Some of My Lives (28 page)

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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

BOOK: Some of My Lives
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I
had the privilege of seeing Louise Bourgeois very often starting in 1995, when I was preparing to lecture about her at the Metropolitan Museum. Naturally, I knew her work, which I very much admired, but I hadn't met her before.
I was warned that she was extremely difficult; she was very small but very fierce and apt to show the interviewer the door after five minutes. It was with some trepidation that I telephoned to ask for an appointment. “But of course come over, in fact come tomorrow, to the Brooklyn studio,” I heard to my surprise. We were speaking in French (the best possible introduction), and we almost always spoke in French from then on, with free swings into her highly idiomatic but charmingly French-inflected English.
The Brooklyn studio was an immense former industrial space that had become a forest of disciplined clutter. Later, she talked about the role of clutter in the family life. Meanwhile, rounded-off spaces were filled with rusty implements whose function had long been forgotten, found objects, made objects, reflecting surfaces everywhere—mirrors, glass, shiny bronze, marble—textiles, dilapidated chairs.
All this was about to be moved out for a major exhibition where these disparate objects would take their places as sheer magic.
The sculptor herself was a diminutive figure in her always personal assemblage of mysterious overgarments, trousers, baseball cap, chains, and boots. Shrewd, mischievous, appraising blue eyes.
By her side, towering above her, was her indispensable assistant and friend, Jerry Gorovoy. It would be more accurate to qualify him as her guardian angel. He warded off angst, intruders, the corrosion
of daily living, not to mention that he was the globe-trotting installer par excellence of her exhibitions all over the world.
After this, Louise allowed me to visit her often at her narrow lair on West Twentieth Street, where she had lived since 1960.
This is where she used to meticulously iron
The New York Times
every morning and flame a spoon and slide it directly into the jam pot for her breakfast. “No toast,” she explained, “but no germs.”
She told me that all her subjects for at least the last sixty years found their inspiration in her childhood. It has never lost its magic, its mystery for her. “I need my memories, they are my documentation,” she said.
As we all know from the movies and the great French novelists, French family life is often full of secrets not quite covered up and hatreds that leave their mark for a lifetime.
Louise grew up in a large house at Choisy-le-Roi outside of Paris. It was very large because some thirty people lived and worked there, besides the family. The family business was repairing tapestries. Living with tapestries was a form of education for her, she said. “Through tapestries I learned what I did not learn in school: stories from the Old Testament, and the New Testament, antiquity, history, mythology.
“The characters from the Old Testament were crafty and bloodthirsty. People just loved that. The New Testament was full of pieties. As subject for tapestries they had no appeal. Scandalous subjects were successful. Pious ones bored people.”
There were elements in the Choisy house that made her feel unwanted, betrayed. One was the fact that her father already had two daughters and had no wish for another. Louise's tactful mother tried to mollify him: “Can't you see she looks exactly like you,
comme deux gouttes d'eau
[like two drops of water]?”
The betrayal that was to haunt her for many years was the fact that in 1922 a young Englishwoman called Sadie came to live in the house. Ostensibly, she was there to teach Louise English, but very soon it was clear that she was sleeping with her father and had been engaged for that purpose.
Sadie lived in the house ten years. Louise said, “The motivation for my work is a negative reaction against her. It is the anger that
makes me work. I thought she was going to like me; instead, she betrayed me. I was betrayed not only by my father but by her too.”
I had a lively example of this simmering resentment. One time when I was visiting Louise, she was showing me a video that had been made from a montage of family photographs. She told me she has some 650 family snaps and has always kept diaries faithfully. As she put it, “The story of the past is very present. Everything is documented.”
We each had a mug of tea and a plate of cookies. As she watched the faded images—so vivid to her—she suddenly let out a cry: “Jerry, stop the film there, right there!” And he had to back up to get the right picture on the screen. It showed a debonair figure, her father, in front of the mantelpiece. You could dimly make out a bust behind him.
It was a Houdon bust of the Princesse de Lamballe that made the most of her generous endowments.
“I just hated that bust,” Louise almost hissed. It evoked the father's numerous dalliances. “Every night I dreamed of smashing it.”
“Did you ever do it?” I asked.
“Of course not, but I destroyed it in my heart. And to this day I hate terra-cotta, I hate ceramics, I hate porcelain.”
Then, to my amazement, she grabbed the plate of cookies and flung it onto the floor, breaking it with a dramatic crash. Then she crunched the pieces into the floor, stamping on them with her boots.
Then she burst out laughing, and our conversation continued as before.
Louise's memories were not only embedded in photographs and diaries. Once I was allowed into her attic, and there hanging in rows were all her old clothes from girlhood on and all those of her late husband—the primitive-art historian Robert Goldwater.
With French frugality and ingenuity, she used snippets of material from them to clothe the stuffed figures she made in 1996.
Because Louise never stopped working, when the physical labor involved in sculpture became too much for her, she made large-scale engravings, drawings, gouaches. She was an insomniac, and at night—besides listening to rock bands on the radio—she drew, endlessly, on music paper. A few years ago, the Hermitage Museum of
St. Petersburg presented a large exhibition of these Insomniac Drawings, some 220 sheets, giving them a noble imprimatur.
We talked about the Left Bank quarter in Paris, where we both had lived. “That neighborhood is very dear to me,” she said. “I was born above the Café de Flore. My brother and I amused ourselves by throwing our mother's scissors out of the window and over the balcony. We aimed them at passersby on the street.
“
