favor intaglio,31 especially the “endearing” 32 of the time, including scenes of her husband with Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, any — it seems clear she began to see art as an outlet unpublished. printer: the United Kingdom 42 scratching of metal for drypoint and the reading, and of herself serving a meal at the artist. edition: 8 impressions Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others in the for her despairing states of mind. Later, when she “muscular” 33 digging with the burin in engraving. family’s country house in Easton, Connecticut.37 of all states and variants. burgeoning New York School, as well as in the talked about her art of this period, she invariably “You give the burin its power,” she once said, Bourgeois was thrust into the New York art Gift of the artist Annual Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of interpreted it in emotional terms.43 and it was “an effective way of directly world through her husband: Robert Goldwater American Art, precursors to today’s Whitney An important Surrealist-oriented venue in converting antagonism.” 34 was a respected art historian who traveled in fig. 8 Biennials. She seems to have been in the thick New York at that time was Stanley William Hayter’s Les Trois Fées (The Three During the early 1940s, Bourgeois had three scholarly and critical circles of the highest order. Fairies), state V of VIII. 1948. of things, in contrast to the more isolated figure print workshop, Atelier 17, which had transferred children: she and Goldwater adopted a four-year- Her appointment diaries of the 1940s are filled Engraving, with gouging she would become. At the same time, by the later operations from Paris during the war. Hayter had old orphan, Michel, from France; he arrived in with the names of prominent cultural figures and hand additions. plate: 1940s, Bourgeois began to have anxiety and self- brought the Surrealist method of automatism — 13 7 New York less than two months before the birth who came to social gatherings at their home, or 6 ⁄ 16 × 5 ⁄ 16" (17.3 × 13.8 cm). doubts, and psychological strains were coming a mode intended to release unconscious thought of their first biological son, Jean-Louis, in July whom she met at openings and other events. publisher: unpublished. to the surface. Notes about insomnia, depression, through art — to the realm of printmaking. At 1940. Their son Alain was born sixteen months Among those mentioned are noted art historians printer: the artist at Atelier anger, and panic started to appear in her diaries.38 New York’s Atelier 17, American artists sat side 17, New York. edition: 8 later. Bourgeois decorated Michel’s room with Millard Meiss and John Rewald, literary critics impressions of all states. Remembering this time, she later said: “There I by side with a range of international figures, colorful French popular prints known as Images Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, and Lionel Trilling, art Gift of the artist was, a wife and mother, and I was afraid of my including such celebrated Surrealists as Max Ernst, d’Épinal, purchased at auction.35 Although critic Clement Greenberg, and established family. I was afraid not to measure up.” 39 André Masson, Roberto Matta, and Yves Tanguy.44 clearly very busy with family chores, she kept art dealers Julien Levy and Pierre Matisse — In this period, Bourgeois’s imagery began Bourgeois must have been impressed when an up with her painting and her printmaking. (She and the list goes on. She also sought attention to exhibit Surrealist overtones. Her earlier exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1944 had not yet taken up sculpture.) She describes as an artist, cultivating gallery owners, not flattened, stylized forms morphed into something celebrated prints from the workshop.45 She began creating a very diluted form of acid for her always successfully. Among her artist friends resembling dream spaces. The subjects were to participate herself in 1946, and befriended Joan etchings and aquatints so it would not endanger were Louise Nevelson, whom she saw frequently, mysterious. This invented space permeated both Miró there the next year.46 Her diaries indicate that 36 the children. She eventually acquired her own and photographer Berenice Abbott, as well as her prints (fig. 8) and her paintings (fig. 9). Hayter was a presence in her life throughout the small printing press. Her prints and paintings others who are less well-known today. All these It is difficult to pinpoint what precipitated the next few years, up until 1950, as she sought out the art-related activities can be traced in her diaries, change. In 1939, she had written positively about between notes about the children’s temperatures Picasso and negatively about Surrealism in when they were sick, their various activities her diary: “All movements painted by Picasso and shopping needs, and all the run-of-the-mill have been seen and felt; he is never theatrical. tasks required for a busy household.

14 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 15 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books in the book portray skyscrapers that stand in for figures, or other quasi-architectural elements inhabiting surreal vistas. In one plate, floating ladders are trapped in a room and attempt escape. The sequencing of plates results in a cinematic sense of action, with Bourgeois’s lonely “figures” waiting, shifting, encountering one another, and getting into predicaments. The configurations in He Disappeared into Complete Silence call to mind the totemic wood pieces that Bourgeois would soon exhibit in her first solo shows of sculpture in 1949 and in 1950, and seem to provide a transition from her painting to this new sculptural direction. She was no longer satisfied with painting’s “level of reality,” she said. “I could express much deeper things in three dimensions.” 56 These early companionship and the collaborative spirit wood pieces were clearly figurative, however of his workshop. She remembers particularly that construction in local print rooms, and her abstracted, and she deployed them around the her ability to speak French gave her special status volume is housed in a beige linen cover equipped gallery space so viewers could walk around and 47 there as she could help with communications. with interior folding flaps to comfortably hold among them (fig. 12). Some of their titles give Hayter introduced a method of rotating the Printmaking Achievements the unbound prints and text pages. She also away the fact that the sculptures were stand- printing plate while engraving with a burin, Getting out of the house and sitting among the figs. 10, 11 fig. 12 sought advice about her parables, reaching out to ins for people left behind in France but, more offering a new freedom to the process; he other artists at Atelier 17 must have relieved Ascension Lente (Slow Ascent), Installation view of Louise her admired friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding generally, they represented isolation and fragility. also stressed experimentation with intaglio some of Bourgeois’s feelings of isolation. Also states V and XII of XIV. 1949. Bourgeois: Sculptures at the director of The Museum of Modern Art. For After this turn to sculpture, Bourgeois stopped Peridot Gallery, New York. techniques. Although Bourgeois did not adopt printmaking lent itself to cooperating with others, Engraving. State XII with gouging the introduction, she enlisted Marius Bewley, making prints and paintings. But while she left and stencil additions. plate: 1950. Photograph by Aaron Siskind Hayter’s automatist approach, the Surrealist particularly her friend the artist Kenneth Kilstrom, 3 7 a respected poet and classicist who had also painting permanently behind, she returned to 8 ⁄ 4 × 6 ⁄ 8" (22.2 × 17.5 cm). elements in her prints of this time — with who helped by bringing her plates into the acid publisher: unpublished. been the director of the Art of This Century printmaking many decades later. The intervening 52 their indeterminate spaces and strange figural room, a task that frightened her. Kilstrom also printer: the artist at Atelier 17, gallery. She then set about attempting to market years would be formative for her emerging presences, and with the technical effects of assisted her in pulling impressions of prints at New York. edition: 20 the volume, sending copies to bookshops and artistic sensibility. gouging, soft ground textures, and occasional home on the press in her studio. She completed impressions of all states. Gifts critics, and printing postcard order forms.53 She of the artist color — reveal his influence. But Bourgeois a range of printed compositions at this time, all said her goal in this endeavor was to become A Long Interruption was no favorite of the master printer and that with an otherworldly, Surrealist tone and subjects better known, but the book was not a success After showing her work in two exhibitions seemed to bother her, ever the student eager to that suggest natural phenomena, enigmatic and she ultimately assembled far fewer than the devoted to sculpture, and now nearly forty please the teacher. Decades later she would write figures, and anthropomorphic architecture plates( announced edition of fifty-four examples. Yet its years old, Bourgeois seemed to have reached of a “recollection of Hayter outburst” and “the 4, 31, 151). Her printmaking was not a pursuit of fame grew much later, in the 1970s and 1980s, a certain level of maturity as an artist, and dangerous Hayter.” 48 She claimed he did not like standard editions, but rather another opportunity when Bourgeois was gaining more widespread it might have been expected that she would women, although perhaps it was more about his to experiment (figs. 10, 11). attention.He Disappeared into Complete Silence continue expanding upon her unique vision. But not liking her, since statistics confirm that nearly With growing confidence in her skills, now occupies pride of place in all her major intimations in her diaries reveal the depression, half the artists at Atelier 17 were female.49 She Bourgeois seemed to accept the challenge posed exhibitions. In 2011 a group exhibition of anger, and bouts of insomnia that would become was certainly miffed not to be represented in by the group of dedicated printmakers around contemporary art based on it was mounted in debilitating. In 1951 her father died suddenly his 1949 book, New Ways of Gravure.50 Regardless, her. She set about creating an illustrated book, a the Netherlands, bringing together related work when she and her family were in France for her when he returned to Europe, she stopped format with which she was intimately familiar, by a range of artists in all mediums.54 husband’s Fulbright fellowship. Her father’s death going to Atelier 17, saying she did not take the and this time planned for its distribution. This Bourgeois’s parables here allude to isolation, seemed to be a psychological breaking point for workshop seriously any longer.51 ambitious undertaking took an enormous effort, frustrated attempts at communication, and anger. Bourgeois. She entered psychoanalysis late that belying the fact that depression and anxiety They are at once poignant, ironic, and droll. In year, continuing that process intensively through held her back. In 1947 she issued He Disappeared his introduction, Bewley states that he wants the mid-1960s, and then intermittently until her into Complete Silence, with nine plates and “to avoid any psycho-inquisitorial session,” accompanying parables she wrote herself but acknowledges that the texts “are all tiny 55 (plates 13 – 21). She had carefully studied portfolio tragedies of human frustration.” Most plates

16 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 17 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books analyst died in 1985. By the mid-1950s she had virtually stopped making art, with only a few attempts at developing her wood sculpture up to that time. After a final show at Peridot Gallery in 1953, primarily of drawings, she would not exhibit a new body of sculpture again until 1964. To be sure, there were trends in the New York art world that did not favor her personalized view it gave her the legitimacy of a job. Later sculptural vocabulary. Critical attention had she noted: “Motivations for Erasmus . . . have turned, in particular, to abstract forms in welded a ‘job’ because Robt has a job — if you have metal. She was hurt and disappointed not to be ‘a job’ you leave in the morning you come home included in the 1951 MoMA exhibition Abstract at night . . . people respect you, you do what Painting and Sculpture in America, organized by men do — ” 67 Although the shop closed in 1959, curator Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, who with his it was in operation — perhaps not always at full wife were among the closest of family friends.57 speed — for nearly four years.68 “The house is Alfred Barr, however, had purchased one of her a trap,” she said. “You look for a refuge and wood pieces for the Museum and installed it in a Although her earlier sculptures, and a few Erasmus I was one and that is what you need.” 69 Recent Acquisitions show around the same time.58 new pieces, were exhibited in group shows during Running a shop, however imperfectly, was But trends were going in another direction. these years, and she kept a studio in Paris when not a small accomplishment. It seems another A symposium held the following year, titled the family was there, she admitted that she was example of the very strong survival instinct “The New Sculpture” and led by Ritchie, featured no longer producing art. She even canceled a in this small, fragile woman. Herbert Ferber, Richard Lippold, Theodore scheduled exhibition at the Fachetti Gallery in Roszak, and David Smith.59 Paris in 1953. But she did try to pull herself out New Materials and a New Vocabulary Bourgeois fell into a deep depression. It of this chasm by asserting herself in another Bourgeois’s intensive psychoanalysis continued prevented her from working but she did carry on, direction. She began to make plans to open a rare into the 1960s, along with the contingent written for better or worse, with family responsibilities This previously unknown cache of writings fig. 13 fig. 14 book and print shop, like the small operation she component. Her jealousy, anger, depression, and also participated in art world activities. But was discovered in two batches, in 2004 and in One of approximately a Advertisement for Erasmus had within her father’s gallery in Paris before despair, and recurring insomnia did not disappear the fact that she was deeply unhappy is evident 2010, just before Bourgeois died.61 She sanctioned thousand documents of Books and Prints, Louise she married. At places like the Swann and Parke- but, as she wrote: “I do not have to say that I personal writings by Bourgeois Bourgeois’s shop during the in writings that she pursued daily — if not their study and also asked that they be read aloud related to her psychoanalysis. late 1950s Bernet auction houses, she added to her inventory used to be under anxiety twenty four hours a 70 several times a day — and that eventually filled to her. As a group and individually, these sheets Loose sheet, June 18, 1958;​ of prints and to the books she had inherited day — but now there are breaks in between — ” approximately a thousand documents during the constitute a remarkably articulate testament of a LB-0258 from her father’s collection,65 just as she had She had found a way to better understand course of her analysis. She detailed her dreams person in crisis. They are now being scrutinized searched out auctions in Paris in the early years.66 herself, realizing even more explicitly that art (fig. 13), described her suffering, attempted to not only by scholars and curators with an In 1956, she finally opened Erasmus Books and could be an outlet the more closely it was tied to mitigate her anger and understand her despair. interest in Bourgeois’s art, but also by those in Prints on East 11th Street, opposite the historic her emotions. While her instinctual expression One such sheet painfully describes her sense of psychoanalytic fields.62 And, most important Webster Hall event space, in what was then New of states of mind had begun with paintings, self during these years: for a new understanding of the full measure of York’s neighborhood for antiquarian books. It is prints, and wood figures of the late 1940s, Bourgeois’s achievement, her writings, generally, remarkable that she had the energy to embark on psychoanalysis gave her an even clearer path. I have failed as a wife are receiving literary attention.63 Her art of the this venture. Bourgeois had just turned fifty-two when as a woman 1950s may in fact have been the written documents Erasmus was not a success on 11th Street, her first exhibition of new sculpture in many as a mother of this period. She noted the creative energy nor was it when it moved uptown to a second years opened at New York’s Stable Gallery, in as a home hostess they required, even though she herself would not location on Madison Avenue near 73rd Street 1964. Her work was now comprised of organic as an artist deem them an art form. She wrote: “Why did I (fig. 14). But the rarified, elite world of the configurations, molded from fluidly yielding as a business woman need so long with L [Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, bibliophile and master print collector surely materials — quite the opposite of her wood and I am 47 — her analyst] — ask him if [it] is customary to have provided Bourgeois with a satisfying intellectual totems. In plaster, she explored forces of nature as a friend — to write down dreams + recall like these pages. and highly respectable activity during this low with hanging nests and cocoons, and twisting as a daughter It is very time consuming but it gives me the point in her life. The shop got her out of the as a sister — ‘joy of creation’ that I used to have after working house — although, according to her diaries, on I have not failed as a beside[s] I build up strength. The result is not ‘art’ some days leaving home was difficult. It gave her truth seeker useless except as a catharsis — ” 64 Later she would a sense of agency. And from a feminist point of lowest ebb — 60 recognize exorcism, catharsis, and the pursuit of self-understanding as motivators of her art.

18 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 19 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books that I work the way I do. It is because of the experiences I have gone through.” 78 In March 1973 Bourgeois’s loving and supportive husband, Robert Goldwater, died suddenly at age sixty-five. To divert herself and help regain balance, Bourgeois began teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Her courses were in sculpture and printmaking, even though she had left the latter medium behind years before. She ran her class like a studio rather than This range of directions certainly did not offering technical instruction. She asked the contribute to a signature style, which was students probing questions about art’s meaning 79 expected in the art world; nor did her work fit fig. 15 fig. 17 was not curative in the deepest sense, it provided a and purpose. But this experience did not comfortably within formalist trends. But Fée Couturière (Fairy Feminist costume party in pathway. As one prominent psychoanalytic writer revive an interest in printmaking in her own Bourgeois was prescient in her approach. The Dressmaker). 1963. honor of Louise Bourgeois, put it: “She may not have ‘had an analysis’; rather, practice. There are only two prints of note from 1 1 Plaster. 39 ⁄ 2 × 22 ⁄ 2 × hosted by Mary Beth Edelson 74 strict grip of formalist modernism was loosening 1 she ‘used’ it.” It succeeded in fueling her art by this period, and both are unconventional. She 22 ⁄ 2" (100.3 × 57.2 × and Ana Mendieta. March 14, in critical circles as movements like Pop art, 57.2 cm). Collection 1979. Guests dressed as their further personalizing it, and led to the startling turned to photostat as an easy method to create Fluxus, and Happenings emerged. Later there The Easton Foundation favorite artists. from left, breakthroughs of the 1960s and beyond. No, an expression of revolt linked to a protest would be an acknowledgment that art had top row: Gloria MacDonald, march in which she participated (fig. 18), and always been more multifaceted than midcentury fig. 16 Barbara Moore, Judith More Personal Than Political to stenciling and rubbing to rid herself of anger Bernstein, Joyce Kozloff, Mary forms that suggested germination and growth critical debates allowed, and “pluralism” would Fillette. 1968. The 1970s was a watershed decade for the art at being rejected for an exhibition (fig. 19). But 1 Beth Edelson, Phyllis Krim, fig. 15 Latex over plaster. 23 ⁄ 2 × 11 × ( ). Some foreshadowed the explicit become the dominant term in a new era of 1 Poppy Johnson; middle row: world as the long-held and constricting formalist Bourgeois’s teaching experience was stimulating 7 ⁄ 2" (59.7 × 28 × 19.1 cm). sexuality that would emerge in her works of postmodernism. Also, artists would eventually Edit de Ak, Anne Sharp, Pat discourse finally gave way fully to a new in other ways. The vitality of the students attracted Gift of the artist in memory Hamilton, Bourgeois, Suzan 75 later in the decade (plate 62). She also introduced embrace multiple modes within their practices, of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. openness. A defining force in this realignment her, and she befriended several young people rubber latex pieces, with forms bordering on with no negative consequences. Bourgeois’s Cooper, Hannah Wilke, Barbara was the women’s movement and the significance whom she enlisted as studio assistants and also the repulsive. place within this changing sensibility became Zucker; front row: Ana it had for the art generated and talked about at as companions for social activities. This circle Mendieta, Michelle Stuart. In 1967 Bourgeois made the first of many trips abundantly clear in 1966 when she joined much Photograph by and © Mary Beth that time. It provided access to new narratives, was a far cry from the coterie of art historians, to the quarries of Italy, where she took up work younger artists in the groundbreaking Eccentric Edelson with biography and the body as prime subject museum directors, critics, and other intellectuals in marble, a more traditional and permanent Abstraction exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard.72 matter. Finally, Bourgeois moved to the center of with whom she had interacted with her husband. material for her sculpture. In Italy she began Terms like anti-form, process art, and post- discussions, particularly among younger women By the end of the 1970s Bourgeois was even collaborating with specialist stone carvers whose Minimalism gained currency to describe the new artists. While she was not an organizing force frequenting the Mudd Club, a punk performance skills she admired. “These craftsmen,” she said, phenomena, and rumblings of a feminist wave in the new feminist art organizations, she was a venue in Lower Manhattan. “are interested not in the tool itself, but in their in the art world were soon to be heard. willing participant and appreciated the attention Bourgeois took a crucial turn in this period as power over the tool.” 71 New forms emerged With her outpouring of highly original forms, she received, even while also maintaining an she began to assemble installations, well before that alluded to rounded landscapes, but with an closely aligned to emotions brought to the surface engrained ambivalence about being pegged the art form became established. In 1974, she overall topography that also suggested breasts. and examined through psychoanalysis, Bourgeois “a female artist.” 76 Thinking back about this mounted the eerie and cavernous The Destruction The shapes embedded in other pieces resembled demonstrated a newfound confidence. She gave period, she gave certain reasons for her hesitation. of the Father (fig. 62; p. 224) at the alternative penises. But it was latex she turned to for one no thought to stylistic consistency. Hers were “The feminists took me as a role model,” she wrote, space 112 Greene Street in SoHo, and later, in of her most blatantly sexual works, Fillette, of not forms generated from other forms, but from “as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested 1978, constructed the encircling Confrontation at 1968 (fig. 16). changing states of mind. As one art historian has in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to the uptown Hamilton Gallery of Contemporary 73 77 noted, her work has a “psychoanalytic logic.” understand myself” (fig. 17). She did not fully Art (fig. 20). Both pieces were replete with And that logic would continue to unfold for acknowledge a feminist underpinning to her the rest of her career. Her analysis in the 1950s struggles. She wrote: “There is no feminist and 1960s had been a process of exploration, aesthetic. Absolutely not! There is a psychological identification, and understanding. Although it content. But it is not because I am a woman

20 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 21 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books violent overtones and narrative implications, calling to mind abandoned stage sets more than conventional sculptures. Bourgeois pursued the theatrical implications of Confrontation further when she staged a performance in it, with actors from among her young friends, as well as one former colleague of her husband, all dressed in outlandish latex costumes adorned with multiple A Growing Renown protuberances (fig. 63; p. 225). The pluralist thrust continued into the 1980s as fig. 18 fig. 20 a filmed slide show comprised of old photographs would be life changing. He was remarkable at Bourgeois was hitting her stride and a range of new art filled galleries and alternative No, version 1 of 5, variant. 1973. Confrontation. 1978. that portrayed the same incident together with freeing her up to focus on her art. He became her 1 enjoying the newfound attention. And it was spaces from uptown to SoHo to the East Village, Photostat. composition: 9 ⁄ 2 Painted wood, latex, and her voiceover narration. The film was installed sympathetic daily companion and has even been 1 5 1 × 18 ⁄ 4" (24.2 × 46.3 cm). fabric. 7' 2 ⁄ 8" × 30' 8 ⁄ 8" × 84 not just recent work that was gaining notice. and mediums such as photography and video 9 in the Museum’s lobby during the exhibition as referred to as her “muse.” His calm presence publisher: unpublished. 14' 7 ⁄ 16" (220 × 935 × 445.9 Her early work, much of which had never sold began to receive increased attention. Bourgeois a last-minute addition.83 This tantalizing saga, kept her on track, whatever her moods. He printer: commercial printshop. cm). Collection Solomon R. and was stored in the basement of her Chelsea was now part of this mix, as were other edition: 24 impressions of all Guggenheim Museum, and Bourgeois’s vivid recounting of it, came to withstood her seemingly irrational fits of anger brownstone, seemed just as relevant. As the “rediscovered” older artists — Lucian Freud, Leon versions and variants, and 1 New York dominate the critical dialogue. With biography and kept things steady. His responsibilities decade closed, in 1979, gallery-goers could see Golub, and Alice Neel among them — whose multiple. Gift of the artist and identity issues now legitimized as subjects continued to grow as he managed Bourgeois’s the full range of her wood pieces from the 1940s concerns seemed suddenly germane in a newly of contemporary art, Bourgeois’s painful past celebrated place in the art world for the rest of in an exhibition at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery. expansive view of art.80 fig. 19 became the default starting point for any analysis her life, and to this day. Whitney Murders, That was followed by a 1980 show there of Bourgeois reached an entirely new level of version 3 of 3. 1978. of her work. If in the 1980s Bourgeois’s renown grew, it was work from Bourgeois’s “middle years,” including recognition with a retrospective exhibition Rubbing and stencil. sheet: In the midst of this growing attention, two in the 1990s that she truly came into her own, 15 her marble sculptures. Also her very early at The Museum of Modern Art in 1982, when 25 × 33 ⁄ 16" (63.5 × 86.2 cm). factors were especially impactful. First, in 1980, as the art world wholeheartedly embraced the paintings, drawings, and prints were the she was seventy years old.81 Finally, the full publisher: unpublished. she acquired a huge loft studio in Brooklyn, kind of personalized content that had been her subject of The Iconography of Louise Bourgeois, an range of her achievement of over four decades printer: the artist. edition: allowing her to think about art on a grand scale. mainstay since the late 1940s. Among the panoply exhibition mounted by Jerry Gorovoy, a young was available to a broad audience. While in 6 impressions of all versions. This certainly fostered the creation of Articulated of ideas emanating from the galleries was one that Gift of the artist artist employed at the Max Hutchinson Gallery some retrospectives, an artist’s early work Lair, of 1986, an enclosure of folding metal was especially relevant for Bourgeois’s sensibility. who would later become her assistant, and seems immature or dated, that was not the case doors, approximately nine by twenty-two by Gender and sexuality had risen to the forefront would retain that position for the rest of for Bourgeois. In exhibitions that followed sixteen feet in size, with a small stool placed at in the feminist wave, and now was adopted Bourgeois’s life. The 1947 illustrated book throughout the decade, her work from all periods the center. This architecturally scaled piece, and as subject matter for a range of male and female He Disappeared into Complete Silence was also and in all mediums was presented together. its theatrical implications, were an extension of artists — Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, and on view in several shows in this period. The The occasion of the MoMA show was also Bourgeois’s explorations in The Destruction of the Kiki Smith among them — who were traversing art world seemed finally ready to appreciate influential for the interpretation of her œuvre. Father and Confrontation of the 1970s, and would some of the same emotional terrain Bourgeois the evocative art Bourgeois had been making This was the moment when she began to very lead to her far-reaching series of Cells — confined, explored.85 Suddenly, even the most transgressive for nearly forty years. publicly stress her father’s unfaithfulness as the room-size installations of differing scales and all bodily content was acceptable for art.86 There locus of her artistic motivations. His affair with manner of contents that began in the early 1990s. was much talk about the abject and the grotesque.87 Sadie Gordon Richmond, the tutor of Bourgeois In addition, Bourgeois engaged Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’s Fillette, so outrageous in 1968, never and her siblings, is described in “Child Abuse,” the young artist she had met through the Max seemed more timely. If one may acknowledge a a page-project published in Artforum magazine Hutchinson Gallery, as her primary assistant. during the course of the MoMA exhibition.82 She had had assistants in the past (many of them Bourgeois also put together “Partial Recall,” former students), but her relationship to Gorovoy

