James Esnor

By 2008, I had over five hundred art books in my home. As you know, I had more - but threw them out because I had simply no room. My collection covered everything from the cave painters to Luc Tuymans. For me the lives and work of the masters were not only a framework for my art - but also a road map for my life. I called many artists master – but only a handful brother. One such man was the Flemish visionary painter James Ensor (1860-1949.)

             

His art and life had haunted my imagination for the last four years – usually at my bleakest moments of despair - when I did not have even rage to keep me going. When I was younger, angrier and more optimistic - I would turn to the likes of; van Gogh or Munch to give me courage in my pursuit of my own art. However, by 2008 - the only story to really give me any consolation - and make me smile if not laugh - was the strange life of Belgian’s greatest artist of the twentieth century (sorry Magritte.)

             

I had first discovered his work when it was featured in a documentary on BBC 2 in the mid 1980s. His Self-Portrait in a Flowered Hat (1883) - jumped off the screen at me – with a jolt of recognition – the mother complex, the transvestism, the madness and the complete self-assured indifference - to the opinions of the world.

            

Having only seen a few of Ensor’s paintings in the flesh - I worried for weeks about writing something on him. Usually I thought it an unforgivable sin to write about art one had largely never seen in the flesh. However, in his case I had finally made a concession. After all who better to write about an eccentric man who lived with his mother, rarely left his house, painted in an attic, thought about death every day, thought he was a prophet, and travelled little outside his home town – than an artist like myself?

             

With other rebellious and revolutionary artists at the fag end of the nineteenth century like; Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch – Ensor struggled for decades to find a sympathetic audience. Perhaps their stories of rejection - had been slightly overdone by romantic biographers in the 1950s – van Gogh for example was just beginning to achieve some recognition when he killed himself. Certainly Ensor’s story of artistic neglect had been over played – largely because of Ensor’s own martyr complex. I think Ensor forever felt himself abused and neglected even when he had success. I also think that he was the kind of man who liked to complain. However, the fact remains that these seminal fathers of modern art – spent many years in the wilderness (literally and metaphorically) before their visions became understood.

             

Ensor was in his forties before he could financially support himself – until then his mother had kept him. His work was intensely disliked by critics and fellow artists. It was writers who supported him and eventually brought him the success he had craved in his youth. He was shy, neurotic and hypersensitive - he died unmarried and childless. He was rumoured to have an imitation mermaid in his studio made off fish-scales, monkey’s teeth and woman's hair. He is most famous today for his paintings of skeletons and masks – but he was in fact one of the most confusingly diverse artists in art history. Don’t expect to understand his art immediately – his work takes time. Many of his paintings are crammed with obsessive details and hidden meanings – so they demand prolonged study. He painted in oils on canvas, wooded panels and paper. He worked deftly in watercolours and also produced a huge body of etchings, and drawings. He could paint and draw like an angel or like a demon. He depicted; landscapes, seascapes, streets scenes, crowds of goggle-eyed people, portraits, interiors, still-lives, self-portraits, caricatures, masks and skeletons. His drawings like his paintings varied from highly skilled, almost magic realism – to his own brand of raw, inspired Expressionism. However, he produced most of his visionary masterpieces between 1876-1896 – after which he mostly copied his past glories and out-lived himself as an artist.

             

In conversation, he was constantly self-contradictory. He was one of those hilarious people who have no idea just how funny they are. At first, they laughed at him - but they ended up laughing with him. In his later years - when fans of his work came to visit him he would play his harmonium - and tell them he wished he had become a musician! I suspect this was his final attempt to frustrate the world.                                                                                                                                  

At first sight, Ensor’s work could appear to the conservative art lover; crude, ugly, creepy and mad. However, the closer one looked at his fantastic and visionary paintings - the more skilled, beautiful and prophetic they became.

             

James Ensor was born on April 13 1860, in Ostend a seaside town in Belgium with a population of just 16,000 at his birth. He lived his life with the lapping, rolling and crashing sounds of the Atlantic sea against the beach and pier of Ostend.

