Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists to have lived. I was only there for the tail end of her career but, absurdly, that was when all the action happened. She had been inventive, emotional, hair-raising and brilliant for many decades of her long creative life, but only in the final stretches was she noticed properly and fêted.
Bourgeois’ late blossoming was like someone taking a finger out of a dyke. Her belated fame cleared the way for all manner of previously silent voices to join the clamour: older women, people who worked with textiles, installation artists, inhibited surrealists, antimodernists of every persuasion. All of them realised with a jolt that if Bourgeois could suddenly be appreciated, so could they.
Older women had, of course, been artists before. But none had previously enjoyed the spectacularly late arrival on the international art scene that she managed. To become the next big thing, the name on everyone’s lips, the grooviest artist in New York, in your seventies was extraordinary.
And it wasn’t only older female artists who began to be searched for and fêted. It was all of her downtrodden gender. When Bourgeois went global, the entire distaff side of contemporary art was lifted up the ladder. That’s why she’s important.
I was remembering all this as I strolled pleasantly past the sheep and the ducks on the way to a Bourgeois show that has arrived with klaxons of surprise at Compton Verney country house in Warwickshire. “What on earth,” I mused, skipping lightly over the sheep turds, “was Louise Bourgeois doing here?”
The answer turned out to be grabbing rural Warwickshire by the shoulders; giving the county a vigorous psychological shaking; talking profoundly about sex, love, fatherhood and motherhood; addressing deep human concerns that are as important in Warwickshire in the 2020s as they were in the New York of the 1980s.
The show begins in the woods across the lake from the country house. An entwined couple made of shiny aluminium hang from a branch. As with most of Bourgeois’ couples — it was a recurring subject — they are intertwined so tightly you’d need an experienced fisherman to untangle the knot.
Over the bridge, nearer the house, stands one of Bourgeois’ giant spiders, called Maman, an edgy tribute to her French mother and an evocation also of darker family currents: secretiveness, possessiveness, violence. When you embody your mum as a giant spider, you open up a can of family worms that is psychologically itchy.
Bourgeois’ parents ran a tapestry workhouse in Paris. It’s where little Louise learnt her sewing skills and where the identification of her mother with a web-weaving spider commenced. The father, I read, was French, crude, unfaithful and having an affair with a live-in governess under the family’s nose.
The issues caused by his cruelty bubbled up darkly in the years of psychoanalysis Bourgeois embarked on after she moved to New York in 1938, having met the American art critic Robert Goldwater at the family shop, and fallen in love. In New York she had three children, all boys, and tried intermittently to pursue an artistic career in the tiny gaps left by domesticity.
Initially she was a painter, influenced mightily by the Parisian surrealism from which she had emigrated. As interest in Paris, surrealism and painting started to wane in New York, she began making the secretive and emotional sculptures — often sewn from fragments of her clothing — with which she would finally make her mark when her fame exploded.
Inside Compton Verney an exhibition entitled Nature Study looks back at this riveting and unusual career. Her early art, the first paintings, is represented sparsely with just enough to prove that her vision was always heightened, always fraught. At the entrance they are also showing a short film I made in 1998 in which she creates a man out of an orange peel and uses the pith to give him a penis. It was her father who showed her the trick.
Her sewing skills are displayed repeatedly, notably in a beautiful cloth book in which she remembers the river that used to flow outside the family house. At the end of her life, when she returned, the river had gone and only the trees were left. Using bits of cloth saved from her childhood, she tells the river’s story with tearful intimacy. My, how close she lets us get.
Making a book by sewing it together was new method in art: a homely skill with big feminine implications. The power of clothes, their ability to prompt memories, was one of her best discoveries. A carousel hung with old garments and some animal bones is as much an act of voodoo as a sculpture.
Another hanging couple repeats the point that the intertwining of male and female creates a knot that’s hard to untangle. Out of vintage clothes stuffed with unwanted tights she has magicked up a he and a she roped together in love and sex.
A more callow and less French mind might assume that the male is always bad in her art and the female always good. But things are never that clear. All we really know about the hanging couple is that she has made them as inseparable as a yin and yang badge, for better or for worse, till death us do part.
Even in her occasional old-fashionedness, the great Louise Bourgeois was a teacher and we were her pupils. It’s what mothers do.
Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study is at Compton Verney to Oct 6
