JERRY GOROVOY
When Jerry Gorovoy was a teenager, a psychic predicted that he would become involved with a much older woman. More than a decade later, he began an intense, lifelong friendship and collaboration with the then 68-year-old Louise Bourgeois. After her death in 2010, he became the President of the Easton Foundation that oversees her artistic legacy, the townhouse in Chelsea where Bourgeois lived and worked from 1962 until her death in 2010, and the adjacent building housing the Louise Bourgeois Archive.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS,NY and DACS, London 2022
Claudia Steinberg Which sculpture by Louise Bourgeois did you include in your first exhibition in 1980, and why did you select it?
Jerry Gorovoy The exhibit at Max Hutchinson Gallery was my curatorial debut. Louise had chosen this very important piece from the 1940s, a multi-legged wooden sculpture originally called The Blind Leading the Blind. In the 1970s, Louise had painted it pale pink and renamed it C.O.Y.O.T.E. The new title didn’t refer to the animal but rather the acronym of a feminist group that advocated for the legalisation of prostitution: Come Off Your Old Tired Ethics. We were able to sell the piece to a museum, which pleased Louise because she was not that well known and didn’t sell much then. She invited me to her house where I saw some of her paintings and drawings from the 1940s, and I immediately suggested a show of these works. She allowed me to curate the exhibit, which was also at Max Hutchinson, and in the course of making it she and I became friends. That was the show in which many of her paintings were seen for the first time since the late 1940s. Two years later [in 1982] some paintings were shown again as part of her MoMA retrospective; several of these are included in the current retrospective of the artist’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
CS You were drawn to her paintings, a part of her oeuvre that she later put aside.
JG Louise had two painting shows in 1945 and 1947, but stopped painting in oil around 1949. Meanwhile, she had begun making her Personage sculptures around 1946, so there’s a brief overlap between painting and sculpture, and you can see this transition reflected in the forms within the paintings.
CS You were a painter yourself?
JG Yes, I have a master’s degree in painting. For over 40 years, Louise had been mining the area around sexuality, autobiography, psychoanalysis – all subjects I, and other young painters of my generation, were interested in. At the time we met, Louise had an underground reputation and was very respected among certain artists, but she was not well known to the general public. I was deeply interested in psychoanalysis, which Louise was in for many years, from 1951 – the year her father died, which pushed her into depression – until the death of her analyst in 1985. I felt like I had come across a perfect case study in Louise. Her reactions to people, her intense anxiety, her phobias, her symbolic art, were all mysterious to me, though they were all clearly interconnected. With the exception of two Personage sculptures and an illustrated book of prints, the current show at the Met concentrates exclusively on Louise’s paintings. She discontinued painting in oil before she entered analysis, but the psychic tensions and instability that led to her breakdown in 1951 are foreshadowed in the paintings.
CS There are photographs of Louise with her early sculptures – the Personages – on the roof of that building, and you see New York architecture of the kind that also shows up in her paintings.
JG Louise loved New York. She saw herself as a runaway from Paris. She loved the skyscrapers of New York, the Woolworth Building, the compressed verticality and grid plan of the city. That all undoubtedly influenced her work. At the Met you can see her anthropomorphisation of architecture. There is a high level of self-portraiture. Louise is present in the paintings, whether as a girl with long hair or a mother with three sons. The space in which she situates her figures adds to the psychological charge of the situations she depicts. Narrow, claustrophobic enclosures, with a sense of indeterminacy between inside and outside. The way she applies the paint, the ambiguities she sets up in the spatial realm, as well as the very long vertical format of many paintings – all of that already presages a sculptural sensibility. Within the paintings, there’s an evolution from the earlier, static forms towards forms that float, swing and spin.
CS She was interested in medieval narratives.
JG Louise was a born storyteller; you can see that in the well-known set of engravings titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence from 1947. There is always the story behind the work, but it’s also very formal. The subject, she said, comes from the unconscious, but the form is very conscious and has to be perfect, “strict and pure”. She writes clearly about her intentions but also loved it when people found other meanings in her work. You don’t need to know her autobiography in order to get something out of it. I remember when Louise had her show in St Petersburg. She was the first foreign artist to have a show at the Winter Palace, and a lot of Russians had never heard of her, but you could see from their reaction to the work how deeply it had affected them. Louise had the power of giving shape to her materials, creating form and beauty with this strong emotional pull. Many people say that if you engage in psychoanalysis you’ll stop being an artist, but for Louise, it was the opposite. Psychoanalysis is the story of your life.
CS What caused her to give up art for more than a decade?
JG You can see in her diaries that she was under a lot of pressure, trying to be an artist while raising three sons and being a good wife to her husband. Her family was trapped in France during the war, which made her quite anxious. Louise had a lifelong fear of abandonment and separation. A lot of the work is almost like a symptom – it’s an expression of the fear, but also a form of self-cure.
CS Last year, the show at the Jewish Museum, Freud’s Daughter, connected Louise’s extensive writings about her inner life with her art. The curator of that show claimed that her writing lives up to that of Antonin Artaud and other major writers, that it’s a parallel strand of her work.
JG Louise felt the need to record her life. We have diaries dating from 1923, when she’s 12 years old, to the last four or five years of her life. These diaries are different from the loose sheets of writing made during her analysis. Louise also wrote on the back of drawings. It is another aspect of her work. She would look at her visual output and try to make sense of it, sometimes adding the writing to the image. She had a way of entering into a stream of consciousness through her writing, but then she would always step back to analyse it – there is a lot of internal dialogue. At a certain point when she wasn’t making much art, between 1953 and 1960, writing supplanted art making in a strange way. Her psychoanalytical writings helped her solve her problems, but they also offer a contribution to psychoanalysis. You could see them as self-expression, but they are also a critique of how female sexuality was often misunderstood in the field of psychoanalysis. Yet people forget that many of the most important psychoanalysts were women: Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Marie Bonaparte and Anna Freud. On an emotional level, Louise seemed arrested, like a young girl, despite the fact that she had received a very traditional French education. She studied mathematics; she was interested in architecture; she wrote about Pascal – you’re talking about someone who knew art history and had a very strong sense of images, artistic vocabulary and intellectual ideas. There was a lot of intelligence behind what she was doing, which coexisted with the fact that she was a basket case emotionally. It’s the polarity of someone who was simultaneously emotionally troubled and as sharp as a tack.
Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1949
CS She had gone to the Sorbonne and later took painting lessons with Fernand Léger at his studio, for example. The Met catalogue reveals her almost hyperactive acquisition of knowledge and skills on a very high level.
JG It’s all in the work, which is very emotionally and psychologically charged, but has such a strong intellectual component.
CS I would like to bring up the Cells that were shown in 1994 at the Brooklyn Museum. That exhibit seems like a seminal moment in her wider recognition.
JG She began the Cells in 1991. And at that point, a shift took place in her work, as she started combining found objects with those she made herself. She wanted to set up an architectural space that would establish the relationship between the found and the made. She also noticed that her work changed in the museum setting, and she didn’t always like how it was presented. For example, a piece that in her studio went all the way to the ceiling looked suddenly small when displayed in a big space. The Cells were in part a way to control the scale despite the environment. She wanted to make an enclosed world where she could define everything.
CS From then on, she went for ever-larger installations, culminating in the opening of the Turbine Hall at the Tate. That was an amazing conquest of the space.
JG I was in London and I visited the Turbine Hall, which was then under renovation, with Frances Morris, now the director of Tate Modern. Frances asked me, “Do you think Louise would like to make something for a space like this, as the inaugural project?” When I returned to New York, I asked Louise if she wanted to do it and she said yes, she wanted to take on the enormous space of that old power plant. So I told Frances that Louise would work on a proposal. She conceived of three steel towers on the theme of the mother. The visitor had to enter each tower and climb all the way up in order to experience the installations as intended. The first is titled I Do, with a fabric mother and child at the bottom of the interior space, and a platform of mirrors at the top. The second tower has two staircases: you would walk up the outside of the rectangular tower, and then descend on an internal spiral staircase. This one is called I Undo, and refers to the anxiety about being a bad mother. At its bottom is a room that’s all red, which is also about anxiety and things going wrong. The third tower, I Redo, has an internal and external spiral staircase, and conveys the idea that you can redo and restore things. Louise wanted these towers to be monumental, so you could walk up and down and go through this journey physically. They were profoundly experiential as well as visual.
CS And once inside, perhaps the towers didn’t feel quite as intimidating.
JG Yes, there was so much more complexity on the inside. We’re reinstalling this work at Château La Coste, an art and architecture park in the south of France. Jean Nouvel has designed the space. The environment is very different from the industrial Turbine Hall, but I’m confident that the intensity of the experience inside these towers will be the same. What I think great art does is change the way you see the world. I know Louise changed the way I see the world; I’m very grateful and lucky to have met her. ◉