22 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 23 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books But as the 1990s ended, Bourgeois — now approaching her nineties — began retreating from the art world at large. She no longer attended her own openings or other art-related events. An agoraphobia that had oppressed her at various times in her life began to grip her more firmly.89 She increasingly spent time at her home/studio, going less and less often to the Brooklyn loft. Instead, people came to her, and the townhouse on 20th Street began to have a workshoplike atmosphere. Those who came with proposals and specialized skills gave her new energy; it was not time to rest if someone was due to arrive. leading artists. He first approached Bourgeois at MoMA and it had inspired him. The idea of Curators, scholars, and journalists added to the about an edition for Parkett, a periodical of a book certainly appealed to Bourgeois, as did mix. Her well-attended Sunday salons became cutting-edge contemporary art that incorporated Shiff’s creative sensibility. Although not a printer more formalized as a growing number of artists prints and multiples as part of its Collaborations himself, he was acutely sensitive to the potential and others in the art world visited regularly, & Editions series. Their relationship would of the medium. He encouraged Bourgeois to try a eager to hear her comments and advice — no grow over the decade of the 1990s and resulted variety of technical experiments before deciding matter how withering — or just to be in her in several notable portfolios, illustrated books, the best way forward. For printing, he depended company.90 and individual prints. Bourgeois enjoyed their on the Wingate Studio printshop in Hinsdale, interactions, especially the fact that she and New Hampshire. In 1990 Bourgeois issued the Prints as Studio Practice Blum occasionally spoke in French, and he puritan, a major accomplishment in the field of zeitgeist, Bourgeois fit perfectly with this spirit It had been a long time since printmaking was fig. 21 fig. 22 was a like-minded admirer of books. He once contemporary illustrated books, under Shiff’s of the 1990s, and she became increasingly integral to Bourgeois’s art, but she began to Single II. 1996. The Song of the Blacks and the delighted her with the gift of a seventeenth- Osiris imprint (plates 45 – 52). confident, creative, and productive. Within that approach it, tentatively, once again when she was Fabric, hanging piece. 6' 8" × Blues, state II of II. 1996. century volume by a French midwife, also Bourgeois’s return to printmaking in the 1990s decade, she debuted highly innovative bodies in her seventies. Asked for benefit prints in the 42" × 30" (203.2 × 106.6 × 76.2 Lithograph and woodcut, named Louise Bourgeois.92 continued unabated, with many undertakings cm). Installed in the bell tower with hand additions. sheet: of work that took her in new directions: the early 1980s, she thought of photogravure, which 3 As a publisher without his own print echoing the artistic concerns of her sculpture of St. Pancras Church, London. 21 ⁄ 4 × 96" (55.3 × 243.8 cm). architectural Cells at the Carnegie International, could easily translate her drawings. Through Collection Artist Rooms publisher: SOLO Impression, workshop, Blum sought out printers who would at that time. For example, the portfolio Anatomy monumental Spiders at the Brooklyn Museum, friends she found the congenial master printer Foundation, United Kingdom New York, and Parasol Press, be good matches for his artists. In the case (1989 – 90), published by Blum and printed by and stuffed fabric figures constructed from old Deli Sacilotto, an expert in that technique. New York. printer: SOLO of Bourgeois, he asked the advice of Judith Harlan & Weaver, captures in printed form her garments and household fabrics, at St. Pancras She enjoyed discussions with him, always Impression, New York. edition: Solodkin, of SOLO Impression, herself a master exploration of the body (plates 116, 117). The 40. Gift of the artist, SOLO Church in London (fig. 21). appreciating the talents of a master craftsman. lithographer. Solodkin had been a neighbor spider motif, with a moving text by Bourgeois, Impression, and Parasol Press Recognition of Bourgeois’s achievement Later in the 1980s, she met Christian Guérin, of Bourgeois and remained a friend. She fillsOde à Ma Mère (Ode to My Mother, 1995), a reached heights that would have been a French printer with a workshop and small suggested the Harlan & Weaver printshop, since book that occupies a fitting place in the modern inconceivable in the earlier decades of her career. gallery in Tribeca. She was impressed with his the printers there were expert in the intaglio tradition of livres d’artistes (plates 181, 182). She represented the United States at the Venice facility and its printing presses, and was partial techniques that Bourgeois favored. Later, Exploration of abject content found expression Biennale in 1993, and then received its coveted to his specialties in engraving, drypoint, and growing out of the Blum projects, Bourgeois and in The View from the Bottom of the Well(1996), a Leone d’Oro (Golden Lion) award in 1999. etching; they soon established a creative rapport. printer Felix Harlan would establish an extremely portfolio of text and harrowing representations Prizes and accolades proliferated. She received As with Sacilotto, she hoped that Guérin might close and long-standing working relationship. of the pained faces of figures trapped in a deep numerous public commissions and enjoyed the finally help her complete the full edition of Solodkin also hoped that Bourgeois would hole (fig. 23). And in a 1992 collaboration with collaborations that came along with them. In 1999 He Disappeared into Complete Silence, from decades become fully engaged with lithography, but the author Arthur Miller called Homely Girl, A Life, she was named by Art News not only one of “the earlier, something she had long wished to pursue. artist was never completely comfortable with Bourgeois provided illustrations that veer from 10 Best Living Artists” — with the likes of Jasper Sadly, Guérin passed away before that could it. Eventually, though, Bourgeois and Solodkin the poignant in volume I to the grotesque in Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter — happen. However, by 1990 printmaking again did complete striking prints together, including volume II, all responding to Miller’s story of but also one of “the Century’s 25 Most Influential had a place in Bourgeois’s artistic thinking. the ambitious and large-scale The Song of the beauty and blindness figs.( 24, 25). Artists,” joining the ranks of Picasso, Pollock, With her now considerable renown, Bourgeois Blacks and the Blues of 1996 (fig. 22). Publisher and others of that caliber.88 Her time had come. was sought after by print publishers.91 Peter Benjamin Shiff of Osiris also introduced himself Blum, a New York publisher and gallery owner to Bourgeois in the late 1980s with hopes of who had relocated from Switzerland, was known producing an illustrated book. He had seen an for issuing exciting print projects with many example of He Disappeared into Complete Silence

24 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 25 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books Th e Past and the Present In addition to images, Bourgeois revived her Print Processes Prints and books turned out to be perfect writings from decades earlier. Th e story in the Prints involve techniques that oft en mystify vehicles for allowing Bourgeois to revisit 1990 illustrated book the puritan is from 1947 even those well-versed in other art mediums. earlier images and texts that remained highly and details her long-ago unrequited feelings for At this point, Bourgeois was familiar with meaningfu l to her. She oft en responded to MoMA’s Alfred Barr. Describing it, she said: “I woodcut and linoleum cut, lithography, something from a past decade as if she had just analyzed an episode forty years aft er it happened. engraving, etching, drypoint, and aquatint — all of conceived it, wanting to start up again; it seemed forward, even insisting that the housing for the fig. 23 fig. 26 I could see things from a distance. . . . Instead which she had employed in the 1939 – 49 period that she was never really “fi nished” with an idea. series duplicate the beige linen covering of He Plate 6 of 9, state VIII of VIII, She Lost It, performance at Th e of feeling a person drowning, I considered the of her printmaking.100 While these all continued When Bourgeois reviewed her early prints with Disappeared into Complete Silence, in deference to from the portfolio Th e View from Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia. situation objectively.” 98 Another story from the to be used in her prints of the 1990s and 2000s, the Bott om of the Well. 1996. December 5, 1992. Photograph by this author for the catalogue raisonné of 1994, the time when the prints were fi rst created. Th at 1940s was the basis for She Lost It, a project she always had the highest regard for engraving Drypoint, with selective wiping. Peter Bellamy her memories were keen and the immediacy of early illustrated book was also still very much 1 1 initiated by Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and drypoint. She once called engraving a plate: 8 ⁄ 2 × 6 ⁄ 4" (21.6 × 15.8 93 her feelings was startling. A remark about a on her mind. Aft er remaking certain plates with cm). publisher: Peter Blum in 1992. Bourgeois screenprinted the tale on a “symbolic act.” She loved its assertive line on sculpture also makes this point: “A while ago printers Deli Sacilott o and Christian Guérin in Edition, New York. printer: nearly two-hundred-foot-long banner, which paper and felt it merited an even higher status I was looking at an early sculpture that I hadn’t the 1980s, she fi nally entrusted a new edition to Harlan & Weaver, New York. became the centerpiece for a performance than drypoint. But engraving requires a certain edition: 25. Gift of the artist seen in a long time. Th e trembling emotions Felix Harlan. (fig. 26). An actor (actually the critic and curator manual strength in order to push the burin that I felt when I made it came right back.” 94 Autobiographical Series, of 1994, is yet another Robert Storr) appeared onstage completely through a metal printing plate; as Bourgeois said, figs. 24, 25 101 For the portfolio Quarantania, of 1990, portfolio consisting mostly of compositions from Plate 6 of 10 from vol. I, and wrapped in the banner, his identity and the it takes “biceps.” On the other hand, drypoint

Bourgeois had plates from 1942 – 48 reprinted. the past. Th is time Bourgeois based new prints no. 1 of 8 from vol. II of the story both invisible. Th en other actors slowly requires only a simple scratching stroke. She Th ey had been saved for nearly fi ft y years, on drawings from her earliest years in New illustrated book Homely Girl, unwrapped him, as Bourgeois’s parable of lost liked the gentle, almost tentative line it produced; just as she saved most everything. Some were York, including a touching scene of two of her A Life, with text by Arthur love was revealed to the audience. Th e freed- nearly half of her total output in printmaking 96 Miller. 1992. too corroded to use and others clearly show young sons in the bathtub. When this series 1 up portion of the banner was then rewrapped utilizes drypoint, by itself or in combination 95 Plate 6: Drypoint, page: 11 ⁄ 2 the passage of time, but Bourgeois went came out, her sons were in their fi ft ies. Album, 3 around an embracing couple standing nearby. All with other techniques. In the 2000s, she would × 8 ⁄ 4" (29.2 × 22.2 cm). No. of that same year, goes back even fu rther, to her 1: Photolithograph, overlay: the performers were in costumes embroidered actively turn to soft ground etching and also fi nd 3 15 99 own childhood, reproducing more than sixty 5 ⁄ 4 × 16 ⁄ 16" (14.6 × 43 cm). with bits of Bourgeois’s text in red. an entirely new vehicle with digital printing. old photographs with her descriptive texts on publisher: Peter Blum Edition, Bourgeois’s method oft en involved fi rst overlaid pages.97 New York. printer (plate 6): choosing a drawing to transfer to a printing Harlan & Weaver, New York; (no. plate using tracing paper or carbon paper, or 1): Stinehour Press, Lunenberg, VT. edition: 100. Gift of the artist

26 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 27 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books past.” 108 The social dimension of all this activity helped distract her from bleak moods. When she knew someone was due at the house — a fact she recorded on a blackboard near the front door — she rose to the occasion. Not that she was always in the best frame of mind when he or she arrived. Most of those close to her, including sometimes screenprint; she also drew directly this author, were at points subjected to her fits on plates with ink marker for a starting point. of anger. Those could be frightening, indeed. After that, her changes were indicated on proofs But for the most part Bourgeois was thoroughly in a combination of pencil, ink, gouache, and engaging and inspiring; the people around her 104 watercolor, and those changes always led to more. them, saw what she liked and did not, and set fig. 27 fig. 29 incorporating color (figs. 27, 28). Color felt lucky to be there. She constantly revised her compositions, and was about making still more adjustments. Bourgeois Bed, version 1 of 3. 1997. Maman. 1999. printmaking, though, was not a natural fit for Bourgeois’s prints began to attract attention almost never ready to stop. She routinely went would scratch directly on the plates for changes, Screenprint, with hand Bronze, stainless steel, and Bourgeois at this point. She found its technical and were exhibited widely at this time. She 11 additions. sheet: 20 ⁄ 16 marble. 30' 5" × 29' 3" × 33' 7" through fifteen, twenty, or more evolving states and at other times Harlan would follow her 13 complexities off-putting and held a more was surely gratified when two of her illustrated × 23 ⁄ 16" (52.5 × 60.5 cm). (927.1 × 891.5 × 1,023.6 cm). and variants. This process did not entail Bourgeois lines and revisions. Some proofs were pulled traditional view of printmaking as a black-and- books were part of a 1993 exhibition at publisher: unpublished. Installed in the Jardin des 105 settling in at a professional print workshop for immediately on Bourgeois’s old press from the printer: Harlan & Weaver, New Tuileries, Paris, 2008. Collection white medium. She preferred adding color Manhattan’s Grolier Club, the distinguished 109 a project, which is standard practice for most 1940s that Harlan had reconstituted on the lower York. edition: 1 impression of The Easton Foundation with hand additions, which gave her optimal bibliophile society. In 1994, this author contemporary artists working in the medium. level of her house in 1995. (He would set up a version 1. Gift of the artist control. On occasion she tried red or blue organized a full print retrospective at The Instead, those who assisted Bourgeois came to second press there in 2003.) She loved that instant printing inks with plate tone, or colored chine Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of fig. 28 her home. gratification, and Harlan said having a press handy collé for accented backgrounds. And her choice the publication of a catalogue raisonné of her Le Lit Gros Édredon (with lips) 110 Printer Felix Harlan was the most frequent certainly stimulated Bourgeois’s printmaking. (The Big Bed Quilt [with lips]), for the numerous benefit prints she contributed prints to date, co-authored with Carol Smith. visitor. For years he came daily, or at least several He would place fresh proofs in blotters to dry on version 3 of 3: state xi of xi. to social, political, and arts organizations was That catalogue brought together some 150 times a week. This required a special rapport with her table so she could start immediately the next 1997. usually color, since it has such wide appeal.106 compositions, spanning from 1939 to 1993, with Bourgeois, and Harlan’s gentle, patient manner morning with more alterations with brushes, Soft ground etching, aquatint, Later, in the 2000s, screenprinting and digital approximately six hundred states and variants. 103 drypoint, and engraving. was a great asset. Bourgeois accomplished more pencils, and pens. 1 1 printing made working with color much easier. Also in the early 1990s, Bourgeois decided printmaking with him than with anyone else — One of Bourgeois’s most ambitious drypoints sheet: 25 ⁄ 16 × 31 ⁄ 2" (63.6 × As the 1990s unfolded, Bourgeois’s 20th to donate an archive of her prints to MoMA, 80 cm). publisher: Solomon R. the total number of printed sheets they made of this period — begun with Christian Guérin Guggenheim Museum, New Street home/studio was increasingly busy and including all the proofs in her possession and a together comes to approximately two thousand. and completed with Harlan — is Sainte Sébastienne York. printer: Harlan & productive. Print people came and went. Harlan promise, going forward, of one example of each 111 He remembers always bringing both engraving (plates 102 – 11), which went through numerous Weaver, New York. edition: might be downstairs on the press, joined there new print with its numerous states. This new and drypoint tools, to be ready for whatever she stages between 1990 and 1994, comprising eight 100. Gift of the artist by the seamstress Mercedes Katz, who became attention to her printmaking acted as a further might want to do on a given day. He also arrived studies, two versions, and some thirty-six states crucial to Bourgeois’s work with fabric pieces. stimulus for Bourgeois, and for the additional with proofs he had pulled at his shop the night and variants in all, with stops and starts over As always, Bourgeois appreciated the expertise printers and publishers who sought her out.112 before, now incorporating the previous day’s that period. With this print, and others, she took of these professionals. “I have the greatest respect The 2000s would bring yet another outpouring changes. Bourgeois relished the unveiling of advantage of photocopying to experiment with for technicians,” she said; “I give credit to people of prints, one that served the aging artist well the new proofs, even closing her eyes while he scale. Sainte Sébastienne changed markedly as it who are related to a certain tool, a certain craft.” in the last years of her life. arranged them for a presentation.102 She studied evolved. This progression offers an illuminating “I do get along very well . . . because I admire look into Bourgeois’s dynamic creative process. them. I am a client to them, not a rival.” 107 The Another composition with dramatic changes house-workshop environment harkened back to across developing states is Bed (1997), which went her mother’s tapestry-restoration atelier. “I want through three source drawings, three versions, to hire workers to imitate my mother,” she wrote and twenty-four states and variants, while also in her diary. “. . . I want to recreate, recreate the

28 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 29 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books edition Ode à l’Oubli in 2004, making it available to a wider audience and fashioning the binding so the individual pages could be detached and framed as a set. Two old friends took up this challenge with her: Peter Blum as publisher, and printer Judith Solodkin of SOLO Impression as the wizard who succeeded in transforming the unique object into an edition of twenty-five examples.117 During this period, Bourgeois was encouraged to work more earnestly in screenprint by printer A Flourishing Production of Prints David Procuniar, who became friendly with In Bourgeois’s last decade — the 2000s — the artist the artist after attending countless meetings of reached her nineties. She was remarkably active her Sunday salon.118 Several print publications during these years, even as health issues arose were the result, including Fugue (2003), which and she grew increasingly fragile. Her agoraphobia allowed Bourgeois to expand on one of her many took hold completely, and she was housebound sketchbooks (fig. 30). She also became involved for most of the decade.113 But this was not with digital printing in the 2000s, first through housebound in the sense of being an invalid with the challenges of printing on fabric for the an ever more constricted life. Her home/studio editioned Ode à l’Oubli. For that project, she found was filled with activity and visitors of all kinds, also continued to enlarge her growing body fig. 30 fig. 32 Innovations Raylene Marasco of Dyenamix through a friend including President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, of Cell sculptures. Continued undertakings in No. 7 of 19 from the portfolio The Good Mother. 2008. Bourgeois’s fabric prints and books were great in the fashion industry; Marasco specializes in who came in 2008 to bestow on Bourgeois the fabric demanded the full-time assistance of her Fugue (detail). 2003. Digital print on fabric, with innovations of the 2000s. The old clothes and the dyeing and printing of textiles. The digital Screenprint and lithograph. aluminum collage. overall: French medal of Commandeur de la Légion seamstress, who sat at a worktable surrounded 13 1 1 household fabrics she was reconstituting for process she introduced eased the way for sheet: 11 ⁄ 16 × 16" (30 × 40.7 31 ⁄ 8 × 26 × ⁄ 4" (79 × 66 × d’Honneur (fig. 71; p. 229). Her Sunday salon was by plastic boxes of materials sorted by color and sculpture were filled with memories — scorches Bourgeois’s expanded use of fabric — a printing cm). publisher and printer: .6 cm). publisher: Carolina still a major attraction. And, most importantly texture. In addition to fabric heads and figures, Procuniar Workshop, New York. Nitsch Editions, New York. and stains testified to their histories — and she surface with more tactility than paper. She for this study, she continued to be stimulated by Bourgeois created fabric totems and collages. She edition: 9. Gift of the artist printer: Dyenamix, New York. decided to try printing on some of the items. preferred it for many of her late prints and books. producing an undiminished stream of print and began incorporating fragments of old tapestries edition: 9. Gift of the artist Harlan began with a plate that had been finalized A transformative advance in Bourgeois’s book projects, and by the various collaborators into her work.114 And fabric also began to play a fig. 31 for a more standard edition on paper, and she printmaking of the 2000s was the adoption of Untitled, state IV of IV in involved with them. role in her prints. liked the result very much. This experiment an expanded notion of the medium, one that Les Arbres (3) from the The decade opened with a major commission Overall, the decade of the 2000s was editioned series of portfolios led to more prints on fabric napkins, tea towels, combined traditional editioning with one- for Turbine Hall, the vast entry space of London’s remarkable for Bourgeois’s printmaking practice. Les Arbres (The Trees). 2004. handkerchiefs, dish towels, and other odd of-a-kind features. She had always used hand new Tate Modern. Her mammoth spider, Maman, Nearly 60 percent of her total body of prints and Drypoint, with hand additions. remnants (plates 74, 76 – 81, 83 – 86). She then additions to elaborate on trial proofs, and from 3 3 completed in 1999 and first installed there in books was created during this period, representing sheet: 11 ⁄ 4 x 9 ⁄ 8" (29.8 x began to construct fabric books, aided by time to time added touches of color to completed 2000, is more than thirty feet tall. After its debut, some nine hundred separate compositions. The 23.8 cm). publisher and seamstress Mercedes Katz. The thirty-five- prints. But in her last years, the unique print it would be seen around the world — appearing decade was also noteworthy for her embrace of printer: Harlan & Weaver, page Ode à l’Oubli (Ode to Forgetting, 2002) is became central to her practice. One prime New York. edition: 6 in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, new print techniques and concepts, alongside portfolios. Private collection a seminal achievement of the period (plate 82). example is the Harlan & Weaver publication Denmark, France (fig. 29), Germany, The Hague, efforts in more traditional modes. After working First she had Katz sew together old linen hand Les Arbres (The Trees, 2004;fig. 31), an editioned Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Qatar, Russia, Sweden, on He Disappeared into Complete Silence in fits and towels from her trousseau, assembling “pages” series of six portfolios, each different in terms of Switzerland, as well as locations in the United starts with Felix Harlan since 1993, she finally and a “binding.” Bourgeois then filled the pages its contents and in the hand coloring throughout. States — most prominently at Rockefeller Center reissued the volume in 2005.115 Its themes of with fabric collages constructed from all sorts of Yet Les Arbres also maintains some traditional in New York. There were many more commissions alienation, anger, and despair still resonated, even old materials. The book’s sequencing constitutes elements of the portfolio format: it deals with for public spaces during these years. Bourgeois as she mellowed.116 Now she added subtle new an exhilarating visual journey as the patterns touches to the plates — particularly color additions and textures conjure up reminders of Bourgeois’s she had planned for a special edition in the 1940s past. The overall bulk of the book suggests a soft but never completed (plates 25 – 28). and comforting pillow. Bourgeois went on to

30 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 31 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books printers of the Wingate Studio. She created a large body of individual compositions with this procedure, some requiring two printing plates, side by side. For the final editions, she chose a variety of inking and wiping effects. (plates 112 – 14, 164–69). Shiff then brought back extra proofs for Bourgeois to enhance with pencils, pens, and brushes; she utterly a specific theme — here, trees and other natural vehicle for Bourgeois since they provided a fig. 33 fig. 34 The hand-embellished, unique print had its transformed them (plates 145, 164, 168 – 70). phenomena — and it depends on sequencing to firm, compact support that could easily be The Fragile. 2007. Couple. 2009. most ardent champion in Ben Shiff of Osiris, Shiff comes from an illustrated-book establish drama. But while most portfolios bring manipulated at her table or while sitting in bed; Series of 36 compositions: Fabric collage with 2 digital who had first established a creative rapport with background and loves language. He has a 1 together loose prints and sometimes include they also became sources for several print series. 29 digital prints and 7 prints. sheet: 9 ⁄ 2 × 11" (24.1 × Bourgeois in the late 1980s and early 1990s when particular penchant for combining text and screenprints, 30 with hand 27.9 cm). publisher: the artist. text and a colophon page, Les Arbres is comprised As with all her digital prints, decisions about 1 they published the puritan together. With his image; this was among the interests he shared additions. sheet (each): 11 ⁄ 2 printer: Dyenamix, New York. 1 simply of prints, and occasional drawings, The Fragile involved extended discussions about × 9 ⁄ 2" (29.2 × 24.1 cm). edition: unique. Collection encouragement, Bourgeois also combined plate with Bourgeois. Thus they continued to produce mounted on bound pages, with no textual inking, colors, sizing, and specific fabrics. Jerry publisher: Carolina Nitsch Louise Bourgeois Trust proofs from that volume into diptychs, triptychs, books together, this time incorporating the new element. The result is a hybrid of the traditional Gorovoy served as the conduit for the project, Editions, New York, and Lison and multipanel formats.122 After a hiatus, Shiff large, elongated prints into singular volumes book and portfolio that provides Bourgeois with bringing samples to Bourgeois for feedback and Editions (Louise Bourgeois), began working with the artist again in the 2000s. that would surely please a bibliophile.123 Shiff New York. printer: Dyenamix, an armature for a mesmerizing visual exploration otherwise managing logistics. After The Fragile He picked up where he had left off, bringing also oversaw the creation of multipanel prints, edition: 119 New York. 7. Gift of of the natural world. was printed, with some sheets in screenprint, the artist earlier proofs and suggesting that she revisit arranged in narrative sequences and often In this period Bourgeois began to work Bourgeois used special dyes to make hand them with hand additions. This suited Bourgeois interspersed with handwritten texts (seefig. 52; with New York publisher and gallerist Carolina additions on individual compositions within the perfectly, since she was always eager to explore pp. 178 – 79). Another innovation was room-scale Nitsch, who also served as the primary dealer series, varying them across the edition of seven her compositions anew. Prints, with their printed installation sets, such as 10 AM Is When for her prints. Nitsch is an advocate of the sets and three artist’s proof sets. She thereby multiple impressions, lend themselves to this You Come to Me (2007): an edition of ten sets individualized but editioned print, one example produced an editioned print project, but with process since each provides a stable jumping- comprised of soft ground etchings, all with being Bourgeois’s The Good Mother,a digital print each set being unique. off point from which to go in any number of hand additions (fig. 35). For each composition, on fabric (2008; fig. 32). Here, a ragged fragment Since compositions can be generated at directions (plates 34 – 40). Bourgeois arranged her own hands and arms of aluminum, left over from casting a sculpture, various sizes and in different orientations with By the mid-2000s Bourgeois’s efforts with those of Gorovoy — who arrived at her is adhered to each print — a different one for each digital printing, the technique also offered with Shiff took yet another turn, bending the house each morning at ten o’clock — and sheet in the edition of nine, and three artist’s new creative possibilities for Bourgeois, boundaries of printmaking even further. Ever Shiff traced them. After printing, Bourgeois proofs. This print is one of many on the theme especially with the numerous figural works responsive to her creative thinking, he decided thoroughly reenvisioned the compositions, of maternity that occupied Bourgeois in this she was creating at that time with gouache to focus on soft ground etching, a relatively primarily with red watercolor additions. late period. She said the mother and child motif on dampened paper. These figures, many easy process for mark making. The results can She then undertook the traditional task of referred not to the birth of her children but to depicting pregnant women, and men with erect closely resemble pencil drawing and these prints sequencing, but here the order and orientation her own birth — a poignant preoccupation at this penises, were printed and then assembled by captured Bourgeois’s distinctive, sometimes of individual compositions vary from set to set. time in her life.120 Bourgeois in diverse combinations, mostly as shaky hand. He brought large, narrow printing When installed, 10 AM Is When You Come to Me Bourgeois’s digital prints often included couples. Some sixty new compositions — each plates to her house, designed to fit the width produces an almost filmic experience, as well unique elements. Another example is the series unique — emerged from these individually of her worktable, and they set up a routine. as an emotional testament to the attachment titled The Fragile(2007), printed on fabric sheets printed figures fig.( 34). Others found their way Although Bourgeois was occasionally too tired Bourgeois felt to her devoted assistant. and based on a sketchbook of drawings (fig. 33). into the 2009 – 10 portfolio of digital prints titled when Shiff was scheduled to arrive, more often Sketchbooks, at this point, were a prime Do Not Abandon Me, made with artist Tracey she was stimulated in anticipation of his visits. Emin, and into the illustrated book To Whom It They could work for a full afternoon, as he and May Concern, a collaboration with her old friend Gorovoy assisted her in positioning and shifting the author Gary Indiana in 2010.121 the plates as she drew. Proofing was done by the