            

 His father was an English engineer - who had travelled to America to find work but had returned to Europe because of the Civil War. His mother was a native of Ostend where she ran a souvenir shop that sold; trinkets, toys, shells, masks, seashells, Chinese goods and all manner of curiosities. A year later Ensor’s sister Mariette (who the family called Mitche) was born. They would have a close relationship and she would pose for many of his early naturalistic canvases. At the age of twenty-one Mitche married a Chinese man - complete with oriental robe and pigtail - who was passing through Ostend. Mitche had a girl with him but then abandoned by him.

             

Ensor only started school at the age of thirteen – and he lasted just two years in the Collage Notre-Dame in Ostend. He loathed school – but did not outwardly rebel. Instead, he adopted an indifferent and resistive attitude towards his teachers. Two years later his parents took him out of Notre-Dame - and left him free to daydream, roam the beach and take up drawing. His father - recognizing his son’s talent - sent him to take lessons with two undistinguished local watercolorists. He later said of them: “They initiated me professorially into the fallacious banalities of their dreary, narrow-minded and still-born craft.” (Jacques Janssens, James Ensor. Switzerland: Bonfini Press, 1978, P18.)

             

Ensor’s mother was far less sure of this path for her son, and would have preferred he took up a real profession. Her husband idled his days reading, drinking and socializing in the cafes - and no doubt feared that her only son would become a burden too – she was right.

             

Even in his most apparently simple, early paintings – Ensor could create pure magic. One of the first such works was Bathing Hut (1876) - a small oil painting - of a mobile beach cabin by the sea. On first sight, it seemed to me to have the ethereal softness of a watercolour – so soft were Ensor’s brushmarks. On second sight, it seemed a humdrum scene. However, by the third look – I was hooked! He painted this small canvas at the age of sixteen – and his painterly skills were already evident. He was already able to create a magical and uncanny version of reality on canvas. It as though - he could actually paint - the air. You felt the wind in your face and the sand beneath your feet.

             

In 1875 – Ensor’s family moved to 23 Vlaanderendreef (now Vlaanderenhelling) on the corner of Noordstraat (now Van Iseghemlaan) in Ostend – where James would live with his family until 1917 - surrounded by his paintings and a life time of collecting what some might have called junk. On the ground floor, his mother ran her souvenir shop.

             

Ensor remembered his family home as such: “My grandparents had a shop in Ostend, in the Kapucijnenstraat, where they sold shells, lace, rare, stuffed fishes, old books, engravings, weaponry, chinaware… It was an inextricably confused jumble of heterogeneous objects; several cats knocked over things, somewhere some parrots produced a deafening noise, and there was a monkey… The shop smelled of mold; the stench of the monkey’s stale urine filled the shells and cats walked over the precious lace. Yet, during the summer season the most distinguished visitors entered the place: the Emperor Wilhelm I, then Prince of Prussia; Leopold I, King of Belgium; the duke of Brabant; the Count of Flanders; The Duke of Ossana; the Duchess Douglas Hamilton. My mother amused all of them with her wit.” Indeed! (This quote is taken from - Between The Street and The Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor. Ed. Catherine De Zegher, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, P223.)

             

At seventeen, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. From day one - when he was forced to draw from the antique casts – he knew he would not fit in. His attitude was profoundly anti-classical, anti-authoritarian and modern. In three years at the Academy, the best he ever got was a second prize for a drawing from an antique head. However, he continued his studies in the Academy in his own dogged, insular way – no doubt convinced he should be teaching them. Later he was to say that he had learned nothing in this: “establishment for the near blind.” (Jacques Janssens, James Ensor. Switzerland: Bonfini Press, 1978, P20.)

             

While in Brussels, he met and befriended the much older Ernset Rousseau - Rector of Brussels University and his young wife Mariette – who were both lovers of science and art. Ensor was to also befriend their son - who had the same name as his father. Their friendship was his rock of safety – through many dark years of isolation and ridicule.                                                     

After three unspectacular years in the Academy - Ensor returned to Ostend. Apart from a few trips to Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris, he was never to leave his hometown again.