C'était méchant
. But what happened was that the scissors always got stuck in the awning outside the Flore, so we never hit anybody.
“My mother never got her scissors back. But she wasn't fussy. She just said, ‘Well, my scissors seem to have gone again.' She never accused us.
“This was quite another age. Montparnasse was all the rage at that time, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés was completely provincial. The Flore was just a little café for the locals. We are talking now of 1922–23.”
An important element in Louise's formation was her school, the Lycée Fénelon. She still remembered the names of all the girls in her class and had written their names on the back of the class photograph.
“It is not so much what I learned there. It was the discipline that it gave me. When you come out of Fénelon you know that you are a disciplined person. And it is a help in everything. If you can overcome it, push it away, manipulate it; that is a help too.
“It's like manners. You don't have to have good manners, but if you have them, they can be of help to you.
“My French intellectual background is very important to me.
“But it was not a social education. The lycée taught us everything except how to deal with other people. Being logical, being very severe and pure, does not make you a diplomat.”
I asked if she saw that as a shortcoming.
“Absolutely, I missed being a diplomat. That is why my work means so much to me. It is a compensation for my difficulty in dealing smoothly and evenly with people.”
On one of my visits Louise talked about her father—he came up very often in these conversations. “It took me a long time to make peace with him,” she said, “but now I feel—well, the guy was not
very good—he was awful. But, first of all, I owe him life. My parents told us that all the time. ‘If you are in this world, it is because we gave you life.'”
“Many people would say, ‘I did not ask to be here.' But I am not like that.”
She said that it was because of her father that she was always surrounded by sculptures. “He was really crazy about sculpture; he collected lead sculptures. Our garden at Saint-Cloud was full of them.
“He had his big Panhard, all his other cars. He was always on the road, looking for sculptures. He would put them on the rumble seat.
“He never knew that I made sculptures; he would never have tolerated it. He detested artists. They were always out to steal other people's wives, he said. He was projecting of course. As he saw it, every artist was out to swipe his daughter.
“So he put his sculptures all over the garden. Apollo was a favorite subject. My mother would not have allowed them in the house. We had great respect for my mother's wishes—no cluttering allowed.
“No cluttering became the number one characteristic of the house. We had no animals indoors, no dogs, no cats, for that reason. Tapestry doesn't clutter. You fold it up, and it doesn't take any room.
“My father collected chair frames, but they did not clutter the house, because they were hanging from the ceiling, in the attic.
“Hanging is safe, and it allows for a lot of movement. So the floor belonged to my mother and her tapestries.”
Louise said she still had this very much in her mind's eye. Suspended ladders and suspended plants turn up in her work of the 1940s. Many years later she used rubber in the ambiguous image of two elongated legs, which hang from the ceiling.
In the 1960s Louise started working with marble and going to the Henraux quarry at Forte dei Marmi, just below Carrara in Italy. She said it was not a great change for her to work in marble.
She told me that if you are making an outdoor sculpture, it is important to have the right kind of marble and to know what not to do with it. If you leave a small chink, and if rain falls into it and it freezes, the marble will crack.
“That is why there is so much marble in Italy, where there is supposedly no freezing point. In the North you have to use granite or
bronze. That is why there is Rodin in France and archaic sculpture in Greece.”
By a fortunate coincidence, Louise met Henry Moore at Forte dei Marmi, where he had a studio. Henry didn't stay there during the hottest months, so he lent the space to Louise.
As Louise tells it, “One day Henry Moore came into the studio to find a chisel, or something, and there I was. He was very friendly, and he didn't waste his time.
“He didn't talk about himself. He talked exclusively about sculpture. There was nothing that he didn't know about marble.
“I was very impressed by his simplicity, his direct style, and his professionalism. I was very impressed by his wife too. She was a nononsense Russian woman.
“We were lucky because we met in the studio, with lots of plaster around. He felt at ease and I felt at ease. It was not personal. It was really a matter of talking shop.”
The architecture of the human body—its elements and appendages—is a recurring theme in Louise Bourgeois's work. Hands in particular are as revealing to her as faces. “I consider the hands a signature,” she told me.
During the summer when I was visiting Louise every week, my husband, John Russell, was grounded by a torn Achilles tendon. His leg was in a cast, and he was in a wheelchair. Very solicitously, she always asked, “How is John?”
Then she announced that she was making me a present—a cast of my hands. After a pause, she added, “And of John's hands too.” Another pause, then she said, “And of his foot too, as soon as he is out of his wheelchair.”
So eventually we were summoned to the Brooklyn studio, where a plaster technician was in attendance. A board was put on my lap. John gamely put his large foot across it. Louise posed our four hands and the foot in question, and we became an instant Bourgeois composition.
We were coated with Vaseline, and the technician whipped up a great soufflé of plaster.
Our appendages were plunged deep into the plaster. It took two full hours to harden.
“It's an act of faith,” Louise commented. “You can say that
again,” I muttered. This was especially true when the plaster specialist hacked at the hardened mound with an enormous knife.
The plaster shattered into a hundred fragments as he prized us out. I would have thought them irretrievable, but somehow, unlike Humpty Dumpty, they all got put together again and turned into a mold.
We thought it indiscreet to inquire about our plaster altermembers. Then one night in November, when I was about to give a lecture on Louise at the Metropolitan Museum, we suddenly saw ourselves—or rather, selected parts of ourselves—right there on the stage. Louise had managed as a surprise to have it installed next to the podium.

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