32 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 33 Louise Bourgeois: Prints and Books between them. “Th ey say the same things Th emesand in diff erent ways,” she maintained.2 Finally, corresponding works from diff erent periods are brought together. Th is organization Variations emphasizes overarching relationships within Bourgeois’s practice and a remarkable consistency in her aims over the course of Shiff also brought partially printed proofs was now more diffi cult, although she remained fig. 35 Th e motivations that led to Louise Bourgeois’s her lifetime. She fu lly acknowledged this to Bourgeois that led in still fu rther directions. engaged to some degree at that scale. Bourgeois 10 AM Is When You Come to art were unwavering over the seven decades of ongoing process when she said: “to be an Sheets with only printed fragments turned also had mobility issues due to arthritis, and Me (set 9), from the series of installation sets. 2007. her long career: it was emotional strugg le that artist involves some suff ering. Th at’s why out to be additional spurs to her imagination. her insomnia was severe — sometimes she went Installation set of 40 sheets: fu eled her process. In seeking to understand artists repeat themselves — because they have À l’Infi ni (To Infi nity , 2008;plates 185 – 98) is an for days with litt le or no sleep. According to 35 soft ground etchings, all and cope with painfu l memories, anger and no access to a cure.”3 extraordinary series that began with partially Gorovoy, this sleeplessness drastically aff ected with hand additions, 4 jealousy, depression and despair, she created printed proofs of Love and Kisses (plate 184). her mood and her ability to work, as she went drawings, and 1 handwritt en In this series, the printed elements — diagonal, from hyperactive to thoroughly drowsy. But her text. sheet (each approx.): sculpture, prints, drawings, and, early on, note to the reader: 1 twisting, veinlike fragments — are almost creativity remained; her printmaking is a tribute 15 × 35 ⁄ 4" (38.1 × 90.8 cm). paintings. Art was her tool of survival, her In the plate captions, dimensions are cited publisher: Osiris, New York. obscured by Bourgeois’s additions in watercolor, to the late phase of her work. She never stopped “guaranty of sanity 1.” with height preceding width (for sculptures, printer: Wingate Studio, gouache, and pencil. But one discerns them employing art to express her emotions and to Hinsdale, NH. edition: 10 sets. In giving form to her emotions, Bourgeois height precedes width, which precedes subliminally when the series is installed; they understand herself and her world. Even in the Private collection returned again and again to particular motifs depth). For prints, dimensions generally refer provide a kind of rhythm from sheet to sheet. hospital, just before she died, Bourgeois asked for that served as visual metaphors; together to the plate size or the composition size; if À l’Infi ni is a prime example of the kind of paper and pencils. As Gorovoy says: “She wanted they off er a thematic framework for her work. a fu ll sheet or book page is shown, those unique print project that became integral to her life back. She wanted to continue what we 124 While varying from architectural forms to the dimensions are cited instead. Most prints are Bourgeois’s way of working at this stage of her always did together.” life. Its swirling, elemental forms constitute growth and germination of nature, from the on paper; those on fabric are so indicated. one of her most important achievements of human body and sexuality to motherhood, and Th is volume’s Checklist pp.( 231 – 39) provides this period in any medium, as well as a striking even to a symbolic abstraction, such imagery additional documentation: fu ll dimensions for example of the potential of printmaking and and concerns appear in all her mediums, and all sheets and pa ges; publishers, printers, and of the collaborative process. sometimes overlap in individual works. edition sizes; credit lines; accession numbers In her late nineties, Bourgeois’s health Th e following discussion of the themes for works in MoMA’s collection; and the declined fu rther. Her eyesight suff ered to a and variations in Bourgeois’s art explores the MoMA online catalogue raisonné numbers degree, perhaps leading to her more frequent use artist’s creative process, with a focus on her for all prints and books. All works are in the of red, although the color always had symbolic resonance for her. She responded positively prints and illustrated books and the evolving collection of Th e Museum of Modern Art, to the large sheets of paper Shiff provided, Th e words time stopped, time remembered, time recreated states and variants that trace the development unless otherwise noted. in the title of this essay are from Louise Bourgeois, in of her imagery. It also includes examples of again probably because she could work more “Time” (Paulo Herkenhoff notes, May 8, 1997), in Frances easily with them from a visual standpoint. Th e Morris, ed., Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate, 2007), 288. related sculpture, drawings, and paintings, intimacy of small printing plates and sheets demonstrating that Bourgeois saw no “rivalry”

34 “time stopped, time remembered, time recreated” 35 “The sky, the building, and the house, knew each other and approved of each other.” louise bourgeois

Architecture

Embodied Bourgeois later turned to art, and then met and married American art historian Robert Goldwater in Paris; she moved to New York in 1938. Some of her early paintings and prints show architectural interiors of places where she lived with her young family. By the second half of the 1940s, when Bourgeois found her distinctive artistic voice, she began to feature buildings prominently in her paintings, with eerie, surrealist overtones and narrative implications (fig. 36). Her works titled Femme Maison (Woman House; In the pursuit of emotional balance and stability, plates 1, 6, 7) exemplify her gendered depiction Louise Bourgeois frequently rendered architecture of the realities of a young mother confined at as a symbolic presence in her sculpture, prints, home with inescapable responsibilities. drawings, and early paintings. “As the architectural Bourgeois’s illustrated book He Disappeared consciousness of the shape mounts,” she said late into Complete Silence (1947; plates 13 – 21) depicts in her life, “the psychological consciousness of the buildings in various guises, many calling to fear diminishes.”1 These forms were invariably mind the skyscrapers she admired in her adopted personified, with structures exhibiting poignant home. She had romanticized these buildings vulnerabilities and, occasionally, assertiveness. even before she arrived, writing from Paris to her Figural works took on architectural features, new husband (who returned to New York before molded enclosures became refuges or, conversely, her): “I dreamt about you, we were running one traps, and roomlike constructions were sites of after the other in a street full of skyscrapers.”3 personal drama. At the same time, the images in her small book Bourgeois’s attraction to architecture was suggest a range of human emotions: loneliness, rooted in her youthful study of mathematics, stoicism, fear, aggression, despair, and defeat. One which she appreciated for its reliability — it enigmatic composition includes two windowless 1. Femme Maison Bourgeois’s Femme Maison version, returned to in 1984, provided her with a sense of calm and security. buildings set in a barren landscape; Bourgeois’s (Woman House). is among her most potent had become a symbol for Thinking back on her time as a young student, she accompanying parable mysteriously identifies 1984. Photogravure, with feminist subjects. It appeared women artists in the 1970s, 1 wrote: “I enroll in Mathematics at the Sorbonne a single New York City landmark and gives it a pink chine collé. plate: 10 ⁄ 16 first in paintings and drawings appearing on the cover of a 7 with the idea of strengthening my analytical clearly human dimension: “The solitary death of × 4 ⁄ 16" (25.6 × 11.2 cm) of the 1940s, in various now classic book by critic and configurations, and was activist Lucy R. Lippard, From mind — there is nothing I enjoy more than a the Woolworth Building” (plate 14). later reprised by the artist the Center: Feminist Essays on demonstration by a + b — It has the beauty of in marble and in fabric. This Women’s Art (1976). Rockefeller Center — it makes me feel safe.”2

36 37 It was in this period that Bourgeois left environment. Her hanging “lair” sculptures, fig. 36 painting and printmaking behind and turned especially, imply safe dwellings, cocoons, and nests Regrettable Incident in the definitively to sculpture. Many of her early wood shaped by creatures of the natural world (see for Louvre Palace. 1947. 1 totems suggest figures — including family and example Fée Couturière [Fairy Dressmaker, 1963; Oil on canvas. 14 �8 × 36" (35.9 x 91.4 cm). Collection friends she missed in France — but others merge fig. 15; p. 20]). But Bourgeois recognized them as The Easton Foundation figural and architectural elements. Titles include places not only of safety and refuge, but also of Pillar (plate 5), Rear Façade, Captain’s Walk on entrapment. “When you experience pain,” she said, Irving Place Building, and Figures Qui Supportent “you can withdraw and protect yourself. But the un Linteau (Figures Supporting a Lintel).4 When security of the lair can also be a trap.”6 she exhibited these wood sculptures, she took In this regard, it is noteworthy that Bourgeois advantage of the gallery’s architecture to add suffered from bouts of agoraphobia throughout drama to her installation by arranging the pieces her life, with her last decade spent nearly makes a direct reference to her past with a as an environment, which encouraged visitors to completely housebound. The security of the home detailed, pink marble model of her childhood walk among them (fig. 12; p. 17). and the fear of the outside world were linked. home in Choisy-le-Roi, a suburb of Paris. The Around the time that Bourgeois introduced When she owned a small bookshop in the late fig. 37 Bourgeois presented the first of her ominously hovering guillotine may be interpreted as a this architectural imagery in her work, she and 1950s, it sometimes took an effort to get herself Maisons Fragiles titled Cells in 1991. This eventually led to sixty- dramatic cry echoing back through the years her husband were interacting in social circles out and to the shop. But being there also afforded (Fragile Houses). 1978. two of these architectural sculptures, which of Bourgeois’s own life, but viewers can also that included several prominent architects — Paul a kind of security. Once, after rearranging the Steel. unit 1: 7' × 27" × 14" she produced up until the last year of her life in respond to this scene on their own terms, (213.3 × 68.6 × 35.5 cm); unit 2: Nelson, Josep Lluís Sert, and Le Corbusier among furniture, she reflected: “I was conscious of the 2010.8 Each can be viewed as a chamber, whether without knowing that the artist lived in that 6' × 27" × 14" (182.8 × 68.5 × them. Bourgeois befriended Le Corbusier in walls and I was constantly leaning against 35.5 cm). Private collection assembled from a circle of old doors or fabricated house from the time she was one until she particular, and associated with him at the Atelier them and feeling their strength.”7 Rooms and with steel mesh. Some are small and meant for a was six. 17 print workshop. The celebrated stiltlike “pilotis,” buildings offered safety, or at least a controllable fig. 38 single inhabitant (such as Cell VI, 1991; plate 32, With the Cells, Bourgeois found a vehicle — a distinctive feature of his modernist architecture, environment in her life, and they recur time and Cell (Choisy). 1990 – 93. fig. 66; p. 226), while others are large rooms filled the confined architectural space — for isolating 1 are suggested in several of Bourgeois’s works again in her art. Marble, metal, and glass. 10' �2" with assemblages of found objects, old clothing, her thoughts and emotions and grappling with × 67" × 7' 11" (306.1 × 170.2 × (see Portrait of Jean-Louis, 1947 – 49; plate 12; and In the 1970s, Bourgeois created the cavelike and various sculptures by her, which together them. One cannot help but draw a parallel 241.3 cm). Collection Glenstone Plate 6 of He Disappeared into Complete Silence, tableau The Destruction of the Father(1974; fig. 62; Museum, Potomac, MD generate an affecting poetic resonance. One Cell, between these enclosures and the home/studio 5 1947; plate 18). p. 224), as well as the oval assembly of wood titled Passage Dangereux (Dangerous Passage, she restricted herself to in the last decade of her In the 1960s, after a long period of boxes titled Confrontation (1978; fig. 20; p. 23). 1997) is the most elaborate in its architectural life. There, she was surrounded by her books, psychoanalysis, Bourgeois’s artistic vocabulary Each had the quality of a stage set where implications; it is made up not of a single room old posters and photographs, sculptures from all turned from the earlier rigid wood figures to Bourgeois could reenact a vividly recalled event, but of a series of them laid out one after another periods, and many personal belongings that were pliant forms made of plaster and latex, as she or conjure up an imagined scenario. Yet even and connected in the fashion of a railroad-style eventually transformed into works of art. At the began to explore the emotional ramifications of as this theatrical, installation-based vocabulary apartment. The provocative contents of each room end of her life, containment within the walls of spaces referencing nature rather than the built developed further in her work, Bourgeois still may be contemplated through the structure’s 347 West 20th Street was a psychological and, explored individual frailty within an architectural porous mesh walls. eventually, physical necessity, though Bourgeois framework. Her Maisons Fragiles (Fragile Houses, Each of Bourgeois’s Cells is different — never ceased recalling all the other places she 9 1978; fig. 37) give form to tenuous human some suggest violence, others are forlorn or had lived in her long life. emotions and potentially unstable relationships, memorializing, but all are strangely haunting. yet in strictly geometric terms. In Cell (Choisy) (1990 – 93; fig. 38), Bourgeois

38 Themes and Variations 39 Architecture Embodied “This theme of symbolic abstraction, through the creation of forms that suggest both the structure of geometry and human individuality, has been a consistent preoccupation of my work.” louise bourgeois

Abstracted

Emotions them Untitled (The Wedges) (1950; plate 56) and Spiral Woman (1951 – 52; plate 59). Bourgeois’s attraction to such systemized shapes has its roots in her early study of mathematics. “In geometry,” she said, “there cannot be violence because all the cases are considered — no surprises, one can be calm.”5 Here, the strict posture of Untitled (The Wedges) is inflected with personalized Louise Bourgeois’s most recognizable sculptures touches: the sizes and colors of the linked are surely her provocative figures and body segments vary, and the work’s arrowlike thrust parts, and her monumental Spiders, all representing conveys determination and stability. Spiral a personalized realism that issues from deeply Woman, on the other hand, is comprised of parts felt emotions. She once noted that realistic that can move, giving the figure an air of drawings signify the “conquest of negative responsiveness and implying that it can adapt to memory, the need to erase, and to get rid of it,” its surroundings. Both of these sculptures rely on while “the abstract drawings come from a deep repetition, which is a significant compositional need to achieve peace, rest and sleep.”2 Abstraction, strategy in Bourgeois’s practice of abstraction. in fact, was integral to her practice, though not The methodical, almost ritualized act of threading often fully acknowledged in critical accounts.3 wood segments onto metal rods would have It provided a tool for ordering and analysis — been comforting for Bourgeois. It approximated giving Bourgeois a sense of control and calm — the act of stitching, and sewing always carried but could also express anger and tension. The with it a link back to her mother’s work in range of her abstraction veers from the resolutely tapestry restoration, as well as the satisfaction geometric and biomorphic to the more overtly of repairing. Repair, on a symbolic level, also suggestive, with references to the human body extended to reparation and making amends in or elements of nature. In the midcentury period, her personal relationships. when formalism was ascendant in art circles, 44. Tornado. This ominous abstract image the indentations. Bourgeois Bourgeois wanted that aspect of her work 1991 – 92. Drypoint, with gives form to the whirling once referred to a print from to be regarded as paramount. Asked about its selective wiping. wind suggested by its title. It the 1940s, similarly titled 15 5 clear erotic content, she demurred: “I am plate: 17 ⁄ 16 × 13 ⁄ 16" was created by hammering Tempête du Vent (Tornado; exclusively concerned, at least consciously, with a nail and screwdriver into a plate 146), as “an exorcism (45.5 × 33.8 cm) 4 thin sheet of copper. Flickering of the fear . . . of being blown the formal perfection.” lights and darks resulted from away and demolished.”1 Bourgeois’s explorations of abstraction reach ink catching on the edges of back to her early wood sculptures, among

62 63 staves — an abstract visual foil that occurs again and again in her later prints and drawings. Lullaby reverberates with an unmistakable rhythm across the whole, while individual plates bristle with signs of sexuality. Bourgeois favored the presentation of such a series in a stabilizing grid. Describing that abstract framework as it appeared in her early paintings, she said: “The organically shaped plaster and marble sculptures fig. 39 grid is a very peaceful thing because nothing can of the 1960s are in marked contrast to her earlier Untitled. 1953. go wrong . . . everything is complete. There is no 1 1 segmented wood totems, they similarly rely on Ink on paper. 22 ⁄ 2 × 14 ⁄ 4" room for anxiety . . . everything has a place . . . recurring elements. Labyrinthine Tower (1962; (57.2 × 36.2 cm). Private everything is welcome.”8 collection Bourgeois’s pen strokes on paper could also be plate 62) seems to sprout up in stages, suggesting While lines, curves, circles, grids, and a wide repetitive and mesmerizing. Many drawings from a plant growing out of the earth in springtime. fig. 40 array of biomorphic formations were highlights her early years display curving and meandering But this twisting sculpture also hints at imagery Acoustica. 2003. of Bourgeois’s abstract language, the spiral holds lines that call to mind strands of her own long of the penis, which would become more explicit Suite of 13 double-sided a singular place in her œuvre. It originated with hair, or the skeins of wool and bobbins of thread in her works later in that decade. Bourgeois’s drawings, ink on paper. the plaster pieces of the 1960s and became a 3 sheet (each): 9 ⁄ 8 × 8" that were touchstones of her youth (fig. 39). The plaster Lair (1962; plate 61) is also built up through fig. 41 The delineation of a strict geometry — without primary motif, even with figurative implications, (23.8 × 20.3 cm). Collection Partial Recall. 1979. Spiral Woman solace that drawing on paper offered her was a duplication, here with modular steps that conjure The Easton Foundation a clear indication of something outside itself — as in . Bourgeois compared the constant throughout Bourgeois’s long life. In her up an eccentric hive or perhaps an architectural Painted wood. 9' × 7' 6" × 66" is somewhat rare for Bourgeois but finds its way turns of the spiral to the twisting and wringing (274.3 × 228.6 × 167.6 cm). last years she filled sketchbooks with repeating structure from some ancient time. into her 1990 book the puritan (plates 45 – 52), out of tapestries as they were washed at the Private collection lines and shapes, sitting quietly at her table or Certain of Bourgeois’s abstract forms may illustrating a text she wrote decades earlier about river when she was a child. In one fit of anger, propped up in bed when plagued by insomnia. Her be considered “signature” aspects of her artistic her friend Alfred Barr, the founding director of she wrote: “The spiral, means squeeze out of, markings are seismographic: tracking the slightest repertoire. The hairlike strokes of her early ink The Museum of Modern Art. In describing the wring the laundry, wring dry — spin dry — waverings of her hand, but also her unending drawings are in this category, as are tiny trembling visual mode she chose for re-examining those twist your own idiot, twist his arm to make resolve. The title of the group constituting circles that cluster together across fields, also reflections, she says: “Geometry was a tool to him do or talk or give, squeeze him, here is then 9 Acoustica (2003; fig. 40) suggests that these sheets found in her drawings. Other signature motifs understanding . . . it was a pleasure . . . there was the message of my spiral. . . .” Yet the spiral might have been filled as she listened to music to include her cumuls, an allusion to cumulous cloud order.”7 These elegant engravings, with their afforded a variety of expressive possibilities. help pass the time at night. Also in this late period, formations. But the cumuls, which first appear sharply defined structures, are a particularly apt It might convey coiling tension, as in Untitled Bourgeois created room-size installations on paper in Bourgeois’s marble sculptures of the 1960s, evocation of Barr, the celebrated champion of (1991; plate 60), or allude to a gathering storm that feature replicating abstract printed forms suggest rolling hills or breasts as much as cloud- modernism. Geometry also permeates Bourgeois’s (Tornado, 1991 – 92; plate 44), but it may also overlaid with drawing. In À l’Infini (To Infinity, filled skies. Bourgeois made many variations on fabric collages of the 2000s, a fact that is foster a peaceful serenity (Progression, 1990; 2008; plates 185 – 98), whirling compositions seem the cumul, giving it monumental proportions in underscored when she selects materials already plate 67). All of Bourgeois’s imagery — abstract to depict a state of metamorphosis. Partial Recall of 1979 (fig. 41), an altarlike wood printed with abstract patterns. In certain of her or figurative — emerged from a complicated Abstraction in one guise or another shows construction that is a landmark of abstraction fabric illustrated books (plates 82, 87), Bourgeois psychological domain. As she vividly declared: “It up at all points of Bourgeois’s career. While her in Bourgeois’s œuvre. Yet its serene presence succeeds in evoking a storyline simply through is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is issued from an emotional realm. “Partial Recall,” color, shape, and pattern. an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of she noted, “has to do with forgiveness and with Another way Bourgeois created an overarching wanting, of giving, of destroying.”10 integration. . . . It is difficult to recall forgiveness, visual narrative was with the format of the series. one needs to be blessed at the moment. Aggression Lullaby (2006; plate 53) comprises twenty-four is very easy to recall.”6 whimsical screenprints on backdrops of musical

64 Themes and Variations 65 Abstracted Emotions “. . . mountains of unusable clothes, buried under torn clothes. I cannot renounce the past. I cannot, do not want to forget.” louise bourgeois

Fabric of

Memory sewing, that skill was mainly relegated to her own clothing — making garments, repairing and altering them. Fashion, however, was something of a preoccupation from the time she was very young, and her parents enjoyed dressing her in stylish outfits. She never discarded any of her clothes, admitting: “The pretext is that they are still good — it’s my past and as rotten as it was Louise Bourgeois’s origins are intimately linked I would like to take it and hold it tight in my to fabric — to the tapestries that were the focus of arms.”5 But the time came when she was ready her family’s business. Her childhood memories to transform these items — not throw them out. were filled with the washing, restoring, and selling This was true also for a range of fabric items of these historic textiles. She keenly remembered amassed over the course of her life — towels, the workshop women on their knees at the river, handkerchiefs, bedding, and the like. washing and wringing those heavy objects, herself The occupation of sewing, long demeaned drawing in missing fragments of imagery, and her as “women’s work,” began to be supported as a mother with a needle and thread, mending. “My legitimate art form with the feminist revivals mother would sit out in the sun and repair . . . ,” of the skill in the 1970s. But sewing and fabrics she remembered. “She really loved it. This sense first made an appearance in Bourgeois’s art in of reparation is very deep within me.”1 A lovely 1991, with Cell I, the architectural structure that letter of 1929, from mother to daughter, reminds initiated one of her most important series. The the young Louise as she travels: “On your return focus of the assemblage of objects filling that I am quite delighted to do tapestry together. eccentric “room” was a metal bed fitted out with You must not neglect that.”2 The association with fabric bedding constructed from such items as her mother is clear, even though her father was old pillowcases and postal mailing bags from also involved in the business through sales at the France (fig. 42). Most were embroidered in red family’s gallery in Paris. with phrases Bourgeois often wrote in her diaries 74. Hair. In 2000, after working for a handkerchiefs. Pleased with the Bourgeois’s interest in the craft of weaving 2000. Drypoint and engraving, number of years with fabric in results, she added small editions found an art context in the mid-1940s, when with selective wiping, on her sculptures, Bourgeois asked on fabric to prints that were she exhibited her own woven textile designs 3 3 printer Felix Harlan of Harlan also issued in larger editions on fabric. sheet: 16 ⁄ 4 × 11 ⁄ 4" at The Museum of Modern Art.3 She may even (42.5 × 29.8 cm). Collection & Weaver to experiment with paper. Hair was among the first, printing her copper plates on with six examples on various have considered business opportunities in The Easton Foundation 4 old household items, including fabrics. designing textiles. But those exhibited works napkins, placemats, and were an exception in her art career. As for

