December 25, 2001

The Artist Louise Bourgeois at 90, Weaving Complexities
By AMEI WALLACH

The artist Louise Bourgeois turns 90 today. Imagine 90 years of celebrating your birthday on Christmas.

"I mean, who is born on Christmas day?" Ms. Bourgeois likes to say. "My mother was very apologetic, and the doctor said, `Madame Bourgeois, really you are ruining my festivity.' I was a pain in the derrire when I was born."

She says such things with a diva's instinct for the dramatic in the rolling French R's of her youth, though it has been 63 years now since she moved from Paris to New York. She has witnessed most of the art movements of the last century and influenced her share. She is still innovating.

She puts demands on her viewers to go with her into a discomfiting zone of trauma and endurance. It is from her that many artists learned to make art about how it feels to have a body that is prey to the conflicts and injuries of biology, history and family life. Long after their attention has turned elsewhere, she expands her investigation in any way that works.

She has made hanging sculptures like rubberized slabs of meat, shaped marble into sex organs, juxtaposed an arched headless body with a 19th-century industrial saw and stuffed black sacklike giants, one with a real prosthesis on its leg, and set them in each other's arms.

She has subverted any tradition in art making that served her purpose, from cave painting to Andy Warhol.

"Art is the guarantee of sanity," she declared as she sat for a pre-birthday conversation last week in the place where she always sits for company, at the scuffed table that blocks the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room of her Chelsea town house. Her sharp, clenched face has loosened in recent years, just as the yellow paint has flecked from the walls and the varnish from the floors.

"That is the most important thing I have said: Art is a guarantee of sanity," she said again. She clasped her hands and made eye contact. "Yes."

Only in the last year has she begun repeating her aphorisms from the past more often than stating new ones. It is as if she is scavenging her brain for useful articles the way she has begun ransacking her house for the stuff she has hoarded.

Among her new works on view at Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea through Jan. 5 are stacked totems sewn from old blankets and shirts, a stuffed head pieced together from worn towels, entwined couples from a favorite blue dress. They are audacious but familiar, too, because they use shapes and cover emotional territory Ms. Bourgeois has been visiting for more than half a century.

This is her first New York gallery exhibition of new work in six years, following her three giant spiders outdoors at Rockefeller Center last summer. The cloth sculptures are opaque, vulnerable and perishable. Except for the stuffed head, they are much smaller than life size. Words have been embroidered on one cloth totem: "Do Not Abandon Me."

There are more new works awaiting exhibition at Documenta, the influential every-four-years summation of the current artistic scene which opens next June in Kassel, Germany. And there is recent work in her current miniretrospective at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, the first major exhibition of a living American artist there.

In the catalog, Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, notes how her "enigmatic fantasies . . . correlate with such museum holdings as the Scythian bronze cauldrons, the mysterious horse masks and whimsical shaman attributes."

She makes her art to get through the day, which is why she still works six days a week every day except Sunday. On Sunday she receives friends and any artist, preferably young, with the wit or temerity to call her up and cadge an invitation. She sees in each new generation something to nurture, to compete with and to learn from.

"So what have you brought to show me?" she asks the visitors imperiously.

There is a quickness with which she gets their drift. But if she disapproves of the work, she pronounces it idiotic. She tells the artists to leave or sometimes reduces them to tears.

On a recent Monday she was working and talking about why she makes art. "I have problems," she said. "What is the shape of my problem? My problem is turned into a physical reality. I am able to give a shape to my problems."

She rummaged through a tin box of pens, scissors, erasers and magnifying glasses. There were drawings spread before her, vestiges of insomniac nights. They were in a dazzling range of styles, from explicit to primitive. Some were started in pencil, overlaid and altered in red.

"Red is my favorite color, definitely," she said as she found the red pen she was looking for. "It is violent. It is the color of blood."

The red pen did not work. Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant and manager, found her three that did. Mr. Gorovoy puts on the water for the pasta and arranges her exhibitions (which interest Ms. Bourgeois far less than the work du jour). He oversees the metal work in the Brooklyn studio where she no longer goes. All the sewing and the printmaking takes place in her Chelsea basement, where Mercedes Katz, the seamstress, comes every day, just like the seamstresses of her childhood home.

Ms. Bourgeois began shading in the drawing on top of the stack before her. It is a curvaceous rendering of a Chippendale chair. The back of the chair consists of a face, turning the chair into a rather glamorous approximation of a woman.

This interest in Chippendale seems bizarre, given the mismatched seats, rumpled daybed and stools rejected from past installations that furnish her sitting room. But her father collected antique chairs, particularly Chippendale.

"A quarter, no, 90 percent of them were fakes," she said, as Mr. Gorovoy produced a photograph of the family's tapestry showroom in Paris between the wars, complete with Chippendale chairs upholstered in tapestry.

It is only rarely now that memories of her father instigate a work of art, though he was the focus of her rage and creativity in 1982 when, at 70, she became the first woman to get a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. At that time she went public with her family drama. Her debonair, domineering father had housed his mistress, Sadie (who happened to be Louise's English tutor), in the family manse, without too much fuss from his wife.

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