Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  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.

  Subsequently, she had it sent to our apartment. And her generosity went beyond the initial gift. Two brawny men delivered a massive wooden cube that she had retrieved out of a magnificently weathered old pier. It was a perfect base for the sculpture.

  I complimented her on her jocular colloquialisms in English. She referred to herself as a fussbud-GET. She referred to an unreliable person who made things up out of ALL CLOTH. She said she owes her easygoing English to her family: her husband and her two boys. “When I married my husband, Robert Goldwater, in 1938, we made a pact. I would never criticize his French if he would never criticize my English. We kept to it. I make mistakes with the greatest assurance.”

  In spite of her deep resentment of Sadie, Louise had learned a passable amount of English during those painful years. This came to be very useful when, as a young person, she wanted to study art in Paris. Her father would not give her enough money to take courses. “Let her starve, and she’ll get married” was his attitude, straight out of one of Balzac’s novels.

  But Paris was full of Americans who wanted to study art, and she was the only applicant who could translate for them; she got to take the studio courses for nothing.

  Fernand Léger was one of her teachers. She said she learned a lot from him—much of it at a silent, unspoken, visual level.

  “He was satisfied with the third dimension on canvas, but I needed to move around the object,” Louise said.

  Louise would not travel. For years she had not left the house. She had no interest in attending affairs in her honor or receiving awards in public. For years she asked me to go to represent her. I went to one recently, at the Municipal Art Society. Often some young person has come up to me at such an event and, looking at me admiringly, enthused, “Madame Bourgeois, I so admire your work.” Sometimes I just smile modestly, accepting the praise.

  Another time Louise was having a large exhibition in Finland. Hoping to tempt her, the organizers sent along a travelogue film with many a photogenic lake. Also, it seemed that the Finns have a passion for the tango. There are large halls where they come from all over Finland to dance it. There were sequences of this on the promotional film, showing impassive dancers, the men built like des armoires à glace, solemnly dancing the tango.

  Louise ran the film for me. Then she hummed an air that she thought was a tango. “No, Louise,” I said, “you are thinking of a java, the tango goes like this,” whereupon I hummed and danced a few tango steps.

  “Voilà!” Louise exclaimed. “Just the thing. You will go to Helsinki and dance the tango at my opening.”

  I said, “Louise, I would do practically anything for you, but no tango in Helsinki.”

  Sitting for David Hockney

  My husband, John Russell, picked out David Hockney as a winner when David was still in the Royal College of Art, more than fifty years ago. His paintings were not like anyone else’s. He himself was not like anyone, either.

  He had black hair then—soon, and for most of his life, it was bleached blond—and very large glasses, which were to remain a fixture. In 1961 he made an etching called Myself and My Heroes in which he appears with Mahatma Gandhi and Walt Whitman; it bore a written message: “I am twenty three years old and I wear glasses.”

  His humor was infectious. Once he saw a picture in a Berlin museum of a leopard in full pursuit of its prey. It impressed him so much that back at his hotel, he made a drawing of it from memory and added two men standing talking in the open. Immediately above them was the leopard, coming down at top speed to make its breakfast of the two of them.

  Underneath the two men he wrote, “They are perfectly safe. This is a still.”

  John wrote about him, “Over the next forty years it turned out that he could do just about anything that he wanted. He could paint, he could draw, he could make prints, and he could give the word ‘photograph’ a whole new meaning. He could give technology a fair shake.

  “Along the way, he has become regarded as someone who is a joy to have around, both for what he has achieved and for his golden good nature.”

  We ha
d heard on one of those frequent long-distance calls (David in London to us in New York) that David had just had his portrait painted by his old, though highly dissimilar, friend Lucian Freud.

  We were naturally curious to know how it went.

  He told us about it when we got back to London: “I walked from my studio to his studio. It’s the prettiest walk, through Holland Park, and I was there by 8:30 every morning. I sat for him eight hours a day, for days.

  “It’s up six flights of stairs. He always runs up them. I would sit for several hours. But he let me smoke and talk, and I had lots and lots of marvelous conversations. His energy was fantastic.

  “He works very slowly, because he scrutinizes every tone. I could tell what he was doing. He uses quite a small palette, for seven colors perhaps. He has piles of tubes, but knows at once which one he wants. Just once, he looked a little longer. I realized that he had to look longer for the blue because he hardly ever uses it.”

  We didn’t see the portrait of David, but Lucian showed us a photograph: a solid, middle-aged Yorkshire man who knows exactly who he is.

  In return, David Hockney asked Lucian to pose for him. “He agreed,” David told us, “but he was not going to sit for six hours. The first time he came, he fell asleep in five minutes.”

  The next time he came to pose, Lucian arrived with his assistant, and the two of them sat for one of the series of double portraits that David was working on.

  “They’re in watercolor,” we were told, “and very large—four feet by three. I may show them in London next year.”

  We had no idea that we might be involved in this project. But suddenly we got a message (2002) in New York from David in London, asking us if we could be at his studio in London at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, November 8. As I was lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum on the sixth, and again at the Met on the thirteenth, it was a tight schedule, but we weren’t going to pass up the invitation. So we flew to London.