90 91 or on the backs of drawings, among them: “Pain is the ransom of formalism,” and “Art is the guarantee of sanity.” Fabric elements were soon found in subsequent Cells. And such aphorisms would later be printed on fabric items with lithography (plates 83 – 86), and in fabric books through digital processes (plates 89 – 95). (fig. 43). Her dresses, blouses, slips, camisoles, and fig. 42 made from bits of colorful silk, linen, chiffon, A significant embrace of fabric in Bourgeois’s coats were all on view; there is a poignancy and Cell I (detail). 1991. tulle, nylon, and rayon from her old garments. printed work came about in 1992 with She Lost a vaguely memorializing quality to the loosely Painted wood, fabric, metal, Some materials exhibit stains, scorch marks, and It, a project created at The Fabric Workshop in hanging attire in these works. Concurrently, and glass. 6' 11" × 8' × 9' even cigarette burns, suggesting their histories.10 6 (210.8 × 243.8 × 274.3 cm). Philadelphia. There she printed variously colored this was a moment when clothing was being Collection Glenstone More fabric books and prints followed, as she silk scarves with a tale she wrote in the 1940s, explored by a range of contemporary artists, many Museum, Potomac, MD also continued with fabric sculptures, some and then expanded it onto a nearly two-hundred- of whom were investigating issues of identity, fig. 43 a place near the presses where printer Felix Harlan incorporating tapestry, with its associations 7 foot-long white banner screenprinted with red as opposed to memory. Bourgeois, now in her Pink Days and Blue Days. 1997. worked. At this stage, Bourgeois generally cut to her family (fig. 44). In fact, fabric was a text. Bourgeois incorporated that banner into eighties, rarely left the house at this point. As she Steel, fabric, bone, wood, glass, and arranged her fabrics with pins, then basted primary material of Bourgeois’s last decades. rubber, and mixed media. a labyrinthine installation that visitors walked emptied her closets for her art, it was as if she 9' 9" × 7' 3" × 7' 3" (297.2 × 221 them together as she shaped her compositions. Indeed, when she took up digital printing in through while reading the text, and also made it were closing a chapter of her life. She no longer × 221 cm). Collection Whitney She turned over final construction to Katz, whose the mid-2000s, it was for the ease with which the centerpiece of a performance in which it was needed to dress up to attend social occasions, and Museum of American Art, professional stitching she actually preferred. Katz’s she could print on fabric. It superseded paper wrapped and unwrapped around her actors. For wore simple outfits at home in her studio. But her New York presence also served as an instigating factor for as her preferred printing surface; she liked its that event, she also made costumes embroidered former wardrobe provided a way to look back and Bourgeois’s fabric pieces. When the artist knew tactile qualities and the way it absorbs ink. fig. 44 with her pithy statements (fig. 26; p. 27). Such remember events. “You can retell your life and she was about to arrive, she eagerly prepared Her last two print projects were a series made Untitled. 2001. words were occupying a more prominent place remember your life by the shape, the weight, Tapestry and stainless steel. projects for her to work on. in collaboration with artist Tracey Emin (Do Not 1 1 in her work generally. the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet,” 6' 2 ⁄ 2" × 12 ⁄ 2" × 9" In 2000, Bourgeois began printing on fabric Abandon Me, 2009 – 10), and a book with author Ideas engaging fabric and sewing began to she said.8 (189.2 × 31.7 × 22.8 cm). after handing Harlan some of her handkerchiefs and friend Gary Indiana (To Whom It May Concern, inspire a range of Bourgeois’s art in the 1990s. The act of sewing had symbolic resonance for Private collection and other linens and asking how her copper 2010), both compilations on cloth.11 Fabric had She created several tall, vertical pole pieces, Bourgeois, but also a soothing effect. She once plates might print on them. He experimented on followed the arc of Bourgeois’s life and art — such as Sutures (1993), in which a hanging black wrote: “I feel depressed . . . fighting depression. . . . the printing press downstairs in her house. She from childhood to very old age.12 rubber form is pierced by sewing needles that If I go to bed, I cannot sleep, only sewing will liked the results very much and made small fabric are threaded from multiple bobbin cones. restore me to a balance.”9 She initially sewed her editions of many of the surrealist images that During this period, Bourgeois also made life-size fabric sculptures with a rough stitch that lends were preoccupying her at that time (plates 76 – 80). figures in fabric, hung her old clothes in Cells, those works a vividly emotional quality (see for Not long after that, Bourgeois saw potential in and created sculptures displaying garments example Untitled, 1998; plate 75). But as her fabric the linen hand towels from her trousseau. It was work increased, she began to rely on a full-time clear that each towel could be folded to form four seamstress. Mercedes Katz, whom she hired “pages.” Perhaps thinking of the cloth children’s in 1999, eventually became a daily presence at books she once collected, she asked Katz to sew Bourgeois’s 20th Street home/studio, sitting at a a batch of folded towels together to make the sewing table on the lower level with plastic boxes binding for Ode à l’Oubli (Ode to Forgetting, 2002; of fabric remnants stacked nearby. She was an plate 82), and then filled the pages with collages active member of Bourgeois’s atelier, occupying

92 Themes and Variations 93 Fabric of Memory “This figure I feel pushed to make is going to dissolve or appease my anxiety.”louise bourgeois

Alone and

Together changing moods and fears would dramatically affect her sense of herself, her body, and her relationships with others, and that in turn would shape the meanings of her figurative art. When Bourgeois turned definitively to sculpture in the late 1940s, her first exhibitions of life-size, abstracted wood totems referenced human figures — whether symbolizing actual The human figure, and specifically self-portraiture, people (as in Brother and Sister of 1949), or giving are integral to Bourgeois’s art in all periods of form to perceived hostilities (as in Persistent her career and in all mediums. Bosom Lady (1948; Antagonism of 1946 – 48). Later, after an intensive fig. 45), a figurative engraving and drypoint, period of psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s, encompasses many of the concerns the artist the role of the figure in her art gave way to a grapples with again and again, in terms of both preoccupation more specifically with the physical subject matter and visual strategies. At this early body. After an endless exploration of dreams point in her artistic career, her work had evolved and previously unspoken thoughts and desires, from a stylized realism to a more dreamlike Bourgeois acknowledged this newly discovered realm, influenced by Surrealism. But combining realm of feelings in her art through explicit features of both modes — the real and the imagery. Works with obvious sexual references imagined — became central to Bourgeois’s vision. appeared in the late 1960s, including the rather In Bosom Lady, an indeterminate space and a figure shocking Fillette(1968), a two-foot-long latex juxtaposing a female body with the wings and penis sculpture that she hung from an ominous feet of a bird are signal devices of the irrational hook (fig. 16; p. 20). Bourgeois also, on occasion, world conjured by the Surrealists. Yet the female’s cradled this disturbing sculpture like a baby in head is recognizably Bourgeois’s own, as indicated her arms, adding a touch of irony and humor, and by the hairstyle she wore at that time. When perhaps thinking of the sons she had raised many describing this print, she pointed to three years earlier. With this and other works, the 96. My Inner Life (#5). This large-scale figure was an inscription on the back shapes in the bowl on the shelf, saying: “These body fragment became firmly entrenched in her 2008. Soft ground etching, with conceived in soft ground citing Eugénie Grandet, the are her three eggs . . . her three children . . . her vocabulary of forms (as in Janus Fleuri [Flowering gouache, watercolor, and pencil etching (as seen in plate 112), long-suffering eponymous three jewels. The bird will take care of the eggs Janus], 1968; plate 118), and led to further additions, and stitched text on and then reenvisioned when heroine of an 1833 novel by 1 1 . . . but the bird can also escape by flight.” This is fabric. sheet (overall): 60 ⁄ 8 Bourgeois embellished seven Honoré de Balzac. Bourgeois 1 × 48 ⁄ 2" (152.7 × 123.2 cm). impressions with hand identified with Grandet, a self-portrait of Bourgeois as mother, conveying Collection Dominique Lévy, additions. This example has a who was dominated by an the rewards and responsibilities she felt in that New York specific subject, identified by oppressive father. role. In succeeding decades, the urgency of her

114 115 provocative creations. In Fragile Goddess (1970; fig. 46), the swelling belly signals pregnancy, but the head of the figure has morphed into a defensive weapon. She can take care of herself and protect her unborn child. But Bourgeois understands the precariousness of this position. Here, she recognizes “a determination to survive Psychic pain — anxiety, fear, jealousy, fig. 45 when she revived the earlier image for her 1990 2 at whatever fragile level you can achieve.” anger — invariably affects the body, and Bourgeois Bosom Lady, state IV of V. 1948. print Self Portrait (plates 98 – 100). Motherhood, Bourgeois’s body imagery shifted from the renders this in her art through the scrutiny of Engraving and drypoint. and a never-to-be-cut umbilical cord, are also 7 7 merely suggestive to the overtly sexual to the bones, muscles, intestines, and bodily fluids plate: 7 ⁄ 8 × 14 ⁄ 8" (20 × 37.8 subjects of the drypoint Do Not Abandon Me cm). publisher: unpublished. surreal throughout the rest of her career. But the (plates 112 – 13, 115 – 17). “With the emotions there (1999 – 2000; plates 123 – 27), which relates to the printer: the artist at Atelier 17, 1990s and 2000s witnessed a heightened level is always the physical reaction — the heartbeat, New York. edition: 4 sculpture of the same provocative title. But in the 4 of realism, particularly with full-scale figures, breathing, perspiration,” she noted. But the impressions of all 1948 states. print, Bourgeois adds an enclosing glass bell jar, some cast from models (as in Arch of Hysteria, response can go deeper: “Depression set in, and Gift of the artist conjuring up a surrealist dream state or, more 5 1993; plate 143) and others constructed in fabric. paralyzing fears. Somatic ailments.” One late darkly, suggesting that this relationship will fig. 46 The diminutive Do Not Abandon Me (1999) also series of prints titled Extreme Tension, from 2007, fig. 47 rather than anxious, and the female figure flaunts be suffocating. Fragile Goddess. 1970. displays a graphic naturalism, while Couple I (1996) intersperses its compositions with handwritten 1 5 Couple I. 1996. such gendered accoutrements of allure as long Images of motherhood fill Bourgeois’s final Bronze, gold patina. 10 ⁄ 4 × 5 ⁄ 8 figs. 3 Fabric. 6' 8" × 27 × 28" combines elements of the real and the surreal ( text panels that call out pains, cramps, and × 5 ⁄ 8" (26 × 14.3 × 13.7 cm). flowing hair, a necklace like one seen on the artist years, when she fashioned simplified forms to (203.2 x 68.6 x 71.1 cm). 9 47, 48). The figures in Couple I are approximately hot flashes, and the effects of tension on the Collection Louise Bourgeois in a 1960 photograph, and prominent high- depict pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, Collection Artist Rooms life size, making it easy to identify with them, yet scalp, shoulder blades, stomach and esophagus, Trust heeled shoes — all of which recur in Bourgeois’s by brushing red gouache onto dampened paper 6 Foundation, United Kingdom the embrace it depicts is nightmarish. Individual intestines, and rectum. Bourgeois first listed these imagery. A certain playfulness pervades the sexual (plate 129). These subjects — so essentialist in identities nearly disappear as the two figures ailments in her writings of the late 1950s and then fig. 48 encounters in the 2003 illustrated book The Laws feminist terms — also recur in her late prints 11 cling to each other — as if hanging on for dear revived the text nearly fifty years later for this Do Not Abandon Me. 1999. of Nature (plates 138 – 42), where the male holds a (plate 130). However, they now refer to her 7 3 1 12 life. Bourgeois explores comparably fraught print series. Stress was a constant problem and Fabric and thread. 4 ⁄ 4 × 20 ⁄ 2 commanding position at the start of the sequence, own birth, not to the births of her sons. As 1 relationships in prints, as seen in Triptych for she charted its consequences: “When we are in a × 8 ⁄ 2" (12.1 x 52.1 x 21.6 cm). but the action flips and the female is ultimately Bourgeois approached the end of her life, she Collection Ursula Hauser, the Red Room (1994; plate 144), where aspects of tense state, our muscles tighten; when they relax firmly in charge. Bourgeois was endlessly looked back to the beginning, to her mother’s Switzerland reality and dream merge. Here, the struggles and and the tension goes down, a liquid is released,” fascinated by the male/female relationship. “There womb and breast, for the reassuring safety dependencies of male and female, and parent she observed.8 These fluids became the subject is the desire,” she said, “the flirtation, the fear of and security they represented. Even at this and child, are conveyed across panels that unfold of a major Cell sculpture of 1992 titled Precious failure, vulnerability, jealousy, and violence. I’m late date, the figure served as a probing vehicle almost cinematically. Yet the pain is unmistakable: Liquids, in which the usually private excretions interested in all these elements.”10 for understanding, as it had in so many guises gaping mouths scream, ribs burst through skin, of the body — urine, sperm, milk, tears — are the While sexual body parts and sexual throughout Bourgeois’s career. “Content,” she and hysteria convulses adult and child alike. As focal point. relationships are pervasive subjects in Bourgeois’s said, “is a concern with the human body, its Bourgeois succinctly noted: “The subject of pain While the effects of her own moods and work, other personal relationships engage her aspect, its changes, transformations, what it is the business I am in.”3 emotions preoccupied Bourgeois, so did intense imagination as well, particularly motherhood. The needs, wants and feels — its functions.”13 feelings provoked by her relationships with others. birth of her son Jean-Louis in 1940 spurred the As noted, sexuality and desire were never far from emblem of family unity seen in an untitled work her thoughts, and this continued into very old of the same year (plate 97), with mother, father, age. With the hanging figures of The Couple (2003; and son entwined. The interdependence conveyed plate 120), the embrace is warm and comfortable, there still affected Bourgeois some fifty years later

116 Themes and Variations 117 Alone and Together “The metaphors in nature are very strong . . . nature is a mode of communication.” louise bourgeois

Forces of

Nature cloaked in foreboding. In prints, she represented wind and dangerous storms, as well as seeds, fecundity, and processes of germination plates( 4 146 – 51). When Bourgeois turned definitively to sculpture in the later 1940s, her prime concern was abstracted figures, but she continued her practice of drawing with black ink, many of the resulting images calling to mind plants and From the time she was a child, Louise Bourgeois landscapes. When a group of those drawings was was a keen observer of nature. She and her part of a solo exhibition in 1953, critics noted the siblings tended garden plots and had an intimate resemblances.5 The sculpture Forêt (Night Garden) knowledge of plants, flowers, shrubs, and (plate 163) was also on display. A wood piece fruit-bearing trees. Years later she recalled tall comprised of separate elements clustered on a boxwoods, shaped by topiary trimming, which shallow base, set close to the floor, it immediately smelled “so sweet”1 when it rained. “When I went conjures up plantings and growth; shrouded in into the garden at night,” she said, “it was as if black paint, it emanates mystery. Discussing this friendly presences populated the landscape.”2 That piece, Bourgeois remembered past experiences: tendency to humanize natural phenomena would “I have looked down at the plants crowded be fundamental to her thinking as an adult artist. together . . . the darkness that surrounds those In 1941, when she and her husband purchased a plants near the ground has always seemed to country house in Easton, Connecticut, she took me attractive and frightening . . . my approach the opportunity to teach her young sons about to nature is a very subjective one and it revolves their surroundings. “Nature was one of the ways around the idea of security or danger.”6 I communicated with the children,” she said, When Bourgeois exhibited an entirely new “both through the animals and the plants. . . . If we body of sculpture at New York’s Stable Gallery in observe life in the garden, we share the same love. 1964, she traded her upright, rigid wood totems It makes you very close.”3 for works of organic and biomorphic contours, 145. Swelling (#3). As a young painter and printmaker, Bourgeois incorporating plaster and rubber molds to create 2008. Soft ground etching, often chose motifs of flora and fauna, analyzing her shapes. She introduced the motif of the “lair,” with watercolor, ink, gouache, and systematizing them through the device of the and pencil additions. 1 1 grid (plate 149). She also hinted at primordial fears sheet: 60 ⁄ 8 × 35 ⁄ 2" (152.7 × 90.2 cm). Collection and mythic powers embodied in the landscape Louise Bourgeois Trust and through such paintings as Untitled of 1945 (fig. 49), Osiris, New York where trees, roots, and layers of sediment are

146 147 (plate 87). She also conceived La Rivière Gentille (The Gentle River), a room-size installation of soft ground etchings with hand additions where imagery approximating the lapping rhythms of water moves from sheet to sheet.14 In yet another group of soft ground etchings, Bourgeois devised large-scale compositions that comprise a visual compendium of seedlings, blossoms, leaves, vines, hanging fruits, and nests (plates 164 – 70). fig. 51 174). In a small bronze (plate 172), a body fragment Along with those, she made a corresponding Les Fleurs (The Flowers). 2009. regenerates itself, not by growing a new head but group that investigates the human body 1 Gouache on paper. 23 ⁄ 2 × by sprouting branches topped with birds. All such (plates 112 – 14). When shown together, these 18" (59.7 × 45.7 cm). Private juxtapositions call to mind the very early imagery two sets of prints underscore Bourgeois’s dual collection 15 of Bourgeois’s Bosom Lady of 1948 (fig. 45; p. 116), preoccupations. a bulbous, nestlike sculpture with a hollowed-out in which her own head and torso are grafted onto At around this time, Bourgeois was also interior. Fée Couturière (Fairy Dressmaker, 1963; the body of a bird. producing a large number of works that fig. 15; p. 20) was one of two pendulous lairs hung In the 1990s, living creatures made a dramatic layered red gouache onto dampened paper. from the ceiling in that show. The next year, entrance in Bourgeois’s work when she exhibited One group of these compositions, addressing Bourgeois exhibited it in a garden, suspended from her first Spider sculptures. She also created a motherhood — pregnancy, birth, and the branch of a tree.7 She revisited that idea years range of prints with this same eerie motif breastfeeding — was exhibited in Edinburgh at later, in 1995, for a public park in Choisy-le-Roi, (plates 179 – 82), familiar from the iconography the Royal Botanic Garden, alongside nineteenth- the town where she spent her earliest childhood eyes. “They are anthropomorphic and they are fig. 49 of late nineteenth-century Symbolist art. By century botanical drawings from the garden’s years. Commissioned for a sculpture, she created landscapes also,” Bourgeois said, “since our body Untitled. 1945. identifying the spider with her mother, and archives. A striking synergy arose between these 1 Les Bienvenus (The Welcome Ones), two hivelike could be considered from a topographical point Oil on canvas. 43 ⁄ 2 × 26" associating the spinning of a web with the two aspects of germination and procreation.16 aluminum nests that hang from a tree.8 Some of view as a land with mounds and valleys and (110.5 x 66 cm). Collection mending and restoring of tapestries, Bourgeois Other red gouaches portray flowers. A poignant The Easton Foundation years later, a similar pair was displayed in caves and holes. It seems rather evident to me again brought together the spheres of the natural beauty is expressed in Les Fleurs (The Flowers, Somerset, England (fig. 50). that our own body is a figuration that appears in fig. 50 and human worlds. In addition, she appreciated 2009; fig. 51), and it is tempting to interpret its In the late 1960s, Bourgeois devised yet another Mother Earth.” 10 Bourgeois placed some marble Both Untitled. 2004. the cleverness of the arachnid, remembering two leaves and three blossoms as symbols of sculptural strategy from ideas based in nature. examples of these sculptures in the sand dunes Aluminum. left: 6' × 42" × how it caught mosquitoes that plagued her family the five members of both Bourgeois’s childhood She fashioned a series of “landscapes,” with forms of Bridgehampton, Long Island, for a time, where 46" (182.9 x 106.7 × 116.8 cm). during summers in Easton. “The crafty spider, and adult families. Nature, in these late years, 1 that suggest hills and mounds, but that may just they settled in among the sea grasses as if they had right: 65 ⁄ 2 × 42 25" (166.4 hiding and waiting, is wonderful to watch,” she could be a source of affirmation and solace, as × 106.7 x 63.5 cm). Installed as easily be interpreted as breasts or other shapes grown or nestled there on their own.11 remarked. “The spider is a friend.”12 evidenced by a text from a 2006 illustrated book: at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, of the body. (For example, see Soft Landscape II, This idea of metamorphosis became integral to United Kingdom, in 2012. Natural motifs regularly appear in Bourgeois’s 1967; plate 155). Such likenesses led one critic to Bourgeois’s iconography of nature. In prints from Both private collection work in her last decade. The rivers she lived near Renewal characterize her imagery as a reflection of “the the 1990s and 2000s, faces, torsos, and legs emerge had always been potent symbols: the Creuse Reconciliation robust sexuality of things under and upon the from the roots, trunks, and branches of trees. and the Bièvre for memories of her childhood, Sunrise earth.”9 Most importantly, these sculptures, shaped While tree trunks might be considered symbols the Seine for its centrality to Paris, and the Buds on tree branches in marble, bronze, and plastic resin, represent of strength and stability, in Bourgeois’s Surrealist- powerful Hudson for its proximity to her 20th Birds return.17 mutability, with forms seeming to transform inspired world they can conjure up nightmare Street home in adulthood. “Each had a different from the bodily to the earthly right before one’s scenarios. In one composition, trunks grow feet character,” she said, “but all could be unpredictable 13 outfitted with shoesplate ( 175), and in another, and dangerous.” In 2002 she constructed an a tree’s branches are submerged in the earth illustrated book of fabric collages called Ode à while its wild root network flails aboveground, la Bièvre (Ode to the Bièvre), memorializing that transformed into a figure’s waving arms plates( 173, river’s waters; she later editioned the volume

148 Themes and Variations 149 Forces of Nature “Never let me be free from this burden that will never let me be free.”

louise bourgeois

Lasting

Impressions What should be made of the late work of Louise Bourgeois? Her long life stretched well past that of many of the major artists who have been subjects of analysis. When would this late period have begun for an artist who lived to ninety-eight? Was there a definitive change at a particular time? In a rare essay devoted to the subject of Bourgeois’s late style, art historian The concept of a “late style” as the capstone of Linda Nochlin chose to contrast the artist’s soft an artist’s life has long been a subject of study fabric sculptures with a marble architectural in relation to those major figures who lived to piece, although Nochlin acknowledged that it was advanced ages.1 A romantic notion of the work “impossible to summarize the work of her latest produced in this period presents it as a source years in any coherent way.”2 In fact, for much of profound meaning and rare insight. No of the first decade of the 2000s — Bourgeois’s matter the artistic era or the circumstances of final years — she continued to expand upon particular artists, similarities are observed even innovations that first emerged in the 1990s, among artists whose “late styles” transpired with Spiders, fabric sculptures and collages, and at very different ages — such as Titian (who died Cells. At the same time, new directions appeared at eighty-six) and Rembrandt (who died at the in her works on paper, particularly a return to much younger age of sixty-three). For painters, the subject of motherhood with vivid imagery loose, spontaneous brushwork is frequently a brushed in red gouache (plate 129), as well as hallmark, as is a tendency toward abstraction, copious line drawings filling sketchbooks. Those with content interpreted in terms of spirituality latter pages — mostly drawn on both sides — and transcendence. Even when certain effects are assembled in suites and exhibited together may be linked to physical ailments attendant as grids (fig. 40; p. 64), many wall-filling in scale; to old age — such as the vision problems that Bourgeois’s repetitive strokes are mesmerizing afflicted Monet, or the dementia suffered by to contemplate. de Kooning — late style as a phenomenon 184. Love and Kisses. This composition was formed Kisses in an edition of 9, but continues to intrigue scholars of art. The late 2007. Soft ground etching, with from two tall, vertical printing did not stop experimenting. 7 work of Picasso, who lived to be ninety-one, selective wiping. sheet: 59 ⁄ 8 × plates, placed side by side. She went on to generate sheets 15 has been the source of recurring study and 35 ⁄ 16" (152.1 × 91.3 cm) Selective wiping of ink created for À l’Infini (plates: 185 – 98) highlighted areas and an by printing only the twisting, evaluation since his death, although its brash paint overall mottled-gray plate tone. veinlike elements of the handling and bold subjects evoke struggle and Bourgeois issued Love and composition. haunting dissonance more than transcendence.

