Even now, Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911, is probably best known for her large-scale sculptures and installation pieces, such as Maman, the colossal steel spider commissioned in 2000 as the first Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern. But she was also a brilliant painter, and spun poetry from everything she touched.
When Gorovoy pauses our tour to point out a favourite piece – the muscular, but not quite human Cell XXI (Portrait) – he divulges that it is partly covered in her old bathrobe, the pink terry-towelling threadbare from use. Gorovoy met Bourgeois in 1980, when he was curating at a small gallery in New York’s SoHo. Their friendship began with her telling him how furious she was with the way he had installed her work.
Her first big show at MoMA was still two years in the future and, though she had been making work since the day she arrived in New York as a young bride in 1938 (Bourgeois was married to the art critic Robert Goldwater, with whom she had three children), her name was known only in dedicated circles. “She was already 70,” Gorovoy told me, when I first met him in 2014, “yet things were just beginning.”
In the mid-1990s, he arrived at Bourgeois’s house expecting to drive her to her Brooklyn studio, as was their custom. “Instead she said, ‘I want you to go upstairs and bring everything to the garden floor.’ I have to say, I was perplexed, but I could see she was excited.”
Bourgeois began taking clothes out of boxes, shaking loose each fold. “Now and then she would tell me something she was remembering,” says Gorovoy. “We hung them on the pipes of her sprinkler system. That was the beginning of her making art from clothes.”
Had something happened to prompt it? “Nothing I can trace,” says Gorovoy. “I just think clothes had real resonance for her. They are a perfect stand-in for a figure, yet not a figure. And though she never talked about death, she spoke of giving these clothes a chance of surviving. She saw herself as their guardian. Some of them were so fragile or needed repairing. There was a sense of atonement, for sure.”
