\u201cI was born on Christmas Day; my mother was very apologetic and the\u00a0doctor said: Madame Bourgeois, really you are ruining my festivity.\ufeff\u201d Thus wrote Louise Bourgeois, portraying her own birth in 1911 as an irksome interruption to the oysters and champagne. \ufeff\u201cI was a pain in the ass,\ufeff\u201d\u00a0she told Modern Painters in 1993. \ufeff\u201cWhen I was born, they abandoned me flat\ufeff.\u201d<\/p>\n
But did they? It was 10\ufeffam in that Paris apartment. Perhaps Madame Bourgeois had laboured all night and cherished her new baby (their letters ring with love, and the anecdote more readily imagines the doctor\u2019s impatience). Surely the oysters had yet to be shucked. But none of this makes a better story than the tale of abandonment Bourgeois gave every journalist from 1982\ufeff \u2013 when her reputation sprang to life with a revelatory show at MoMA\ufeff \u2013 until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. This genius of modern sculptors was an equally magnificent mythmaker.<\/p>\n
Was her very first sculpture really an effigy of her father, modelled in spit and dough, its limbs amputated before his startled eyes? Was she really named after Louis Bourgeois to placate him for the disappointment of a girl child? Did he really have an incestuous love for her? Everyone who knows the art also knows the accompanying narrative of the long-suffering mother, the philandering father, the English governess who becomes his mistress in the 1920s (stout Sadie from Blackheath) and the pretty little girl they all spoiled. These early\u00a0betrayals will inspire the grief and fury that sustain Bourgeois\u2019s work. \ufeff\u201cAll art,\ufeff\u201d she would tell pilgrims to her brownstone in New\u00a0York, \ufeff\u201cis an exorcism\ufeff\u201d\ufeff.<\/p>\n
Marie-Laure Bernadac lived in that brownstone to research her book, first published by Flammarion in 2019, now translated for Yale by the writer Lauren Elkin. Venerable curator of three Bourgeois shows, Bernadac was given access to the colossal archive of diaries, letters, loose-leaf observations and psychoanalytic writings \ufeff\u201cdiscovered\ufeff\u201d in the 21st century. Bourgeois flatly denied ever undergoing analysis, yet she attended sessions several times a week for \ufeffmore than 30 years. Bernadac persuasively suggests that this aided the storytelling, and the stories allowed Bourgeois a measure of actual privacy. But she does not go any further. Discretion, prudence, professional tact: all these virtues mar her biography.<\/p>\n
It appears a comfortable childhood of gardens, toys and picnics, of days in the family\u2019s tapestry-restoration business or its elegant shop \ufeffon Boulevard Saint\ufeff-Germain. Photographs show Louise\u00a0in Chanel in Cannes. To Bernadac, \ufeffa group shot with father, brother and governess in Nice resembles a couple with their offspring\ufeff, though it does not to me. Sadie looks away and M Bourgeois stands askance.<\/p>\n
But perhaps there is a true intimation of the future in a school photograph from 1927 where Bourgeois has scratched out her own dead-centre face (apparently loathing a new haircut). This acute destruction turns the image into an enigma. Sex, suffering, motherhood, entrapment in the home, or by a man, or by children: all the acute power and mystery of her stupendous figures in cloth, latex, tapestry, wax and steel, her stuffed and limbless mannequins, woefully punished, deformed and pitied, have their inkling in the tip of\u00a0that teenage needle.<\/p>\n
Bernadac delicately implies that Bourgeois\u2019s mother was sick for many years before Sadie\u2019s arrival, possibly with emphysema, though we never discover precisely what. Nor is there any explanation of her father\u2019s sudden death at 66 in a Paris clinic, barely remarked upon in Bourgeois\u2019s diaries. And how exactly did she come to be married within \ufeff19 days of first meeting the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938, and why did she not set sail directly with him for New York? Bernadac glosses over it all: \ufeff\ufeffthey were \u201cvery much in love\ufeff\u201d.<\/p>\n
Within months, Bourgeois had returned to France on a family visit, where she adopted a three-year-old orphan, seemingly worried that she was not yet pregnant. Michel arrived by sea in 1940, accompanied by a nurse and refusing to disembark in New York, poor child, just six weeks before Bourgeois gave birth to her son, Jean-Louis. Dyslexic, farmed out to boarding school, eventually finding work as a building superintendent, Michel died suddenly in 1990. Bernadac does not\u00a0tell us how or why, though public records must be available.<\/p>\n
Discretion, prudence, professional tact: all these virtues mar this biographyDiscretion, prudence, professional tact: all these virtues mar this biography<\/p>\n
A third son was born \ufeff15 months later; how readily this invokes so many of Bourgeois\u2019s female figures, weighed down by life and offspring. All three Goldwater sons were renamed Bourgeois in the 1950s out of fear of antisemitism and taken to France to escape the policies of Senator McCarthy. Bourgeois claimed to have been investigated by McCarthy several times. Bernadac\u2019s acknowledg\ufeffment that there is no evidence of this at all is tucked away in an anxious footnote.<\/p>\n
Indeed the author keeps so dutifully behind the lines she has been granted that direct quotations from Bourgeois dominate the entire book, too often padded out with Bernadac\u2019s own weak restatements. She scarcely ever puts her head above the parapet. This is a shame, as Bernadac is surely right \u2013 for instance \u2013 to believe that Robert Goldwater was an extraordinarily supportive husband, although Bourgeois barely mentioned him after his sudden death in 1973. The love letter reproduced here is extremely beautiful, yet Goldwater has almost no presence in this book.<\/p>\n
NewslettersChoose the newsletters you want to receive<\/p>\n
Clear, calm analysis on the stories driving the day\u2019s news.<\/p>\n
The very best of our journalism, reviews and ideas \u2013 curated each day.<\/p>\n
A dispatch from The Observer\u2019s kitchen table \u2013 from Nigel Slater\u2019s recipes to interviews, features and hot tips.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n