176 177 Just as Picasso produced a dazzling array Bourgeois started with a repertoire of inventive fig. 52 The 2008 series À l’Infini (To Infinity), an Bourgeois combined other such hand-colored of prints in his late years, facilitated by printer new imagery in an extended series of large-scale I Give Everything Away. 2010. installation set made up of these reenvisioned and reworked prints into a variety of multipanel friends who set up a nearby workshop especially compositions from tall, narrow printing plates Series of 6 compositions, all compositions, epitomizes Bourgeois’s late works and series, several of which became room- 3 soft ground etchings, with 6 for him, Bourgeois’s printmaking flourished approximately five feet in height and from ten to printmaking practice (plates 185 – 98). This work size installation sets. Others were bound into extensive hand additions and near the end of her life. With a new printer and twenty inches in width, some joining two plates began with variant printings of Love and Kisses unique books in which she wrote texts in pencil, handwritten texts.sheets: 7 plate 184 new publisher, she explored the full potential of side by side. Her forms, while straddling the line no. 1: 59 ⁄ 8 × 71" (152.1 × 180.3 (2007; ), in which only fragments of her handwriting itself becoming a poignant 7 digital printing. She also carried on with intaglio between abstraction and representation, continued cm). no. 2: 60" × 6' 1" (152.4 × the composition appeared. One such fragment feature. In fact, it was the combination of words 3 5 projects in collaboration with her longtime to reference long-standing themes of the human 185.4 cm). no. 3: 59 ⁄ 4 × 69 ⁄ 8" sparked Bourgeois’s imagination: the interlocking and texts with printed imagery that first brought 3 printer and friend, Felix Harlan, of the Harlan & body and nature (plates 112 – 14, 164 – 69). After (151.8 × 176.8 cm). no. 4: 59 ⁄ 4 elements that extend diagonally across the sheet Shiff and Bourgeois together in 1989, resulting 4 × 70" (151.8 × 177.8 cm). no. 5: Weaver workshop. issuing many of these as editioned prints, with from top left to bottom right. She turned her in the publication of the puritan (1990; plates 60" × 8' 10" (152.4 × 269.2 cm). 3 45 – 52 While this work proceeded steadily, there variations in inking, wiping, plate tone, and paper, no. 6: 59 ⁄ 4 × 69" (151.8 × partially printed sheets to a horizontal position ), an illustrated book with many unique was also a significant change in 2005, when the Bourgeois kept the process going. She went back 175.3 cm). publisher: Osiris, and then proceeded to freely brush on red gouache offshoots. Now, the artist and publisher again publisher Benjamin Shiff of Osiris moved to an to extra proofs, reimagining the existing imagery New York. printer: Wingate and watercolor, and add lines and scribbles with collaborated on works that encompassed apartment in Bourgeois’s Chelsea neighborhood. with extensive embellishments in gouache, Studio, Hinsdale, NH. edition: pencil. Each sheet is a unique visual experience, their shared love of art and language. In I Give unique. Collection Glenstone She was ninety-three years old at this point but watercolor, and pencil (plates 96, 145, 170). Shiff but the twisting printed forms echo from one to Everything Away (2010; fig. 52), their last large Museum, Potomac, MD had long before developed a creative rapport and her longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, were another. This intuitive method calls to mind the project together, Bourgeois matched eight of her with Shiff, often investigating new possibilities there to help, rolling the paper under the table as free-associative automatism of the Surrealists, transformed compositions with a moving text for unique prints. But their proximity now greatly she worked down its surface, holding the where the artist’s hand was ostensibly prompted that seems like a final good-bye: simplified arrangements and accelerated the work prints up for her inspection, and arranging them only by the unconscious. Here, Bourgeois’s they accomplished together. on the floor to dry, all so Bourgeois could remain scrawls, washes, painterly strokes, and dabs I Give everything away Bourgeois began to eagerly pursue a direction seated while she worked, which was necessary come alive on one sheet and then dissolve on the I Distance myself from myself that tapped into her natural inclination for at that point. next, as a sense of movement ripples through from what I love most experimental printmaking; she had always relished Bourgeois was thoroughly energized by this the series. Occasionally, representational details I leave my home working and reworking states and variants as her process, working on as many as four or five appear — babies floating in amniotic sacs or a I leave the nest moods changed, rather than focusing on the end prints in a single session. As Shiff described it: couple embracing — but overall, this pulsating I am packing my bags.8 result of standardized editions. But with Shiff, she “I think when you work in the most spontaneous world operates on what seems to be the cellular now embraced an entirely new level of freedom possible way, and you work with principles — level of an elemental domain. À l’Infinican be in her creative process and produced an extensive not by premeditating or trying to force anything interpreted as a meditation on life’s primordial body of work that not only expands conventional to a vision, but letting the vision inform itself — beginnings or perhaps an expression of the notions of printmaking but also constitutes a all these beautiful connections happen, all over boundless universe identified by its title, both finite whole that can be considered within the art the place.”5 Many of these projects exhibit the typifying “late style” content. historical framework of “late style.” traditionally defined characteristics of late artistic styles, including loose and brushy handwork, spontaneous markings, and a tendency toward abstraction — all with an overall impact of mystery and beauty that approaches the elegiac and sublime.

178 Themes and Variations 179 Lasting Impressions Deborah Wye: I have a couple of thoughts about how printmaking fu nctioned within Louise’s overall practice. I’m particularly interested in the eff ects of collaboration, which is basic to printmaking. It seems that her collaborative relationships were very stimulating for Louise, and in fact helped counteract her recurring depression and despair.

Jerry Gorovoy: Everything was very much tied to the emotional intensity of the moment. Louise’s facilities off ered at the Art Students League mood aff ected who she wanted to see and the in New York, which she had begun to att end way she interacted with them. Her immediate in 1939. As a new arrival in the city from feelings would determine what kind of work she Paris, she must have welcomed the chance needed to make, what level of concentration or to participate in the creative community the skill it required, and what she needed from the Working League provided. By 1946, she had also found other person. her way to Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Jerry Gorovoy Usually, appointments were made in advance, and she rarely canceled. She felt she had to take the communal workshop that had been Relationships Assistant advantage of the technical assistance. It was almost transferred from Paris to New York during like a work ethic: “Someone is coming here, and the war years. Artists frequented that shop I’ve got to be prepared. I have to do my homework. to use its printing equipment and to share I have to be ready, and not lose my chance.” A long-standing notion of artistic creation knowledge about techniques and process. Her collaborators were involved in the technical features the artist working alone in the In Bourgeois’s second phase of realization of ideas and images that for the most studio — and indeed, it may be the case much printmaking, beginning in the late 1980s, part Louise had already elaborated in her creative of the time that artists work in solitude. circumstances had changed. Her fame had solitude. Yet the resistance of the material could But production sometimes requires begun to grow, and now publishers sought also force changes as she went along. She always used to say: “What I want and what I get are two collaborators who bring particular expertise her out. Th eir invitations were stimulating diff erent things.” Aft er she tweaked the image, to the art-making process. Th at is clearly in and of themselves, prompting a renewed the result would sometimes trigg er something in true for certain sculptural endeavors, and engagement with the medium. She then her unconscious that could bring about fu rther for projects like public commissions, began to work with various printers, but not changes. Chance and even mistakes played a role which oft en require a team of contributors. at their workshops. She preferred her home/ in shaping the print. Th is is what she meant when Printmaking is an artistic undertaking that studio on 20th Street, where they came to she said that making art for her was a search, a is primarily collaborative — oft en involving collaborate with her, returning to their shops voyage without a destination. publishers, as well as skilled specialists, for printing or making use of the two presses Louise couldn’t work with just anyone. Encountering strangers could provoke fear and and dedicated equipment found in print in the lower level of her house. She looked anxiety : “What does this person want, what if workshops. Th ose shops are lively and forward to these visits. Th at anticipation, and fig. 53 Jerry Gorovoy, President of Th e Easton I cannot deliver, oh, they want too much from supportive places, where artists and printers then the work done together, could dispel Jerry Gorovoy and Louise Foundation, established by Louise Bourgeois, me.” With printmaking, she only worked with a form unique bonds based not just on skill the despairing moods that plagued her. She Bourgeois leaving Bourgeois’s fi rst met the artist in 1980 when he was working few people. She established relationships with Brooklyn studio. 1993. sets but also on personal chemistry. appreciated the social dimension of these Photograph by and © Vera Isler at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York. Felix [Harlan, of Harlan & Weaver], and with Ben In her early phase of printmaking, in the relationships but they were also creatively He included her work in a group show there, [Benjamin Shiff , of Osiris], and Judith [Solodkin, 1940s, Louise Bourgeois worked on her own energizing. Bourgeois became an avid and then mounted a solo exhibition of her early of SOLO Impression], and with David Procuniar at home, and taught herself relief printing printmaker in the fi nal decades of her life. paintings, drawings, and prints. He started to [of Procuniar Workshop]. How Louise felt about assist the artist periodically and eventually came each of them aff ected what she produced. All as well as drypoint, engraving, etching, and Th e following interviews are with three to work with her fu ll-time, handling all logistics the printmaking people represented diff erent aquatint. She even acquired a small printing of Bourgeois’s primary collaborators. Th ey related to her work and career and also becoming personalities, but consistency was important. press. Th at was a practical arrangement were conducted between September 2016 and a trusted companion and close friend. Gorovoy for a young mother with small children. January 2017. continues his work with Th e Easton Foundation, But Bourgeois also took advantage of the fostering the artist’s legacy through exhibitions, expertise in lithography and the printing publications, and related projects.

194 195 Jerry Gorovoy dw: But you were the number one person who she was under pressure. She would take it out on her creative flow. That’s why she liked it when pressure right. I would make proofs that weren’t provided consistency. me. Or she’d say: “I want to destroy the work. I Felix came back the next day and the day after dark enough, because I hadn’t wiped the plate don’t need the work.” I tried not to let her destroy that. “Oh, Felix, can’t you come back tomorrow?” correctly, or didn’t have the pressure right. But jg: Well, I was the middleman. I served as a things. But certain works did get pushed over, she’d say. When he couldn’t come, there was a sometimes the results were surprisingly good, conduit to those who were coming and going. cracked, broken, torn up. I always knew the rage break in the rhythm. But sometimes that break particularly with the fabric prints. She referred to me as “the pacifier.” I could calm would pass. After she calmed down, it was as if could be productive, because then she had time to her down and patch things over, as she had a nothing had happened. I don’t think most people look at the image with fresh eyes. It all had to do dw: Was it the same when she worked with tendency to break things and relationships. understood how psychologically fragile she was. with a flow, a sort of energy. the stonecutters in Italy? What were those It really was like a storm, you just had to ride Also, when working at home, she liked that dynamics like? dw: Since you were the ultimate facilitator, or it out. If you tried to engage her and be rational, the house had different rooms. If she wasn’t in fact the ultimate collaborator—or middleman it was just adding fuel to the fire. I would go in the mood to deal with someone, she could say: jg: Louise always liked to make adjustments in as you put it—how would you characterize your silent. Then she’d say: “Oh, you’re like Robert “Felix, can you go downstairs and put this on marble, and sometimes she’d have trouble with own relationship with Louise? [Goldwater, Bourgeois’s husband of thirty-four the press . . . ?” Or I might say: “Felix, why don’t the technicians, who preferred making exact years, who died in 1973]. He disappeared into you make a few proofs.” I knew that would get copies. They’d have big fights that I would have to jg: I was Louise’s companion, her friend. We complete silence.” Or something like that. At her excited, to work directly on new proofs. So I iron out. Once the stone was cut, the damage was spent almost every day together. We shared other times, it was almost as if she craved some sort tried to juggle things and keep things on an even done. With printmaking, she could always work interests outside of just art and the studio. We of confrontation. keel. That’s what I felt I was doing, not just with on another proof. went to movies, the theater, openings, dinners. printmaking, but with everyone. She didn’t want to be asked: “What are you We talked about psychoanalysis. dw: Did that continue as she got older? When I traveled abroad, Felix would block out doing? What does this mean?” She liked things to I was in a position to see how self-destructive a week and come to the house every day to work remain technical, for the technician to say: “I can she was, how fragile her relationships with jg: These rages were physically exhausting. with Louise. I felt more comfortable knowing he achieve what you want in the following ways.” others were, even with those she was closest to. They came pouring out. No one can sustain that. was there. When I called, I could speak to Felix. A person could say one thing and Louise would As she got older, I think she was happier. She I knew they were working. I knew things were dw: In the 1970s and early ’80s, Mark Setteducati react violently and go on the attack: “That’s it, reduced her life to her work and a few people okay. They were so productive when I was away. [who had been a student of Bourgeois's at the finished, the day is over, go home.” “These people around her. She wasn’t going out of the house School of Visual Arts] was Louise’s assistant. are asking too much of me!” she would say. She anymore. There were no longer those social dw: How did it work with Felix on making He once told me that he was a success with would attack out of fear. Her claws would come pressures. She just gave herself to her work, and changes and corrections to images? Louise because he didn’t say much. If she out. She would break relationships, even with that was the one thing that kept her in balance. asked him to saw something in two, he never her family and close friends. jg: Well, sometimes Louise would work on the asked why. My role was to figure out how to keep her dw: I’d like to ask about the routine Louise had plate herself, making corrections. Other times stable, what she needed, what she was afraid of, when printer Felix Harlan came to the house. she’d say to Felix: “Oh, it’s too light,” and then jg: Mark had the perfect temperament for and what she was trying to achieve. Sometimes Felix would engrave deeper to make a line darker. Louise. And that was a very particular time in I had to talk to people in advance, to explain jg: Felix was very calm and easy to work with, She’d also ask Felix to take lines away that she her life. Robert had died in 1973. She was just what Louise wanted, or ask them not to mention very reserved. Louise really loved him. They did didn’t like. He would have to scrape and burnish getting out socially again, she was teaching certain things. I would try to coach them on how amazing things together. He was a printmaker in parts of the plate. But once the line is deep, it’s not printmaking at SVA. Mark was really pivotal, at to deal with her, what to do, what not to do. But the classical sense. always easy to remove. that point. There were other people around too, Louise also needed to work in isolation, with If Felix was expected to arrive the next day, wilder people, like Suzan Cooper [a singer and total concentration. She had a lot of respect for she would prepare an image that she wanted on dw: Did Carol Weaver [partner in Harlan & performer], but Mark was very stable. the skill and knowledge of her collaborators, but the plate. At other times, she had plates that she Weaver] ever get involved, or it was mainly Felix? her primary creative process was solitary. Her had worked on ready for him to proof, or proofs dw: How were things different when you image making came from deep inside her. The that she had reworked by hand. There was always jg: It was mainly Felix, working directly with came along? technical aspects came later. preparation, both physically and mentally, for Louise. What Carol did was great. She often the visits. But her working methods could also printed the editions. But she only came to the jg: I was a young artist, working in a gallery, dw: I remember, way back, if I was planning to be more intuitive: “Oh, Felix, can you cut a circle house once in a while. She’d bring the prints to be and she could see that I loved her work and come over in the afternoon, I’d call you to find out in that plate? I really want to have a circle in signed. Felix worked next to Louise at her table. that I was visually oriented. I also was thinking how things were going, to get fair warning. copper.” Of course, Felix wasn’t prepared to cut a of becoming an analyst. And she saw that I could circle then and there. But he would stay calm and dw: Sometimes you would run down to the possibly help her professionally. At that time jg: Sometimes she’d say I was “in cahoots” with say: “Next time, Louise, I’ll bring you a circle.” press yourself and make a proof, if Felix wasn’t she hadn’t been exhibiting that much. It was people. She’d create triangles with me and other Louise also liked immediate gratification when there, right? a transitional time in the art world. The aesthetic people. I had to be careful. I didn’t want her to she was working. So with prints, she wanted concerns of younger artists were moving closer think it was two against one. Sometimes it got a proof right away, from her press downstairs. jg: Yes, I would try, because Louise wanted to what Louise had been expressing for decades. crazy, and we had fights where I would have to But for larger-scale works she sometimes had to that immediate gratification. But I’m not a profess my loyalty. It was especially bad when accept delays in the process, and that interrupted printmaker. With the old press, you had to get the

196 Working Relationships 197 Jerry Gorovoy dw: You certainly recognized something in her dw: She definitely transformed things with dw: She had a gift for making forms but also and saw her struggles—it was among the most work when you organized the exhibition The all her evolving states and variants. such a piercing intelligence. emotionally draining things I’ve done. Iconography of Louise Bourgeois [1980 show of paintings, drawings, and prints from the 1940s that jg: There were always conflicting emotions jg: She was very well read, very well educated, jg: Louise was barely hanging in there at that Gorovoy curated when he was working at the Max contained within the same motif, multiple stories with a wide frame of reference. At the same moment in her life. There was a lot of anger, guilt, Hutchinson Gallery]. that could evolve around subtle changes to the time, she was open to any material or process. and utter despair. People don’t realize that when form. With Sainte Sébastienne [plates 102 – 11], For example, when we got a fax machine, Louise she wrote “Art is a guaranty of sanity,” she really jg: I really didn’t know much about her work in one variant the woman has arrows, in another wanted to make something with it. Then she’d meant it. when I did that show. Something in her work she has long hair, in yet another her face is want to blow up an image even bigger and we’d attracted me and I needed to understand the effect transformed into a cat’s face, and in another she go to a Xerox place to make an enlargement. dw: I know she would blow up at me, and that it had on me. That exhibition, in a way, was the has eggs in her hair that represent children. These kinds of processes offered the potential she was very complicated, but I had no idea of beginning of my journey into understanding both This is a motif that went through various to change an image, to take it to another level or the depth of her torment. Those writings make her and the art she made. permutations. She was constantly tweaking it, to see it in another way. She would reconfigure, me wish I could have comforted her in some way. changing its meaning, changing the narrative. recombine, and establish something new. That Her pain was heartbreaking. dw: She had done a few major pieces in the 1970s, working process triggered something in her. like The Destruction of the Father[ fig. 62; p. 224] and dw: It’s like re-mining. I remember showing jg: People didn’t realize the depth of the Confrontation [fig. 20; p. 23]. her something she had made forty or fifty years dw: What was Louise’s relationship to Judith emotional chaos that gave rise to her forms. before and she would respond as if she had just [Solodkin]? Her emotions were raw. Louise said: “My work jg: The performance [A Banquet/A Fashion Show made it. The distance had gone away. Whatever is about my problems, and you may not be of Body Parts] staged inside Confrontation [fig. 63; emotion was in there, she would still respond jg: She knew Judith way before she met me. interested in my problems, but that’s fine.” Louise p. 225] really came out of her relationship with to it. I think she tried to fix her up with Jean-Louis knew that her work was a sort of life raft. And her friend Suzan Cooper. It had a lot to do with [Bourgeois, Louise’s son]. Judith is eccentric, and who knows where she would have been without their dialogue. jg: Yes, Louise had an amazing power of recall. she was really good with Louise. She had skills, art. It really kept her alive. You see in her diaries her recollection of minute besides lithography, that Louise appreciated. dw: So Suzan Cooper can be seen as another kind details of things that happened in the ’30s and She was working in leather and fabric, and later dw: I know there was a constant struggle, but of collaborator? ’40s. Her subjects and symbolism always came helped with the fabric book editions. She came there was also a will to survive. Even the act of out of her life. An incident would happen, and to the Sunday salons and wore crazy hats. writing seemed to be part of the fierce will to jg: Suzan was a performer. Louise wanted to help then the next day it would be incorporated in Louise liked that. keep going, to understand, to beat this thing, to her get gigs. They would go out to clubs together, the work in some way or another. It was the tackle it. She was this little person, but so fierce. like the Mudd Club. I think that whole period retelling of the incident, or the repair of the dw: Could you comment on the fact that she of performance came out of her hanging out with incident. Memories were an arsenal of forms for was a female collaborator? A lot of people say jg: She certainly had intense emotions and her students and younger people. The performance her. The conflict between things that happened that Louise didn’t like women very much. anxieties. Her fears and phobias were expressed orchestrated around Louise’s sculpture yesterday with things that happened today, or through her body and transferred into the work. Confrontation was definitely very collaborative. things from the past coming together with things jg: She liked Judith’s personality. She liked Her relationship to her body was crucial, because from the present. It was all those things. It was Suzan Cooper. She liked you. And don’t forget her psychic life manifested itself in the physical dw: In terms of another collaborator, how did she an amazing gift. I really believe she had access Mercedes Katz, who helped Louise do the sewing realm through symptoms such as nausea, work with Bob Spring [owner of Modern to the unconscious through her work. And that for all the fabric books and editions. They worked palpitations, insomnia, and the like. She’d say: Art Foundry]? explains the mystery, brilliance, and eccentricity together for over a decade. All these people had “Oh, my work is my body.” I see the work almost of her forms. It was a means of self-knowledge. different talents, and each collaboration was very as fibrillations of a heartbeat. It’s almost like the jg: She really liked Bob because of his skills and “Why do I feel this way?” “Why am I guilty?” different. But, I don’t know, maybe it was also a forms are coming out of her body. his personality. Bob understood how to work with “Why am I aggressive?” She was trying both to certain kind of woman that she had difficulties A lot of art today explores the body through a her, when to talk and when not to talk. And she understand her feelings and to control them. with. She could be jealous. More with women, political or social lens. Louise’s work was coming challenged him technically with the complexity of Even in her writing, there’s this stream of but with men, too. She could be very jealous if out of her own torment. It was a body under her forms and imagery, wanting to cast in rubber consciousness, a total volcanic spewing out. she thought that someone was pursuing me. But siege, a body that’s going to break apart. She and aluminum, and not just in bronze. He liked Then she steps back and looks at what she probably Louise preferred the company of men. had to stop the tension or she was going to kill the challenge. Sometimes he would say something just expressed. So it was an expression of raw someone, or kill herself. You have these emotions, and she would hit the roof. But she came to trust emotion, and then analysis. These two things dw: I’d like to turn to the writings Louise but ultimately it was the form that she was trying him. That was a very long-term relationship, very come together in her creative process. produced during her psychoanalysis [undergone to perfect—in the end, that is all that we’re left important and very productive. She always wanted intensively in the 1950s and ’60s, and then with, and all that mattered to her. to retouch the waxes for her bronzes, making them intermittently until 1985], numbering close to a unique, in the same way that she continuously thousand documents. That’s a remarkable body reworked her prints. of work. When I read her notes and papers,

