Louise Bourgeois’s daily routine
Art, orange marmalade, and mushroom pizza
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Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)
I’ve been savoring the latest issue of Apartamento, especially its fascinating collection of 1970s-era photos of the artist Louise Bourgeois’s New York City townhouse, which she bought with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, in 1962. They lived there together until Goldwater’s death in 1973, and Bourgeois lived there alone for the next 37 years, gradually expanding her studio from its original location on the garden level until it took over almost the entire house.
Alongside the photos are two interviews conducted by Leah Singer, with the curators Jerry Gorovoy and Philip Larratt-Smith. The interview with Gorovoy is particularly revealing. He met Bourgeois in 1980, when he was 27 and she was 68, and—as he’s described elsewhere—became her assistant for the next 30 years.
In the Apartamento interview, Gorovoy details Bourgeois’s routine in the 1980s, when she was making smaller artworks at home and constructing large-scale sculptures at a studio in Brooklyn: