At 13ft wide, the townhouse in New York that was both home and studio to Louise Bourgeois is almost as tiny as the artist herself. It was here, on the site of an old apple orchard, half a mile from the shore of the Hudson river and Chelsea’s elevated railway, that Bourgeois moved back in 1962 when she was 51 years old. It was here too that she died almost half a century later at the age of 98.
The transition from domestic to work-space was engineered with maximum efficiency. When her husband died in 1973, she got rid of the dining table, then the stove, and turned their bedroom into a library for her self-help and psychology books.
Little by little this elfin woman with her ballerina bun colonised the house like one of the spiders she became famous for sculpting. Cocooning herself into the spaces within its walls, she hollowed out arches and knocked through walls, burrowed through floorboards and installed spiralling stairwells to open up cavities below. No space was wasted in pursuit of her art, and nothing has been tidied away since the day she died. Kitchen cupboards are stacked full of tins, Coty foundation and her hairbrush still twined with hair sit on the mantelpiece, next to a book titled ‘Taxes for Dummies.’
On the day that I visit, the street outside is glossy with rain, but the spring downpour has brought with it a flock of birds, chirruping happily and noisily in the trees. Opposite sits a beautiful church, its bell chiming the hour.
“Louise loved to sit by the window, drawing and writing, watching the street,” says her long-time assistant and friend Jerry Gorovoy, who is guiding my visit. A show dedicated to her tapestry works is shortly to open at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, and though, as he tells me, he doesn’t often curate her work, this time he took the reins with pleasure. “I like projects with a small focus where you can bring something new to people,” he says. The show includes a number of her heads, as well as spiders and cushion towers. Much of it has never been seen before. Meanwhile, from tomorrow, an exhibition of her works on paper opens atTate Modern in London.
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