198 Working Relationships 199 Jerry Gorovoy dw: Can you say something about Louise’s dw: The invitations were a stimulus, then. dw: But the simultaneity of all that happening, when she turned the sheets. She didn’t wait until practice of picking up with a much older image as the old and the new, all at once—that is so things dried. She started at the top of the paper if no time had gone by? jg: She knew the project would be going out in fascinating to me. The old things remained and worked her way down. We helped pull the the world. She had never had that outlet before relevant and vital. large sheets down for her to reach areas she was jg: The chronology of her work unfolds with printmaking. The publishers offered the Another thing I’d like to explore is the format working on, since she needed to be seated while like a spiral. The spiral, a form she loved, has possibility of reengaging with a medium she of the series, because it is typical in printmaking, working. Then we’d put them on the floor to dry. two directions. While Louise was producing loved. with sequencing as another kind of storytelling. Sometimes she liked the drips. If not, she’d wipe new works in the ’80s and ’90s, people were Peter was involved with Parkett magazine them out. discovering her early work. Everything was and was doing a lot of printmaking. Louise jg: I think the idea of working in series in She also had this thing about wanting to get rid coming out at the same time. Normally an artist was showing in Europe a little bit, and he got printmaking probably came out of Louise’s of the plate mark. She didn’t want to be defined wouldn’t still have all that early material. But hers interested in doing a print project with her, love for books and writing. All the bodies of by the plate edge. A lot of times that was the first was unseen and unsold. We were unearthing old which led to several others. She thought Peter work inform each other, whether it’s sculpture thing she would do on a proof, extend her marks work at the same time that she was producing had a very good eye, very good taste. He was informing the printmaking, or the printmaking past the plate edge of the plate. But everything new things. That’s one of the reasons why the connected to the international scene, and was informing the drawing, then a drawing can depended on her mood and physical state. She chronology of her forms or images is like a spiral, interested in books like she was. inform a sculpture, and so on. It’s all revolving, always wanted Ben to come, but sometimes I because she was looking at the drawings from and each one of these things allows her to could see she was too tired. She might only be the ’40s and ’50s when she was preparing for a dw: She did the Arthur Miller project with Peter articulate the same issues, but in a different able to work for twenty minutes. At other times drawing show in the ’80s. She got inspired again [figs. 24, 25; p. 26. fig. 65; p. 226]. How did that medium and material. She started working a lot she could work for a whole afternoon. by the early images and related them to what she work, in terms of collaboration? in suites, which I think was inspired by seeing was feeling and making in the present. the proofs for prints. Everything comes out of the dw: What about the fact that Louise stopped jg: Peter initiated the project. We already knew working process. She’d say: “Oh, I like them all leaving the house, that she suffered from dw: It was a discovery for us, and for her a Inge Morath, Arthur Miller’s wife, and that’s how together. I don’t want to break them up.” agoraphobia? I know sometimes she feared rediscovery. The other thing was that she saved Miller came into the picture. He was invited to people coming to the house, too. everything. So the resonance of the past was the Brooklyn studio. Louise was working on the dw: Would you talk about Louise’s relationship always present. She saved every photograph. Cells series at the time, many of which dealt with to publisher Ben Shiff? You were around when jg: She had bouts of agoraphobia her whole life. And she was furious that she couldn’t find the the five senses and memory. He later sent a story he first came to Louise. It was particularly intense in the 1940s and ’50s. copper plates for He Disappeared into Complete for the collaboration, but Louise didn’t really Later in the 1950s, her son Jean-Louis would Silence [plates 13 – 21]. She saved all those clothes respond to the text so much. I was worried it was jg: Ben made the puritan [plates 45 – 52] early on. sometimes have to hold her hand to take her to and linens. going to get awkward, but Peter handled it. He It began as a book project and then morphed into see her shrink. She couldn’t go on her own. In her spoke to Inge, and Miller sent another story that a series of hand-colored wall suites. The images late years, the agoraphobia came back gradually. jg: Louise felt that she had been rejected, so he had been working on, titled “Homely Girl,” were very geometric. When Ben came back She had loved going to the Dean Street studio she couldn’t reject anything. If she got rid of old about a woman who marries a blind man. Louise some years later, he wanted to move away from in Brooklyn every morning, and she’d be up and clothes or an old pair of shoes, she’d almost feel loved it. It related to her Cells and inspired her traditional books and printmaking; “Oh, Louise, ready on the stoop waiting for me. But slowly she guilty, like she was abandoning them. That’s why to make the series of prints, and then the second I’m going to bring you a big copper plate and we became fearful of leaving the house. she held on to the old clothes of her mother, and volume with photos of diseased eyes. can print it a different way,” or “What if we try ultimately wanted to incorporate them into After that, other people started approaching putting these plates in different combinations?” dw: What about her declining health? her work. Louise with ideas for projects. For book projects Louise was loose about it. She thought seeing she usually preferred to use her own writings. all the proofs together was beautiful. She would jg: Her health was quite good until about 2004, dw: Let’s talk about Peter Blum [of Peter Blum There are only a few projects with other authors. switch the order, turn some upside-down, when she started having some recurring health Edition], and how he came into the picture. There’sTo Whom It May Concern, her collaboration things like that. She liked that the scale got issues and began to get frailer. Her mobility and with Gary Indiana, whose writing Louise always bigger, and also she liked working with the stamina were affected. She suffered from terrible jg: Things really began when Peter approached loved. But that was much later. When Carolina proofs as a series. At a certain point, her eyesight insomnia. But none of these things kept her from her to make prints. That renewed her interest Nitsch approached Louise about a collaboration was not as good as it had been. So, working on working. With her inability to sleep, she became in printmaking. It’s not to say she wouldn’t have with a writer, Louise wanted to instead use her a larger scale was better for her. With Felix, the manic and very productive, and then she would gone back to it, but having publishers propose own writings. Carolina published the Hours of the work was on a small scale, with small plates. It crash. It was a cycle. things was a motivating factor. It affected her Day [plates 88 – 95], which contained older texts was more difficult for her to see, and she’d use a emotionally and psychologically, because from Louise’s diaries. Reading her old writings magnifying glass. she’d say: “Oh, I have a publisher now, who’s again was like revisiting her older sculpture after Ben would say: “How about using paint? Don’t publishing this.” a long time. worry, they can all be unique. Don’t worry about the paint smearing; we can mop it up.” He seemed to want to get away from printmaking, strictly speaking. It was wild. She became much looser with her gouache additions. There would be drips

200 Working Relationships 201 Jerry Gorovoy dw: It seems that her collaborative relationships Deborah Wye: I know you started to work with were energizing, stimulating. But I think gett ing Louise on the recommendation of lithography recognition in old age was also empowering. printer Judith Solodkin of SOLO Impression, who When I fi rst knew her, she talked to me a lot sought you out for intaglio printing. about ambition. And you see it in her writings. Felix Harlan: We had known Judith over the years. jg: Early on, she was professionally ambitious, She was working with Louise, but then Louise but I think in some respects she gave up. It was went off into etching rather than lithography. I diffi cult jugg ling being a wife, a mother, and an think it must have been a disappointment for artist. To be a woman in the art world in the Judith, but they did some amazing things together, ’40s and ’50s was not easy, but she actually said like that fabric book. Judith got in touch with us that being anonymous and outside the art market because Louise needed drypoint plates proofed. gave her freedom to develop her work. People ask why she wasn’t that well known earlier. It dw: What were the fi rst plates you worked on? was her own psychology, partially. She was very self-destructive. fh: Th ey were for the Anatomy portfolio [plates 116 – 17]. We proofed the plates and sent them back dw: I remember her talking about being jealous, Felix Harlan to Judith. I stamped our address on the wrapper about having the “green disease” of envy. She’d because I was a litt le concerned that they might warn me: “Don’t get the green disease.” of Harlan & Weaver, Inc., Printer get lost with the messenger. I think Louise got curious about who was printing the plates. She jg: She really did believe that many of her saw our address on the wrapper and called. Th at successfu l male peers were not that good. Th en was a prett y exciting moment. She said something you start thinking: “Oh, the whole system is like: “I want you to come over right away.” I went rigg ed, why bother to play the game?” On the to meet her and she had some sugg estions for other hand, when she had opportunities, she how she wanted the plates printed. Jerry was didn’t take advantage. She could have a show away that day. scheduled in Paris and then cancel it. She couldn’t We looked at proofs together and she told me handle the pressure. She alienated people, too. exactly what she wanted. She told me she didn’t like what she called “the blott er eff ect,” which dw: She once told me — back when I did that meant that the drypoints were too fu ll of ink. Th ey show at Brandeis in 1977 [From Women’s Eyes, a were too fu zzy looking. She wanted them wiped group show at Brandeis University ’s Rose Art a litt le more, so they’d be more lean. I promised Museum, with a number of Bourgeois’s works] her I’d do that, and we took it from there. and told her there would be a catalogue — “Th e only thing that’s important is the printed word.” dw: What did you make of her at that fi rst meeting? jg: She defi nitely liked people who were writers. But I think she appreciated visual people more. fh: Oh, it was thrilling, of course, to meet Louise Being visual is rare. She always felt that, in the in her beautifu l, strange litt le house, and to go end, writing had the power to convince people. fig. 54 Felix Harlan, a partner with Carol Weaver in into the back room fu ll of books and everything But if someone’s not visual, can you really Felix Harlan and Carol Weaver the Harlan & Weaver workshop, specializes in else. We were prett y comfortable with each convince them to see? at the Harlan & Weaver intaglio printing. He began working with Louise other right away. Actually, she may have seemed workshop, printing Bourgeois’s Bourgeois in 1989 – 90, when she fi rst returned to a litt le nervous, perhaps. Twosome, drypoint and etching, 2005. Photograph by Johee Kim printmaking aft er a decades-long hiatus. He soon Th en we began working with Peter Blum established an intimate working relationship [of Peter Blum Edition]. We did the large spider with her at her home/studio. Bourgeois and the spirals [plate 60]. Louise liked Peter. accomplished more printmaking with Harlan He had a lot of connections in Europe and she than with anyone else — the number of printed was excited about that. She was very happy sheets they collaborated on reaching nearly two to be working with him. His portfolios were thousand. His steady, patient manner made him always beautifu lly done. an ideal collaborator for her.

202 Working Relationships 203 Felix Harlan dw: Did Louise ever come to your workshop? dw: I know you soon began to work with dw: Oh, no! But you knew that was just a mood, But the crux of it was that Louise wanted to Louise at the house on a regular basis. right? see things right away. She didn’t want to wait for fh: Louise never once came to the workshop me to take the plates away, print them, dry them, [at 83 Canal Street, in Manhattan]. The closest she fh: Yes, but there would be breaks if I was fh: Well, I didn’t know her well enough at that and bring them back. And she was very serious came was when she and Jerry drove back from proofing something. And I’d work around her point. I just thought: “Well, that’s it. I blew it.” about printmaking again and wanted to have it her studio on Dean Street, in Brooklyn, usually schedule. Then, as she began to trust me, I would And I didn’t see her again for a couple of months going on in the house. In a way, it was like when late in the afternoon. Those were pre-cellphone go when Jerry wasn’t there. He was beginning to after that. she lived in the family apartment [on 18th Street], days, and Jerry would pull the car up on Eldridge make more and more trips to curate and install When it happened, I hadn’t known what to do. early on. I know the press was set up there, Street and call up from a pay phone. I’d go down exhibitions. So I would go to the house on those I’m a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. I couldn’t because Jean-Louis [Bourgeois, Louise’s son] with proofs and hand them to Louise through occasions, too — sometimes for four or five days think of a good response. So I just swallowed it told me he remembered it. the window! in a row. up. But eventually Jerry called and said: “Look, if Louise liked me to arrive at eleven. I would you want to work with Louise, you’d better come dw: And then you added a second press, right? dw: I don’t think she was interested in going to stay all day and then close up. We’d have lunch over. Everything’s okay now.” She was a little stiff workshops the way other artists do. She preferred together. She’d tell me what she wanted and with me at first, but then we got over it. fh: Yes, we had the opportunity to get another the comfort and security of being at home. I’d prepare it. We’d talk while we ate, but she one for a little more than the cost of moving it. wouldn’t want to talk about artwork at that point. dw: It’s remarkable that only happened once in It was an even smaller press, but an interesting fh: I think that with all the people around in a She wanted to know what was going on. We’d all those years working together. But how would one. I felt like rescuing it. I have a bad habit of workshop, she would have been uncomfortable. usually sit in the front room so we could look you characterize your relationship, generally? collecting presses. But Louise was fine with the And she didn’t seem to think it was important to out the window onto the street. She’d comment idea. And the second press — a King press — had be there. on what was going on outside. And she’d want fh: It was very friendly, very familiar. And more pressure. to know what we were up to. She was always she never pushed me. She left me alone to work I remember proofing the series that ended dw: I know you picked up on a few projects that interested in our neighborhood, in Chinatown. on what I needed to. I’d go downstairs to do up being both a paper and a cloth book — Christian Guérin [of Gravure] had started, like Then I might do some grocery shopping for her, things there. Or I’d go up to the second floor The Laws of Nature [plates 138 – 42] on that press, Self Portrait [plate 100], for instance. or other little things like that. It was a long day, and retrieve things for her. It was a very to show Louise how it worked. But then the which was fine, except in the summer when it comfortable relationship. full editioning was done on Canal Street. The fh: We did quite a bit of proofing on that plate. got very hot in there. Louise didn’t seem to feel I was very fond of Louise. And I think she original idea was for a cloth book. But at first Louise was very concerned that we get it just the heat. liked having me around. She did once say: “You I was a little unsure about how we would do right since it was going to be a benefit for MoMA. know, you’re a friend.” I think it was one time that, since we were so much more accustomed dw: That routine seems so calm. Didn’t she have when we were having lunch. It had become clear to printing on paper. So I printed the plates dw: That blue was a little unusual for her. Is that her moods and blow up at you sometimes? that we were not going to have just an artist- on paper first, and then on cloth. We also tried aquatint? printer relationship. We could drop that and be those plates on silk, and on a silk scarf. Silk fh: Just one time. more friendly. It was very, very special. I miss her. is so soft and prints beautifully. It’s so closely fh: No. It’s soft ground. Instead of doing It was a tremendous opportunity to be able to be woven that it takes a very nice impression. aquatint, you can lay down a fine fabric screen for dw: Oh, Felix! That’s a record. with her and watch her work and to work with a soft ground. But if you don’t look too closely, it’s her. It was what every printer hopes for, to have dw: What was it like to print on fabric napkins a lot like an aquatint. fh: Pretty good, I think. It was early on. Maybe a relationship like that with an artist. and handkerchiefs? she wasn’t completely comfortable with me yet. dw: I hope we have our cataloguing right! Jerry had gone on a long trip to Europe. But he dw: How did you happen to set up the old fh: When Louise first asked about it, I went You also took over Sainte Sébastienne [plate 111], was a planner, and he thought of everything in printing press downstairs? downstairs and just got started. That was when and then did the two Stamp of Memories prints advance. He said: “While I’m gone, it’d be great they were going through all her closets upstairs, [plates 109, 110]. How did Louise come up with if you worked on this project with Louise.” So I fh: It had been stored in the Dean Street studio pulling out all kinds of stuff that she wanted to the idea of using sealing stamps as a kind of arrived and was ready to go with that project. But and then Louise had it moved to 20th Street. It go through. She wanted to use everything. I think branding? Louise didn’t want to do that at all. She was not was in pretty rough shape, very dirty. It hadn’t she liked the random staining and the softness interested. So I said: “Well, Jerry wanted me to been cleaned and greased. So I took it apart and of fabric, and the way it drapes. I got better at fh: Those are brilliant. I noticed that she had help you with this project while he’s away.” That cleaned it up, and then put it back together again. printing with it. You’ll notice on some of the her father’s stamp around and was working with really set her off. It was like I was paying more It’s a nice press. The wheel is nice. We bolted it early ones that the registration — the placement it. Then one day she gave it to me and said: “See attention to what Jerry wanted than to what she down to a stand and then started using it. But on the piece of cloth — is a little haphazard. So I if you can print with this.” Carol [Weaver] did all wanted. That was not good at all. She blew up that press had its limitations. It was small, with was generally happier printing on cloth with our the stamping. It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of and called me a “bullshitter”! And pretty much only an eleven-inch-wide press bed. And it didn’t presses at the shop, because I had more control. experimentation. Then Louise did the one with said: “Get out of here!” I can’t remember if I left generate a lot of pressure. So I would always get the second stamp. right away. But I thought: “Well, I guess that’s the better proofs when I took the plates back to end of my working relationship with Louise.” Canal Street.

204 Working Relationships 205 Felix Harlan dw: Just one more thing about fabric. It seems wiping, there is a lot of ink on the surface, a plate. She’d add things. And I thought: “Wow. dw: How did you feel about Louise’s advancing that after a while she preferred it to paper, for because you are actually monoprinting. And then This is really going somewhere great.” But I age? Did that affect your work together? prints. there’s the scratchiness from the texture of the wouldn’t see all the proofs she worked on, only tarlatan [a fabric used in printshops for wiping the ones where she wanted changes on the plates, fh: Things were changing by, let’s say, the mid- fh: I agree. ink from plates] — that shows. When you look or she wanted to sharpen up the printing, and 2000s. I was still working with her. Brigitte at the print, you can almost feel the ink being such. Actually, with your website [moma.org/ [Cornand, filmmaker, who was Bourgeois’s daily dw: What about Mercedes Katz [a professional pushed around on the plate. I thought it was very bourgeoisprints], I’ve been learning a lot more companion in her late years] was there pretty seamstress hired to help with Bourgeois’s works good for her work. about those proofs I never saw. When the plate much all the time at that point. I definitely began in fabric]? I know she sat down there at her work was finished, I’d help with the choice of to go less frequently. My work with Louise was worktable, right near the press. How was the dw: I’d like to talk a little more about your papers and then do the editioning. tapering off. relationship between you two? process with her. How did it work when making I remember once when I was there, her energy changes? Would she do that when you were dw: How did it come about that you began to had really dropped, but she was actually not well. fh: She was really nice to get along with. It there, or after you were gone? publish Louise’s prints, as well as printing them? I didn’t realize it. I just thought: “Well, she’s old was a tight space down there. But I didn’t need and just exhausted.” Once she got over that bout very much room. She was finishing prints, fh: Both. But I knew she liked to get up in fh: Well, we were invited. It was Jerry and of illness, she came back. But I could see that her hemming them, backing them, embroidering the the morning and look at the proofs. She had a Louise who had the idea. Harlan & Weaver age was beginning to show and she was getting initials. So I could check in with her and see how folder — a blotter — that she kept on her table. So was doing so much of the printing, it seemed less energetic, generally. Also, her eyesight was things were going. She was there I think at least during the day when I was there proofing, or at like a better arrangement, practically speaking, getting worse. I think it was easier for her to five days a week. They found a good person in the end of the day, I’d put proofs in that blotter to publish the projects, too. It worked out work on the big plates that Ben [Shiff, of Osiris] Mercedes. She’s very talented. to get them a little flatter. Then in the morning beautifully. brought. The work we did together was small. But I had a different role upstairs, too. I had to she would go into the folder and start working be more present there. And, you know, I’d even on them, before I got there. She had that pile of dw: How do you think Louise felt about the dw: Maggie [Wright, The Easton Foundation venture a suggestion here and there! drawing materials right there on her table. social aspects of collaboration? I’ve always archivist, who had worked at the Harlan & thought that having someone come to work Weaver workshop] mentioned that Louise gave dw: What about Louise’s use of selective wiping, dw: Do you think she liked the security of the helped pull her out of despairing moods. you a bound volume of Hogarth prints from her which I see a lot? [See plate 127.] She even used it printed image, the fact that more could be made collection of prints and illustrated books. That way back in the early period, in the 1940s. and she could keep on experimenting? fh: I hope that was the case when I came. There seems very special. were only a very few occasions when Jerry fh: It was because of her prompting that we did fh: I think that’s very true. And she talked about would say: “Don’t come today. She’s not in a good fh: Yes, she did that. It was great. It’s a little it. We wouldn’t normally use it at our shop. Of liking etching because it was really in the metal. mood. It’s not a good day to come.” Sometimes, crumbly, as you might imagine, so I have it course, printers have different styles of printing, It had a permanence and it was repeatable. She I would see that she was a little tense or maybe wrapped and put away. It was engraving, and we but they usually avoid selective wiping because could always get back to that place. The image a little more withdrawn, but she always had a talked about engraving a lot and she knew that it’s difficult to repeat for an edition. But she was wasn’t going away. It was dependable. She could sort of professionalism about making the prints I’m a big Hogarth fan, naturally. It was really nice pretty relaxed about that aspect. For a printer, take off from there. that came into play. “You’re here. We have to do that she did that. it is definitely more of a challenge to use it. She something together.” Also, if she wasn’t in a good had first asked Jerry to do some wiping when dw: When you say “etching” do you mean mood, I could always go downstairs for a while he printed some proofs for her. She showed me anything in metal — etching, engraving, drypoint? and find things to do. With prints there is always those and said she liked the way it looked. something to do. So I’d make a proof and bring it fh: I mean anything in metal, but she always up and show her. That made her happy. But there dw: That’s interesting, because Jerry isn’t a talked about engraving most of all. She wanted was definitely a social aspect to the relationship, printer. He told me he only tried because Louise to go as deep as possible below the surface of which she liked. wanted to see something right away. So are you the metal. But she liked drypoint, too, and used saying that it may have been his more random it a lot. dw: I’ve been reading her psychoanalytic papers, wiping — certainly not professional wiping — She also liked the fact that there was other which are filled with despair. that she ended up liking? That led to more stuff going on, on the metal, when it wasn’t just a selective wiping? mirror finish. So she was often interested in the fh: Do you think psychoanalysis helped her? metal itself and the kind of effects of the metal She certainly was willing to explore stuff in her fh: Yes, I think that could be true. She liked the plate. She liked the physicality of printing from work that is still shocking. It doesn’t always look variability of selective wiping. And I agree that, copper. I think it directly related to her interest like a happy event — more like a painful one. with certain images, it finished them beautifully. in metal and sculpture. I mean, she was willing to go places with her It seemed like a perfect way to realize the image. I remember watching the way she worked. It work. There’s a kind of honesty to that work that You could try to get that effect with aquatint, was just so wonderful to see her imagination still impresses me. but it wouldn’t be quite the same. With selective being brought to bear on what she was doing on

206 Working Relationships 207 Felix Harlan Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’s longtime assistant, sat that text. But Louise changed it a litt le. Th ere’s bs: I think it always worked, and if it didn’t work in on this conversation . something at the end, a new paragraph. it never got to go public.

Deborah Wye: What were your thoughts when bs: She added a quote at the end. It will always jg: Louise would tear things up if she didn’t you fi rst approached Louise for a project? I know remain mysterious, but it’s very, very specifi c why like them. you were inspired by He Disappeared into Complete she put that there, and what was going on. Silence [plates 13 – 21]. bs: But it’s fu n to destroy something and then dw: I don’t remember that, about her adding the see it somehow come out at the other end of the Benjamin Shiff : Osiris wasn’t really about books. last couple lines. process as something extraordinary. I remember It wasn’t about prints. Th ere was a diff erent things going into the sink, for instance. angle. Th ere was also the idea that a writer could bs: She said: “If you have a secret, you are very make the images for his or her own text, or the much afraid.” [Th e fu ll 1990 postscript is: “If you jg: Yes, she would wash things. Because with artist could, in reverse. Th ose kinds of ideas were have a secret, you become afraid. You are paralyzed by the gouache painted on, if it didn’t work, she fl oating around. I didn’t want to think about the your desires, and are in terror of the desires still to be could wash it . . . then we’d need to take paper history of bookmaking, or printmaking, or livres uncovered. Th e demands of love are too great, and you towels to dry it. But that was liberating for her d’artistes. withdraw.” ] printmaking. Compared to other materials, like I remember Jerry was there when I fi rst met stone: once you chip it, you can only go in one Benjamin Shiff Louise. I wasn’t a printmaker, but when we were jg: Th at was in keeping with the way direction. With these prints, if it didn’t work out, experimenting, Louise approached things as Louise worked. She always had to update, to she would go to another proof and have another of Osiris, Publisher if she had no printmaking background either. contemporize. She’d tweak a text to make it idea for that image. She liked that. To start, we worked on small plates. I asked relevant to the moment. Louise always looked forward to Ben coming. Peter [Pett engill, of Wingate Studio] to give me And he would leave materials. “Okay, Louise, materials. I remember all the spit bite [an aquatint dw: Ben, did you know, at the time, that the I’m leaving twelve sheets. At your leisure. . . .” printing technique] plates lying out on Louise’s puritan was about Alfred Barr? Sometimes when he came back, she hadn’t terrace aft er she’d worked on them. touched them. It depended on her energy level. bs: No. But I knew exactly what that last quote At other times, he’d see that a lot had been done. Jerry Gorovoy: Louise worked in diff erent ways. was about. It was so completely true. I think that Th en they’d go through them together. Ben Sometimes she’d have a group of images ready is one reason that many of Louise’s works are so could get her to continue. to work on for prints. But when Ben came, things powerfu l. Th ey are so true. were much more experimental and loose. To bs: But she liked to work! Honestly, the be honest, if things hadn’t clicked between them, dw: You eventually did more with the plates whole idea of an artist as solitary, in some that would have been it. But Louise liked Ben. from the puritan, when Louise made folios, cabinet — that’s nonsense. tripty chs, and studies with hand additions, dw: Ben, could you tell that things clicked on extra proofs. I guess I’d call that “blurring dw: But most people don’t realize that those right away? the boundaries” between the worlds of prints, kinds of interactions can be important for an drawings, books — or maybe it’s not making artist, can be like sparks. bs: Oh, totally! Th e mission in the very any boundaries to begin with. beginning was still about text, even though I jg: Ben would come every day. didn’t want to be followed around by categories. bs: I would say, as a note, that those studies “left ” the puritan. dw: How long would you stay? dw: How did you sett le on using Louise’s fig. 55 Benjamin Shiff fi rst met with Louise Bourgeois in own text? dw: Th at kind of experimentation continued in bs: Whatever Louise wanted. I can say this. Benjamin Shiff in Louise 1988 to propose a book-publishing project. In 1990 the work you did with Louise in her late years. I never called up and asked: “Louise, should Bourgeois’s 20th Street home/ they issued the puritan, a major illustrated volume bs: It happened through a discussion with Jerry I come?” and she said “no.” Even if nothing studio, at her worktable. 2017. with text and eight engravings by Bourgeois. and Louise. And then one day Jerry opened a jg: With Ben there was no standard production. happened that day. She could be very tired, or Photograph by Deborah Wye Later, in a second phase of collaboration in the drawer and said: “Look at this.” It was a story on And that suited Louise. She liked to take even manic, really hallucinatory. But I’d stay. 2000s, Shiff encouraged the artist toward a more a piece of 8 ½-by-11-inch copy paper. It was the something and keep it alive, to keep reworking it Sometimes I would sit there for hours and we experimental approach to printmaking. From text for the puritan. and changing it. So that was the synergy between would say almost nothing. Sometimes, you 2005, he lived in Chelsea, near Bourgeois’s home/ Louise and Ben — he encouraged her to take an can’t help. studio, a convenience that facilitated their work jg: I had been going through Louise’s diaries and image and make variations. Th e process was But there was so much going on at any given together. She completed a large and innovative sheets of writings and I found that story. It was always very open-ended. Sometimes it worked. time, with various sheets at diff erent stages. body of prints with him during the last years of such a beautifu l thing. It just made sense to use Sometimes it was more problematic. I was managing sometimes fi ft y plates. So, when her life. I came over, I’d ask: “Which one of these should

208 Working Relationships 209 Benjamin Shiff we do today?” I could run back and get other what comes through. The work’s a testament. you were part of the family. That’s when good jg: With Ben, she had no fear. Whereas when things. Everything was part of the mix, and I felt like Louise was reaching out . . . keeping things can happen. It opens up a potential space she was working in stone she’d be afraid because because I was right next door, things were easy. going. That was an inspiration. Don’t think for creative things. She always knew Ben was she knew she could cut too deep; it was forever. The working method was never, “Okay, we’re because you’re getting old you shouldn’t surround coming back. “Okay. Come tomorrow,” she’d say. going to take this from start to finish.” It was yourself with energy and creativity, and that “Come back.” bs: Well, it was the most forgiving environment completely the opposite. And it took time — you shouldn’t test yourself, and you shouldn’t that you could give. That was also part of the it could take years. communicate what’s going on in your own bs: But it was also a philosophy; there was a practice. individual life. She was really staying so alive and philosophical core sympathy between Louise dw: So things were always coming in and out of was inspiring young people. and myself, with what I was trying to do with dw: I want to ask about À l’Infini [To Infinity; production? I remember when Nick Serota [then director of whatever Osiris was, or is. plates 185 – 98]. Tate Museums, London] came, and I showed him So, you walk in one day and you’re talking bs: They were getting patina! I’ll tell you what Louise was doing. He said: “This work has about writers and books. . . . And then one day bs: With À l’Infini, it just happened. And it might something: the last study from the puritan, one of all the energy of youth, with the wisdom of the you walk in and say: “Okay, there are no rules.” not have happened. The printed elements are the panels . . . it was behind the washing machine ages.” Louise was absolutely in heaven. There was all the consistent armature. That was, you know, for, I don’t know, seven years or something. And Louise was just so giving. I would just say that kinds of exploratory printmaking. Some very in a musical sense, it was an aspect of its sonic then when it came out from behind the washing she didn’t stop giving. It was extraordinary what focused, some completely adventurous, but no construction. And the printing wasn’t the same machine, it looked pretty good! she was able to do. differentiation. It was a philosophical space we every time. But you start by starting. She would shared. “Let’s just see where this day goes.” It was work on stacks, and then let them dry. And then dw: That’s so funny! That’s the ultimate “going jg: Well, the work kept her alive. And she could totally open. I’d bring them back. And then something would with the flow.” never really relax. You know, when we went to In terms of the actual printing plates, there be pulled together out of it. But it has this web Italy together, she had to work, work, work. And were some that had an absolutely clean, tranquil of abstraction, going in and out of abstraction jg: But Ben did direct her. I mean, Louise knew then on Sunday, there was no working, and I’d background, with only lines. There are others and figuration; it has a really nebulous quality where she wanted to go with a particular image, say: “Okay, let’s go to the beach.” I would drop her where you have the miracle of what the plate of the unknown — of the very beginning and the but Ben was good at knowing the right time to off and by the time I had parked the car, she’s like: captures as a memory sink. You have the patina very end. It also has weaving. say: “Okay, let’s do another,” “Let’s try this.” “Let’s go.” It was almost like, when she was not of the plate. And then many things in between. working, there was anxiety. There is lots of magic in the plates. jg: There’s a side of Louise, in relationship to dw: When did you move so close to Louise? And then there was a range of papers, made abstraction, that’s never totally understood. dw: Ben, this must have been an incredible with different pigments. All the paper was Her work is not only spiders and arched figures. bs: It was in 2005. experience for you. I know I can speak for myself, unique. So, everybody on the team — printers, since I feel that meeting Louise when I did in the papermakers — was participating. It was a bs: To expand on that — Louise had an dw: Because I noticed the incredible boom in late ’70s, and having that relationship, was one of philosophy we shared. extraordinary education. She not only knew it, your work together around 2005, 2006, and from the great things of my life. But you, and obviously Also, I think when you work in the most but lived it, and very often knew the players . . . then on. So that’s when you moved close by. Jerry, had these incredible, rich relationships. spontaneous possible way, and you work with back to the Dadaists and Surrealism. And she What would you say about it? principles — not by premeditating or trying to could reach back to a formal arts education, bs: That was probably the best period, even force anything to a vision, but letting the vision back to the tapestries, even, which are from a though I like the early things, too. But there bs: I know what comes to mind. When I went inform itself — all these beautiful connections completely different era. This was all something weren’t a lot, then. off on my own, and started Osiris, I always used happen all over the place. she lived with, that came with the traditions of to say that [Robert] Ryman was the father of her space, through her family in society. She jg: It was so great to have Ben close by, because Osiris and that Louise was the mother of Osiris. dw: Beautifully said, Ben, I must say. was someone with tremendous culture and I could say, anytime: “Ben, come on over.” It was She was so supportive. That’s a horrible word that curiosity. And she read, while very few artists much easier for working. He took things away to people overuse, but it was a beautiful thing for bs: Louise was so many things. It was so actually read. dry and flatten, and then brought them back. We’d me. Louise was the artist’s artist. She had the beautiful. She could be very consistent with hold them up for Louise. She liked that, looking least ego of anyone. And I’ve worked with a lot certain things and then that would disappear. jg: I have to say that the thing that differentiates at them close up and then from a distance. And of artists. She could get into this kind of — almost like a Louise’s work with Ben was that it went beyond then we’d hold up the next one. Louise would dervish . . . certain trances. It was part of her the usual limitations of being a publisher of write on the backs of the sheets to keep track of jg: When Louise started to get popular, a lot inner communication that she extended into prints. It was integrated with everything else, her sequence. of people came into her life. They would come the work. She would have a routine, almost like and now is integrated in all exhibitions of once — a photographer or a journalist, for a fetish, but then also a meditation. She could Louise’s work. dw: Ben, you were working with Louise when instance. But whether it was Felix [Harlan, of spend hours on something, and then integrate she was very old. Harlan & Weaver workshop] or Ben or Brigitte it for three months. dw: But since I’m a print specialist, I like [Cornand, filmmaker and Bourgeois’s daily that printmaking was the underpinning of bs: But it was an absolutely great period. She companion in her late years], or you. When the projects, that it had the flexibility to was such a strong woman. I think that’s really Louise built up those relationships, it was like accomplish this.

210 Working Relationships 211 Benjamin Shiff jg: It was the initial impulse, the spark. dw: And as Ben says, the armature. It’s built into each composition. Th at makes the sheets all connected. bs: Yes, they are connected. Genetically! dw: What about the multipanel projects with text, like I Give Everything Away [fig. 52; pp. 178–79], that bring the word and image together again — which I think is wonderfu l? bs: Th at one’s got huge energy. It’s storytelling on a large scale. And with the writing . . . I mean, that was an advantage of my coming from the book side. jg: Louise was brought back to a lot of texts with the discovery of her psychoanalytic writings. We were reading them to her, and Ben would say: Notes “Th is is really poetic — I love that sentence.” She was mining her own past with those writings. Chronology But there was new writing, too. Checklist of Plates bs: Yes, that was so fresh and from the moment, that just bubbled up. It was alive. And sometimes that’s part of the action . . . a kind of storytelling, Selected Bibliography but in a diff erent way. You see the way the words move in and out of any given series of works. Index But the sense of storytelling sometimes could be with no words. Th at’s what you’re trying to Lenders to the Exhibition get from people. You’re trying to get people to really look and make up their own stories, to follow Trustees of threads, to activate their hearts and their minds. Louise is just all over on a matrix of real quality Th e Museum of Modern Art and authenticity . She reaches my heart all the time. dw: I know. Me, too, Ben. I wonder, when was the last time you saw her? bs: Th e day before she died. jg: Ben came to the hospital. Louise wanted to work. bs: Yeah, I thought she was ready to go back to work. She was gett ing bett er. I remember I said: “Okay, but put on your riding boots. We’re gett ing ready!”

212 Working Relationships Notes

The catalogue raisonné of Bourgeois’s printed 4 In the 1994 exhibition The Prints of Louise “Bourgeois might be seen as the mother “Love and Hate, Girl and Boy,” London 27 Ledger from Bourgeois’s gallery space on Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ œuvre is available online: Deborah Wye, ed., Bourgeois at The Museum of Modern Art, of all the other artists in this show — the Review of Books 36, no. 21 (November Boulevard St. Germain in Paris; LB-1772. Reconstruction of the Father, 200. Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books I included Bourgeois’s remarks on many one who has built the richest body of 6, 2014): 11 – 14. Also, Bourgeois notes 28 Barnet was appointed League Printer in 40 Bourgeois, “Select Diary Notes, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, of the individual object labels. Several psychologically resonant work.” in 1966 that her analyst, Dr. Henry 1935 and League Instructor in Graphics 1939 – 1944” in ibid., 40. Source: 2017), moma.org/bourgeoisprints. In this people told me those remarks played a 11 Bourgeois, quoted in “Arena” (interviews Lowenfeld, pointed to Pierre as a source in 1936. See Pamela N. Koob, Will Barnet Bourgeois, notebook, March 6, 1939; volume’s endnotes, references to works in role in opening them up to her work. for a 1993 BBC2 documentary film of her problems: “how I failed to adjust and the Art Students League (New York: LB-0381. this online resource have been abbreviated 5 Two scholarly examples are Mignon directed by Nigel Finch), in Marie-Laure at Pierre’s birth (trauma)” (loose sheet, Art Students League, 2010), 8, 16. 41 Bourgeois participated in the exhibition thus: “MoMA cat. no. xxx: title.” Nixon, ed., Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds., January 31, 1966; LB-0169). In 1946, 29 In the 1990s and 2000s, Bourgeois began The Women at Art of This Century gallery Reference numbers preceded by “LB” (1999): Louise Bourgeois, with texts by Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ after several breakdowns, Pierre was the tradition of making holiday prints in June – July 1945. or “LL” (e.g. “Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. Mieke Bal, Briony Fer, Mignon Nixon, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and institutionalized at age thirty-three. He again, this time not as greeting cards but 42 Bourgeois always denied her connection 1968; LB-0685” or “June 6, 1973; LL-0214") Griselda Pollock, Alex Potts, and Interviews, 1923 – 1997 (Cambridge, MA: died in an institution in the southern as gifts for her close circle of friends. to Surrealism, no matter how relevant pertain to documents in the archives of Anne M. Wagner; and Catherine M. MIT Press, in association with London: suburbs of Paris in 1960, at age forty- 30 See for example Louise Bourgeois, the link seemed to others. She said: The Easton Foundation, which also contain Burge, Disagreeable Objects: The Sculptural Violette, 1998), 257. seven. handwritten instructions for lift ground “I was not a Surrealist, I was an the artist’s diaries, correspondence, and Strategies of Louise Bourgeois, PhD diss., 12 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1987; LB-1389. 19 Bourgeois, loose sheet, April 24, 1952; aquatint, loose sheet, c. 1940-46; LB- existentialist.” Bourgeois, quoted in related ephemera; the copyright for these University of London, 2005, http:// 13 The effect of simultaneity — of LB-0462, quoted in Mitchell, “Love and 1833. Paulo Herkenhoff (transcribed and edited materials is owned exclusively by The discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1445334/. Bourgeois’s active involvement with old Hate, Girl and Boy,” London Review of 31 The term intaglio comes from the by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve), “Interview,” Easton Foundation. Bourgeois wrote in 6 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred and new work at the same time — came Books, 7. Italian word meaning “to incise.” In in Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and both French and English, and sometimes in and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane up in a discussion with Jerry Gorovoy, 20 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. printmaking, it is an umbrella term for Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois a hybrid of the two. In the texts selected for Meyer-Thoss,Louise Bourgeois: Designing the artist’s longtime assistant, on no. 683: Horizontal Mountain Landscape. various techniques involving the incising (London: Phaidon, 2003), 14. this publication, all quotations are given in for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann, 1992), 194. September 12, 2016. See full interview, 21 Correspondence housed at The Easton of metal plates with tools or with acid. 43 Artist’s Remarks on all of her prints from English. Translations from French to English 7 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1968; LB-0685. pp. 195 – 202 in the present volume. Foundation between Bourgeois’s Intaglio includes etching, drypoint, the 1940s are found at Wye, ed., moma. are by Richard Sieburth and Françoise 8 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred,” 14 Bourgeois, loose sheet (draft for Art Now: father and mother during the war engraving, aquatint, and mezzotint. org/bourgeoisprints. Gramet. As necessary, the punctuation 195. New York, on Janus Fleuri), September continues until December 1918. Also, 32 Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, “A Drama of 44 Atelier 17’s impact has been called of Bourgeois’s quoted passages has been 9 While not making reference specifically 1969; LB-1442. in 1940 Bourgeois wrote to a friend the the Self,” 23. Available online at “About “catalytic.” See Martica Sawin, Surrealism amended to conform to the style of the to her childhood, Bourgeois used 15 Bourgeois’s foundation, The Easton following reminiscence: “I was very the Artist” > “Essay,” at Wye, ed., moma. in Exile and the Beginning of the New York present volume. In certain instances, her the word trauma in various writings. Foundation, is located in New York City, young in 1917, but I always remember org/bourgeoisprints. School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), original line breaks have been maintained to Some examples are: “to separate from where scholars can, by appointment, Maman crying when Papa went back 33 Ibid. 152. communicate the rhythm of a passage. me to abandon me, the trauma of have access to her archives, presently [to war] after he was wounded for 34 Ibid. 45 Hayter and Studio 17: New Directions in abandonment is jealousy” (loose sheet, comprising more than 3,500 items, with the second time.” Quoted in “Letters 35 Bourgeois, diary entries, June 5, 1940, Gravure, The Museum of Modern Art, c. 1963; LB-0383); “abandonment additional material continually being to Colette Richarme, 1937 – 1940,” and January 14, 1943. In the diaries for New York, June 18 – October 8, 1944. Introduction trauma? no, castration trauma? no, . . . catalogued. in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise her early days in New York, there are 46 The first note in Bourgeois’s diaries 1 See Deborah Wye, ed., Louise Bourgeois: spurned trauma no, preferred trauma 16 Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, “A Drama of Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ several mentions of her purchasing indicating a visit to the workshop is from The Complete Prints & Books(New York: no” (diary entry, March 4, 1985); “blue, the Self,” 18. Available online at “About Reconstruction of the Father, 37. Thanks to prints. It occurs to me that she may have October 1946. The Museum of Modern Art, 2017), white, black spot, this is the trauma’s the Artist” > “Essay,” at Wye, ed., moma. Maggie Wright, Archivist, The Easton planned to open a print- and bookshop 47 Wye, “A Drama of the Self,” 26. Available moma.org/bourgeoisprints. colors” (diary entry, March 11, 1986); org/bourgeoisprints. Foundation for pointing out this letter. like the space she had in her father’s online at “About the Artist” > “Essay,” at 2 “Art is a guaranty of sanity” appears in “abandonment is the trauma of one” 17 In a scene in a biographical film, 22 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. gallery in Paris, but there is no specific Wye, ed., moma.org/bourgeoisprints. several of Bourgeois’s works. Bourgeois, (diary entry, August 8, 1987). while fashioning a male figure from no. 700: Storm at Saint Honoré. mention of such a plan at that time, when 48 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1989; LB-0064. “This is about survival . . . about the 10 My understanding of the long-term a tangerine skin, Bourgeois describes 23 Bourgeois, “Child Abuse: A Project by she was very busy with her three young 49 Christina Weyl, Innovation and will to survive,” in Deborah Wye, “A neuropsychological effects of traumatic an incident when her father mocked Louise Bourgeois,” Artforum 21, no. 4 sons. Later, in 1956, she opened the shop, Abstraction: Women Artists and Atelier 17 Drama of the Self: Louise Bourgeois as situations has benefited from discussions her as a child during a family dinner. (December 1982): 45. See MoMA cat. no. Erasmus Books and Prints. (East Hampton, NY: Pollock-Krasner Printmaker,” in Deborah Wye and Carol with psychoanalyst Susan Tye, who Describing this long-ago incident moved 987: Untitled, no. 3 of 4. 36 Wye, “A Drama of the Self,” 26. Available House & Study Center, 2016), 3 (online Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois (New specializes in trauma. For a discussion of her to tears. She said: “The pain was very 24 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. online at “About the Artist” > “Essay,” at catalogue no longer available). York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), trauma and its currency in contemporary great. You can see that after fifty years, no. 536: La Maison d’Arcueil. Wye, ed., moma.org/bourgeoisprints. 50 Stanley William Hayter, New Ways of 10. This essay is also available online at art, theory, and culture, see Hal Foster, for somebody who doesn’t cry, after fifty 25 Bourgeois, May 7, 1997, in Jerry Gorovoy 37 See MoMA cat. no. 423.2: Man Reading, Gravure (New York: Pantheon, 1949). “About the Artist” > “Essay,” at Wye, ed., “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October, years, the thing is so vivid that it is as if and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Louise and MoMA cat. no. 425: Easton Bourgeois notes her “fulmination + moma.org/bourgeoisprints. no. 78 (Autumn 1996): 107–24. For an it had happened yesterday.” As seen in Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, with 38 Some examples are: Bourgeois, diary angoisse” [anguish] over Hayter’s book. 3 Bourgeois’s remarks about her prints exhibition that surveys a range of art The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, a critical text by Paulo Herkenhoff entries, September 10 and December “How should I object — scene, scandal up to 1994 were transferred from Wye exploring psychological states, see Susan directed by Amei Wallach and Marion (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997), 5. 18, 1947; February 22, April 27, June 29, (picketing) argument?? sly remarks” and Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois Hapgood, Slightly Unbalanced (New York: Cajori (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2008), 26 See “Letters to Colette Richarme,” November 12, and December 3, 1949. (diary entry, January 23, 1949); and to the relevant records in the updated Independent Curators International, 1:18:29. in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise 39 Bourgeois, “MacDowell Medal “Great nervousness over the fact that online catalogue raisonné, Wye, ed., 2008), with an essay by Susan M. 18 Some see the birth of Bourgeois’s Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ Acceptance Speech” (August 19, 1990), I have not been put in Hayter’s book moma.org/bourgeoisprints. Andersen. In Hapgood’s introduction, brother, Pierre, as an especially pivotal Reconstruction of the Father, 23 – 30. in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise for reproduction” (diary entry, January “Slightly Unbalanced” (p. 14), she writes: event for the artist. See Juliet Mitchell, 24, 1949).

214 Louise Bourgeois 215 Notes 51 Wye, “A Drama of the Self,” 28. Available Philip Larratt-Smith, Juliet Mitchell, works: a 1607 vellum-bound Pastorales; and Postmodernism (Art – Winter 1980): 87 See Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire transferred to: Wye, ed., moma.org/ online at “About the Artist” > “Essay,” at Mignon Nixon, Paul Verhaeghe and Julie a variety of nineteenth-century 377 – 79. in American Art, with essays by Jack bourgeoisprints. Wye, ed., moma.org/bourgeoisprints. De Ganck, and Meg Harris Williams illustrated literary works; an 1811 76 See Elisabeth Lebovici, “Is She? Or Isn’t Ben-Levi, Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, 94 Bourgeois, in “Louise Bourgeois in 52 Ibid., 27. (Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa, 2011; Historic Views of Paris; and many titles in She?” in Morris, ed., Louise Bourgeois, and Simon Taylor (New York: Whitney Conversation with Christiane Meyer- 53 In Bourgeois’s diary of March 20, 1948, London: Violette, 2012). It should be fine leather bindings. 131 – 36. Museum of American Art, 1993). Thoss,” in Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: she notes that she sent one volume noted that Bourgeois denied more 67 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1963; LB- 77 Bourgeois, quoted in “Feminism,” in ibid., 88 Ann Landi, “Speak, Memory: The Designing for Free Fall, 130 – 31. to critic Clement Greenberg, whose than once that she had ever been in 0383. 130. Indiscreet Charm of Louise Bourgeois,” 95 This portfolio was published by Galerie formalist art criticism would not have analysis. See Henry Geldzahler, “Louise 68 Bourgeois’s writings from these years 78 Bourgeois, “Statements from in “Who Are the 10 Best Living Artists?” Lelong, Paris, and printed by master favored Bourgeois’s work. Interestingly, Bourgeois,” in Making It New: Essays, indicate the ups and downs of running Conversations with Robert Storr” Art News 98, no. 11 (December 1999): 139; printer Piero Crommelynck, Paris. See in 2016, Greenberg’s daughter brought Interviews, and Talks (Brooklyn, NY: the bookshop. For example, she says: (text prepared in 1985 for MIT Press), and Charlotta Kotik, “Inside Out: Louise MoMA cat. nos. 533 – 41: Quarantania. that copy to MoMA for examination. He Turtle Point Press, 1994), 284, for the “I have wanted to know how it feels to in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise Bourgeois,” in “The Century’s 25 Most 96 See MoMA cat. nos. 430 – 43: had kept it all his life and his daughter following exchange: “H.G.: Have you make a buck — I find it awfully hard. Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ Influential Artists,” Art News 98, no. 5 Autobiographical Series. inherited it when her mother died. ever been psychoanalyzed? L.B.: No. But rewarding.” Bourgeois, notebook, Reconstruction of the Father, 220. (May 1999): 129. 97 See MoMA cat. nos. 846 – 914: Album. 54 Laurie Cluitmans and Arnisa Zeqo, H.G: That doesn’t interest you? L.B.: It is January – February 1959; LB-0496. 79 See Wye, “A Drama of the Self,” 28 – 29. 89 There are various references to 98 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. He Disappeared into Complete Silence: almost the subject of my entire work!” 69 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1962; LB-1121. Available online at “About the Artist” agoraphobia in Bourgeois’s diaries and nos. 1072 – 79: the puritan. Rereading a Single Artwork by Louise 62 “The revelation of Bourgeois’s 70 Bourgeois, loose sheet, June 31, 1965; > “Essay,” at Wye, ed., moma.org/ notes. One points back to when she was 99 See MoMA cat. no. 54: She Lost It. Bourgeois, with essays by Mieke Bal, psychoanalytic writings . . . seems as LB-0731. bourgeoisprints. in her twenties: “After Maman’s death, 100 All the various techniques with which Maria Barnas, Lytle Shaw, Robert Storr, significant a discovery for the history of 71 Bourgeois, “On The Sail” (December 80 See Kay Larsen, “Louise Bourgeois: Her I started to be afraid to leave the house Bourgeois worked can be searched in Steven ten Thije, Arnisa Zeqo (Haarlem, psychoanalysis as for the history of art.” 17, 1988, first published in Prospect ’89 Re-emergence Feels Like a Discovery,” especially after lunch.” Bourgeois, loose “Techniques” at Wye, ed., moma.org/ Netherlands: De Hallen Haarlem, Mignon Nixon, “L.,” in Larratt-Smith, The [Frankfurt: Frankfurter Kunstverein, in “Artists the Critics Are Watching,” Art sheet, September 17, 1959; LB-0124. In bourgeoisprints. 2011). In addition to the exhibition and Return of the Repressed, vol. 1, 85. Also, 1989]), in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., News 80, no. 5 (May 1981): 77. 1986 she made this note about feelings 101 Wye, “A Drama of the Self,” in Wye and catalogue, organizers Cluitmans and when I visited the related exhibition, The Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the 81 This author was the organizer of the surrounding her agoraphobia: “I cannot Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois, 23. Zeqo presented nine events focusing on Return of the Repressed, at the Fundación Father/Reconstruction of the Father, 171. exhibition and wrote the accompanying get out of the house, I want to, I have to. Available online at “About the Artist” different aspects of He Disappeared into Proa in Buenos Aires, a city considered 72 Lippard discovered Bourgeois’s work catalogue, the first monographic study I would like to. I was planning but I give > “Essay” at Wye, ed., moma.org/ Complete Silence. a center for psychoanalysis, a curator at for this 1966 show at New York’s of the artist’s work. It is noteworthy up at the last minute. It would help to be bourgeoisprints. 55 Marius Bewley, “Introduction,” in He the Fundación told me there was even Fischbach Gallery through Arthur that a decade earlier, in 1973, a group completely ready, waiting by the door, 102 Telephone interview with Felix Harlan, Disappeared into Complete Silence (New more interest in the show from the Drexler, then curator of architecture at of nineteen female artists and writers it would make things easier: some nice April 12, 2012. York: the artist, 1947), n.p. Ultimately, psychoanalytic community than from MoMA. He had assisted Bourgeois with had written curator William Rubin at feelings will help, familiar friendly place 103 Ibid. Bewley interprets her depiction of the art community. the installation of her 1964 show at the MoMA, proposing that the Museum to go to.” Bourgeois, loose sheet, March 1, 104 For the full evolution of Bed, see MoMA loneliness and alienation as evoking a 63 Recently, Léa Vuong, a French literary Stable Gallery. Lippard describes how do a retrospective of Bourgeois’s work. 1986; LB-0427. These words also appear cat. no. 480. societal dilemma. scholar, has been working on an analysis Drexler showed her the latex Portrait “Interest in her work is higher than in the text for The View from the Bottom 105 Telephone interview with Felix Harlan, 56 Bourgeois, quoted in Deborah Wye, of Bourgeois’s writings from a poetic and of 1963, which she calls “astoundingly ever before,” they wrote. “The time for of the Well, a portfolio of nine drypoints, April 12, 2012. Louise Bourgeois (New York: The Museum literary viewpoint. I heard her present ‘ugly’ and simultaneously appealing.” museum recognition and the widest published in 1996. See Publication 106 All the benefit prints Bourgeois of Modern Art, 1982), 18. her work at the “Future Bourgeois” Lucy Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” possible exposure is as soon as possible.” Excerpts for MoMA cat. nos. 568 – 76. created can be searched in “Printers & 57 Choreographer Erik Hawkins, with symposium at the Scottish National in Frances Morris, ed., Louise June 6, 1973; LL-0214. In the later 1990s Bourgeois became Publishers” > “Publishers and Recipients whom Bourgeois was collaborating Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Bourgeois (London: Tate, 2007), 114. By 82 “Child Abuse: A Project by Louise increasingly reluctant to leave home, and of Benefit Works” at Wye, ed., moma.org/ on a set design, wrote to her about the in 2014. She is also the author of the coincidence, in 1982, Drexler, who was Bourgeois,” Artforum, 40 – 47. For a full by the early 2000s she had ceased going bourgeoisprints. collaboration and mentioned that he essay “Louise Bourgeois: Woman of at the time my colleague at MoMA, view of the project, see MoMA cat. out altogether. She no longer went to her 107 Bourgeois, quoted in Douglas Maxwell, had just seen the Abstract Painting and Her Words,” in Louise Bourgeois: To Hell called me to his office for a surprise. He nos. 985 – 88. Brooklyn studio but worked only in her “Louise Bourgeois,” Modern Painters 6, no. Sculpture exhibition. He expressed his and Back (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, slowly pulled Portrait out of a shopping 83 Bourgeois talked about Sadie Gordon 20th Street home/studio. For a period, 2 (Summer 1993): 39. disappointment that her work was 2015), 211 – 19. bag. I could not help laughing at how Richmond for the first time publicly she would leave home to go to the doctor, 108 Bourgeois, diary entry, June 18, 1987, not represented and offered to write 64 Bourgeois, loose sheet, September 13, repellent it was. Drexler donated it when she presented a slide lecture at the but later the doctor made house calls. At quoted in Louise Bourgeois: L’Araignée et to MoMA and complain. Letter from 1957; LB-0219. to MoMA and I included it in the Maison Française at Columbia University times, she would not even go out into les tapisseries (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth, Hawkins to Bourgeois, January 24, 1951; 65 I noticed Bourgeois’s father’s initials retrospective of the artist’s work that I in 1979. That became the basis of the her backyard, but she resumed doing 2014), 6. LL-0189. Bourgeois wrote back that she in several volumes when I perused curated that year. filmed slide show. She did not discuss that. (Interview with Jerry Gorovoy and 109 See Elizabeth Phillips and Tony Zwicker, hoped he would protest. Letter from the book collection that remains 73 Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise the film with me before asking that it be Benjamin Shiff, May 4, 2011.) The American Livre de Peintre, with an Bourgeois to Hawkins, February 1951; shelved in Bourgeois’s house. As early Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art part of the exhibition, which was already 90 For a sense of what Bourgeois’s Sunday introduction by Robert Rainwater (New LB-1761. as 1954, thoughts of a bookshop, and (London: MIT Press, 2005), 3. installed. The only place to put it was in salons were like, see Brian D. Leitch, York: Grolier Club, 1993). 58 Recent Acquisitions, The Museum of the relationship of a bookshop to her 74 Juliet Mitchell, “The Sublime Jealousy of the lobby of the Museum. “Always on Sunday,” New York Times 110 Wye and Smith, The Prints of Louise Modern Art, February 13 – May 13, 1951. father, appear in Bourgeois’s diaries: Louise Bourgeois,” in Larratt-Smith, The 84 Robert Storr, “Jerry Gorovoy,” in Morris, Magazine (August 18, 2002). nytimes. Bourgeois. 59 In 1954, Bourgeois was described “The return of the father. His tastes, Return of the Repressed, vol. 1, 52. ed., Louise Bourgeois, 152. com/2002/08/18/magazine/always-on- 111 As MoMA’s Curator of Prints and by a critic as among those “artists garden, his Diderot lines, his antiquarian 75 For a discussion about the changes of 85 See Corporal Politics, with essays by sunday.html. Illustrated Books, and then Chief who have found — and persisted in profession — conflict of the subject the 1970s, see “Pluralism in Art and in Donald Hall, Thomas Laqueur, and 91 All the printers and publishers with Curator, this author oversaw the exploring — personal directions outside of a book shop (substitute for the Art Criticism,” roundtable discussion Helaine Posner (Cambridge, MA: MIT whom Bourgeois worked can be Bourgeois print archive and its the ‘movements’ of modern art.” Belle shop) — need of being approved of by among members of the American List Visual Arts Center, and Boston: searched in “Printers & Publishers,” at cataloguing until 2010. This work Krasne, “10 Artists in the Margin,” Design the father. My father loves me. I long for Section, International Association of Beacon Press, 1992). Wye, ed., moma.org/bourgeoisprints. continued after my retirement for the Quarterly, no. 30 (1954): 9. him to love me.” Bourgeois, diary entry, Art Critics: David Bourdon, Michele 86 Bourgeois is discussed as part of a “bad 92 Telephone interview with Peter Blum, online print catalogue raisonné. 60 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1958; LB-0129. February 5, 1954. Cone, April Kingsley, John Perreault, girl tradition” in Marcia Tanner, “Mother April 12, 2012. Bourgeois issued a 112 All the printers and publishers with 61 A sample of these writings has been 66 The remaining book collection in Corinne Robins, Irving Sandler, Laughed: The Bad Girls’ Avant-Garde,” modified facsimile of this book. See whom Bourgeois worked can be published in: Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s house includes the inventory Jeanne Siegel, A. L. Stubbs, Phyllis in Bad Girls (New York: New Museum MoMA cat. nos. 612-15: Recueil des Secrets searched in “Printers & Publishers” at ed., Louise Bourgeois: The Return of from the bookshop. Eventually it will Tuchman, in Art Journal 40, nos. 1 – 2: of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles: de Louyse Bourgeois. Wye, ed., moma.org/bourgeoisprints, the Repressed, 2 vols., with essays by be fully catalogued. In a brief review of Modernism, Revisionism, Pluralism, UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1994), 53, 93 As noted, all Artist’s Remarks from which also provides brief texts on her Elisabeth Bronfen, Donald Kuspit, the collection in 2016, I found a range of 65 – 67. the 1994 catalogue raisonné have been primary collaborators.

216 Louise Bourgeois 217 Notes 113 Bourgeois gave up her Brooklyn studio is also available online at “About the diary entry of October 8, 1989, where Designing for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann, Metaphor (Katonah, NY: Katonah 8 Bourgeois, quoted in “Mortal Elements: in 2005 as it had to be vacated for Artist”>”Essay” in Deborah Wye, ed., Bourgeois lists her residences in 1992), 182. Museum of Art, 2009). Pat Steir Talks with Louise Bourgeois” construction in the area, but she had Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints France; her family’s country house in 7 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. 8 Bourgeois, quoted in Paulo Herkenhoff, (first published in Artforum 32, no. 1 not been venturing there for some time. & Books (New York: The Museum Easton, Connecticut; her loft studio nos. 1072 – 79: the puritan. “Louise Bourgeois: The Unmentionable, [September 1993]: 86 – 87, 127); repr. 114 See Louise Bourgeois: L’Araignée et les of Modern Art, 2017), moma.org/ on Dean Street in Brooklyn; the house 8 Bourgeois, quoted in Deborah Wye, Blades, Fabrics and Fashion” (interview in Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans- tapisseries. bourgeoisprints. in Stapleton, Staten Island, which she Louise Bourgeois (New York: The with the artist, November 16, 1995), Ulrich Obrist, eds., Louise Bourgeois: 115 The second edition of He Disappeared 3 Bourgeois, “Freud’s Toys,” Artforum 28, bought for her son, Michel, but which Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 43. in Marie-Laure Bernadac, ed., Louise Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction into Complete Silence was published as no. 5 (January 1990): 113. remained empty for a long time as a 9 Bourgeois, expressing her anger when Bourgeois: Recent Works (Bordeaux: of the Father: Writings and Interviews, a benefit project for the Department sculptural environment; and lastly her psychoanalyst had gone away, loose Musée d’Art Contemporain de 1923 – 1997 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, of Prints and Illustrated Books of The 347 West 20th Street. sheet, October 1, 1963; LB-0322. Bordeaux, and London: Serpentine in association with London: Violette, Museum of Modern Art and includes Architecture Embodied 10 Bourgeois, April 1997, in Jerry Gorovoy 10 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred Gallery, 1998), 104. 1998), 235. a foreword by this author. See MoMA note: This chapter’s epigraph is from and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Louise and Fatal: Statements,” 194. 9 Bourgeois, loose sheet, May 28, 1963; 9 Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah of cat. nos. 989 – 99. Louise Bourgeois, “The Puritan,” 1947, Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, with 11 The Paris Review, no. 130 (Spring 1994), LB-0313. Bourgeois and Robert Goldwater at a 116 Bourgeois continued to record her published with plate 2 of 8 in her illustrated a critical text by Paulo Herkenhoff cover illustration. 10 For a full discussion of Ode à l’Oubli, see Franz Kline opening at Sidney Janis feelings in her diaries. At the beginning book the puritan (New York: Osiris, 1990). (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997), 108. 12 Interview with Felix Harlan, December Deborah Wye, “Louise Bourgeois,” in Gallery, New York, March 7, 1960, of the diary for 2000 she writes: “Total 11 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA 30, 2016. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, illustrated in Frances Morris, ed., Louise retreat . . . the fear of fear, the fear 1 Bourgeois, in conversation with Jerry cat. nos. 989 – 97: He Disappeared into 13 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. eds., Modern Women: Women Artists at The Bourgeois (London: Tate, 2007), 87. of being devoured . . . I fear solitude, Gorovoy, 1999, as cited in Gorovoy Complete Silence. no. 567: Paris Review. Museum of Modern Art (New York: The 10 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred loneliness and abandon[ment].” Later, and Danielle Tilkin, Louise Bourgeois: 12 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA 14 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 274 – 77. and Fatal: Statements,” 194. on July 22, 2000, she writes: “Rage Memory and Architecture (Madrid: cat. no. 995: plate 7 of He Disappeared no. 580: Untitled. 11 See MoMA cat. nos. 152 – 67: Do Not 11 For a thorough analysis of the subject uncontrollable. Violence. Revenge.” Her Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina into Complete Silence. 15 Bourgeois, quoted in “Arena” (interviews Abandon Me, and cat. nos. 168 – 79: To of motherhood in modern art, including diary entries taper off in the 2000s, yet Sofía, 1999), 15. This volume, with 13 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA for a 1993 BBC2 documentary film Whom It May Concern. a discussion of Bourgeois’s work, see on January 1, 2005, she writes: “I had essays by Mieke Bal, Jennifer Bloomer, cat. no. 540: Thompson Street. directed by Nigel Finch), in Bernadac 12 A detailed account of the full range Massimiliano Gioni, The Great Mother: a flashback of something that never Beatriz Colomina, Lynne Cooke, 14 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA and Obrist, eds., Louise Bourgeois: of Bourgeois’s work in fabric is found Woman, Maternity, and Power in Art and existed.” Jerry Gorovoy and Danielle Tilkin, cat. no. 1014: The Sky’s the Limit. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of in “Louise Bourgeois: Chronology,” in Visual Culture, 1900 – 2015 (Milan: Skira, 117 For more about this process, see Amy Josef Helfenstein, and Christiane the Father, 258. Germano Celant, Louise Bourgeois: The 2016). Newman, “Louise Bourgeois Builds Terrisse, is illuminating for its various Fabric Works (Venice: Fondazione Emilio 12 The artist’s assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, a Book from the Fabric of Life,” New interpretations of the subject of Abstracted Emotions e Annabianca Vedova, and Milan: Skira, conveyed this information to this author. York Times, October 17, 2004; nytimes. architecture in Bourgeois’s work. note: This chapter’s epigraph is from Fabric of Memory 2010), 318 – 30. 13 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1958; LB-1187, com/2004/10/17/arts/design/louise- 2 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1950; LB- Louise Bourgeois, “Brief Account of note: This chapter’s epigraph is from Louise 13 See MoMA cat. no. 96: Spiraling Eyes. and in “Form” (previously unpublished bourgeois-builds-a-book-from-the- 0430. Career,” c. 1965, in Marie-Laure Bernadac Bourgeois’s diary, June 6, 1994. 14 See MoMA cat. nos. 61b-95b: Ode à notes for a lecture, late 1960s), in fabric-of-life.html. 3 Bourgeois, letter to Robert Goldwater, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: l’Oubli. Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise 118 Telephone interview with David September 24, 1938; LB-1715. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of 1 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred 15 See MoMA cat. no. 705: Self Portrait (on Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ Procuniar, July 18, 2013. 4 Bourgeois often changed the titles of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923 – 1997 and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane a bedspread); cat. no. 753: The Long Night Reconstruction of the Father, 76. 119 See MoMA cat. nos. 250A – 250F: her works, and these titles from her (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in association Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing (on a tablecloth); and cat. no. 754: The 14 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. Les Arbres (1 – 6). 1949 and 1950 exhibitions, with the with London: Violette, 1998), 77. for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann, 1992), 187. Long Night II (on a bed sheet). no. 545: Self Portrait. 120 Jerry Gorovoy conveyed this exception of Pillar, are either no longer 2 Joséphine Fauriaux Bourgeois, letter to 16 Bourgeois, loose sheet, July 12, 1965; LB- 15 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. information to this author. extant or were appropriated into other 1 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA Louise Bourgeois, July 29, 1929; JVB- 0725. no. 504: Sainte Sébastienne. 121 See MoMA cat. nos. 152 – 67: Do Not sculptures. cat. no. 680: Tempête du Vent (Tornado). 0025; reprinted and translated in Louise 16 See MoMA cat. nos. 1041 – 1052: Abandon Me, and MoMA cat. nos. 5 For more on Bourgeois’s relationship 2 Bourgeois, quoted in notes of Jerry Bourgeois: L’Araignée et les tapisseries Anatomy. 168 – 79: To Whom It May Concern. to architecture generally, and to Gorovoy, in Marie-Laure Bernadac, (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth, 2014), 87. (This Alone and Together 17 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. 122 See MoMA cat. nos. 1072 – 92: the Le Corbusier in particular, see Paulo “The Insomnia Drawings of Louise catalogue documents the full range of note: This chapter’s epigraph is from Louise no. 1046: Plate 6 of Anatomy. puritan. Herkenhoff, “Architecture” and Bourgeois,” in Louise Bourgeois: The Bourgeois’s works involving tapestry Bourgeois, loose sheet, July 14, 1952; LB- 18 Background, MoMA cat. nos. 350a – 354a: 123 See MoMA cat. no. 832: Differentiate, “Le Corbusier,” in Frances Morris, ed., Insomnia Drawings, vol. 2 (Zurich: Daros, fragments.) 0309. The Laws of Nature. and MoMA cat. no. 833: Duration and Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate, 2007), in collaboration with Peter Blum, New 3 Exhibition of Modern Textiles, The 19 Paulo Herkenhoff, publication excerpt, Intensité. 46 – 48 and 89 – 90. York, 2000), 12. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. ibid. 124 Jerry Gorovoy conveyed this 6 Bourgeois, in Deborah Wye, Louise 3 For an illuminating essay on the August 29 – September 23, 1945. no. 541: Bosom Lady. 20 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. information to this author. Bourgeois (New York: The Museum of subject of abstraction in the work of The checklist includes six works by 2 Bourgeois, quoted in Deborah Wye, no. 1132: Classical Figure. Modern Art, 1982), 67. Bourgeois, see Robert Storr, “L’Esprit Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois (New York: The 7 Bourgeois, loose sheet, September 16, géométrique,” in Frances Morris, ed., 4 According to The Easton Foundation Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 79. Themes and Variations 1957; LB-0140. Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate, 2007), Archivist, Maggie Wright, there are a 3 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred Forces of Nature 1 Bourgeois often used the phrase “art is 8 According to the “Catalog of the Cells,” 21 – 35. few letters in the archives indicating and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane note: This chapter’s epigraph is from Louise a guaranty of sanity” in conversation in Julienne Lorz, ed., Louise Bourgeois. 4 Bourgeois, in “William Rubin – Louise that Bourgeois sent samples to possible Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. no. and included it in several works of art Structures of Existence: The Cells Bourgeois: Questions and Answers,” clients, but nothing further seems to for Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann, 1992), 189. 672: Rayons de Soleil sur la Mer. in different mediums. See for example (Munich: Prestel and Haus der Kunst, in Bernadac and Obrist, eds., Louise have come from those efforts. 4 Bourgeois, “Louise Bourgeois in fig. 2 (p. 11), no. 9 of 9 from the series 2015), 250 – 71, the total number of these Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/ 5 Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 1968; LB-0202. Conversation with Christiane Meyer- 1 Bourgeois, quoted in “A Memoir: What Is the Shape of This Problem?1999. architectural sculptures includes five Reconstruction of the Father, 86. 6 See MoMA cat. no. 54: She Lost It. Thoss,” in ibid., 130. Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Beckert” 2 Bourgeois, in Deborah Wye, “A works that are considered precursors to 5 Bourgeois, loose sheet, January 28, 7 See for example Nina Felshin, Empty 5 Bourgeois, loose sheet, December 17, (previously unpublished remarks from a Drama of the Self: Louise Bourgeois fifty-seven Cells. 1958; LB-0267. Dress: Clothing as Surrogate in Recent 1951; LB-0455. conversation recorded in the late 1970s), as Printmaker,” in Deborah Wye 9 Bourgeois often made lists, and 6 Bourgeois, “Self-Expression Is Sacred Art (New York: Independent Curators 6 See MoMA cat. no. 835: Extreme Tension. in Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans- and Carol Smith, The Prints of Louise among them were several notes about and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane International, 1993); and Barbara J. 7 For the original list, see Bourgeois, loose Ulrich Obrist, eds., Louise Bourgeois: Bourgeois (New York: The Museum the houses of her past, or the rivers Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Bloemink, Dress Codes: Clothing as sheet, c. 1959; LB-0768. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of Modern Art, 1994), 12. This essay she lived near. See for example her of the Father: Writings and Interviews,

218 Louise Bourgeois 219 Notes 1923 – 1997 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden, his life. See Deborah Wye, “Late Work,” in association with London: Violette, 2008). in Wye, A Picasso Portfolio: Prints from Chronology 1998), 122. 17 Bourgeois, MoMA cat. no. 120.1: The Museum of Modern Art(New York: 2 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. Untitled, no. 23 of 24, from the The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), no. 539: Boxwoods. illustrated book Hours of the Day. 168 – 73. 3 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. 18 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA 4 See MoMA cat. nos. 364 – 78: Nature no. 679: Champs de Blé. cat. no. 680: Tempête du Vent. See also: Study; and cat nos. 456 – 79: Self Portrait. 4 See Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. no. 610: 5 Benjamin Shiff, interview, January 23, cat. no. 680: Tempête du Vent; cat. no. 610: Ascension Lente. 2017. See full interview, pp. 208 – 12 in Ascension Lente; and cat. no. 674: 19 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA the present volume. Les Mollusques. cat. no. 538: The Grid. 6 For examples of these multipanel 5 See reviews for the exhibition Louise 20 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA works and series, see MoMA cat. no. Bourgeois: Drawings for Sculpture and cat. no. 551: Laurel Easton. 920: unique variant 3: Que Veux-Tu Sculpture, Peridot Gallery, New York, 21 Ibid. de Moi?; cat no. 918: When Did This March 30 – April 25, 1953: F.P. (Fairfield 22 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA Happen?; and cat. no. 748, unique Porter), “Louise Bourgeois,” Art News 52, cat. no. 606: Sheaves. variant 3: Les Matins Se Lèvent. For no. 2 (April 1953): 39; and “Louise 23 A note from the artist's assistant, Jerry examples of installation sets, see Bourgeois,” New York Times, April 5, 1953. Gorovoy, in Other Remarks, MoMA MoMA cat. nos. 775 – 805: La Rivière 6 Bourgeois (in conversation with cat. no. 553: Lacs de Montagne. Gentille; cat. no. 944: 10 am Is When You Robert Goldwater), loose sheet, c. 1953; 24 See MoMA cat. nos. 250A – 250F: Come to Me; and cat. no. 1152: Nothing LB – 1796; quoted in “Self-Expression Les Arbres. to Remember. Is Sacred and Fatal: Statements,” 25 See Spider, 1994, in Related Works in 7 See MoMA cat. no. 832: Differentiate; in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Other Mediums, MoMA cat. no. 53: and cat. no. 833: Duration and Intensité. Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zurich: Untitled (Spider and Snake). 8 See MoMA cat. no. 822: I Give Ammann, 1992), 184. 26 Publication excerpt, MoMA cat. nos. Everything Away. 7 Fée Couturière was exhibited outside 4a – 12a: Ode à Ma Mère. 9 Bourgeois, quoted in Deborah Wye, “A during the XVIIe Salon de la Jeune Drama of the Self: Louise Bourgeois as Sculpture at the Musée Rodin, Paris, in Printmaker,” in Deborah Wye and Carol 1965. Lasting Impressions Smith, The Prints of Louise Bourgeois 8 Bourgeois’s Les Bienvenus was note: This chapter’s epigraph is from Louise (New York: The Museum of Modern commissioned in 1995 by France’s Bourgeois, loose sheet, c. 2008; LB-0516. Art, 1994), 26. This essay is also Ministère de la Culture et de la The brief text appears as the final entry in available online: “About the Artist” > Communication and installed in April the compilation of Bourgeois’s writings in “Essay” at moma.org/bourgeoisprints. fig. 56 fig. 57 1996 in the Parc de la Mairie in Choisy- Philip Larratt-Smith, ed. Louise Bourgeois: Bourgeois with her parents, Bourgeois with her tutor, Sadie le-Roi. The Return of the Repressed, vol. 2 (London: Joséphine Valérie Fauriaux and Gordon Richmond, on the 9 William Rubin, “Some Reflections Violette, 2012), 189. Louis Isadore Bourgeois. 1915 Bièvre River. 1923 Prompted by the Recent Work of Louise Bourgeois,” Art International 8, no. 4 1 There is a specific literature devoted to (April 20, 1969): 17. this subject that can be traced back at 10 Bourgeois, quoted in Deborah Wye, least to the nineteenth century. Three “Louise Bourgeois: ‘One and Others,’” relevant contemporary references are This chronology provides an 1911 1917 in Wye, Louise Bourgeois (New York: The (listed chronologically): David Rosand, overview of Louise Bourgeois’s Louise Joséphine Bourgeois is born Bourgeois’s mother becomes ill with Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 25. guest editor, “Old-Age Style,” Art Journal life and career, with a focus on her in Paris on December 25 to Joséphine what is likely influenza; she will remain 11 See photograph in ibid., 83. 46, no. 2 (Summer 1987, special issue); prints and illustrated books. Along Valérie Fauriaux and Louis Isadore in poor health for the rest of her life. 12 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. Karen Painter and Thomas Crow, eds., no. 1: Araignée. Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists with important solo exhibitions and Bourgeois. Louise has an older sister, 13 Bourgeois, Artist’s Remarks, MoMA cat. and Composers at Work (Los Angeles: retrospectives of her work in general, Henriette (1904 – 1980), and will have a 1919 no. 633: Le Soleil. Getty Research Institute, 2006); and it includes solo print exhibitions that younger brother, Pierre (1913 – 1960). Family moves to Antony, another 14 See MoMA cat. nos. 775 – 805: La Rivière Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, were accompanied by publications. Paris suburb, setting up the tapestry- Gentille. eds., Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays 1912 restoration workshop there, while 15 Forty-three of these soft ground etchings in Art, Literature, and Music (Oxford: were seen together for the first time in Oxford University Press, 2016). This Family resides in Choisy-le-Roi, a maintaining the tapestry gallery on Louise Bourgeois: Turning Inwards subject was also addressed in the suburb of Paris, from 1912 to 1917; Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (UK), symposium “Late Rembrandt and Old property includes the family’s tapestry- October 2, 2016 – January 1, 2017. Age Creativity” at the Rijksmuseum, restoration workshop. 1922 16 Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study, at Amsterdam, April 30, 2015. Family begins spending winters in the Inverleith House of the Royal Botanic 2 Linda Nochlin, “Old Age Style: Late 1914 South of France where the climate is Garden, Edinburgh, May 3 – July 6, 2008, Louise Bourgeois,” in Frances Morris, with an accompanying two-volume ed., Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate, Louis Bourgeois leaves home to fight better for Joséphine’s health; Bourgeois catalogue: Philip Larratt-Smith and Paul 2007), 189. in World War I; remains enlisted until cares for her mother on these trips. Nesbitt, Nature Study: Louise Bourgeois 3 Working with his printers, Aldo and 1918. When he is wounded in 1916, Family employs an English tutor, and John Hutton Balfour (1808 – 1884) Piero Crommelynk, Picasso created up Bourgeois and her mother visit him in to six prints a day in the last years of the hospital in Chartres.

220 Louise Bourgeois 221 Chronology