             

He converted the fourth-floor attic of his parent’s home into a studio and began painting a series of Impressionist inspired landscapes and realist portraits. However, it was his interiors with his family members sitting inside - that I found haunting. Had anyone ever painted curtains with such tenderness – as flimsy barriers to a harsh external world of frightening people? I wondered to myself.

            

Ensor liked to have photographs taken of himself and his friend Rousseau Jr. - messing about. In one black and white photo - Ensor and his friend Ernest - play-fight with bones on the beach. In another photo - Rousseau plays the role of a surgeon - removing the “stone of madness” from Ensor’s head! Later Ensor would use these and other photographs as stimulation for his paintings. As a young man, Ensor liked to play his flute at parties, jeer at hunchbacks in the street - or mock the stallholders at the fish market. You could say he loved causing mischief - and I thought that was the best way to understand his strange and comical work. When he would walk the streets of Ostend, he was jeered at by passers-by and gangs of children. They nicknamed him ‘Compere-la-mort’ (Death’s Confederate.)

             

Ensor’s attic studio had a fine view of the streets’ of Ostend outside – which he would paint repeatedly – often when they were crowded with Mardis Gras revelers, military regiments, or marching bands. He sat and watched the world pass by. In the course of his life, Belgium was invaded three times. First by; Bismarck’s Prussian army - then the Kaiser’s Storm-troopers and finally - by Hitler’s Panzer Grenadiers. They were all then beaten out - by the French, English and American armies. Sitting in his little room dispensing his rage and fears on canvas - but always trying to remain polite in real life – he must have wondered at a world that thought him the madman!

             

At the age of nineteen, Ensor painted his first mask paintings. Ostend was known for its masks and his family home was full of them. The masks harked back to fourteenth century farce, the danse macabre, paganism and witchcraft. However, there was nothing schematic about the way Ensor painted masks – each had its own peculiar identity – depicting different kinds of personalities, vices or stations in society. In fact, it almost appeared to me that the masks were coming to life. When I was younger, I was somewhat sceptical of Ensor’s masks and skeletons. I worried that it might be a bit contrived. However, Ensor lived from birth with these strange objects. He played with them. He befriended them. Therefore, it was utterly natural for him to paint them.

             

In 1881 – Ensor started exhibiting – to poor reviews, little public enthusiasm and some ridicule. Over the following years, many of his submissions were rejected and when he did show - he received scathing reviews.

            

By the mid 1880s fantastic and macabre imagery entered into his work. Groups of masked people met in rooms, skeletons fought each other - and bourgeois rooms were littered with; skulls, dolls, masks, puppets, books and bones.

             

Ensor never painted from the nude life-model – because his mother disapproved. So most of his nudes came from his head or were reworked from others artists paintings and drawings. Those nudes that there are - tend to be comical or threatening (in one drawing of a big breasted woman he drew satirical faces over the nipples.) In fact, I wondered if he thought of sex much at all - I knew he thought of death every day.

             

Like his life – Ensor’s paintings were full of contradictions. In the same year (sometimes in the same month) - that he painted a fantastic and gruesome pair of skeletons – he could also paint a beautiful and sedate still-life. Yet all of his work was stamped with his DNA. He painted what he wanted – when he wanted. Art was his solitary amusement. He delighted in confusing and playing with his audience and himself. This was made even more clear in his drawings - where half a page might depicted a fully shaded realist drawing of a fireplace – but on the other half of the page odd faces, masks and goblins appear out of thin air - threateningly.

             

Every great painter has his or her own idiosyncratic pallet. Ensor’s brittle whites, steely blues, fire-engine reds, emerald greens and sad violets - were totally his own. His greatest paintings seemed to me to radiate light – which miraculously appeared to come from behind the paintings somewhere.

             

Ensor was an obsessive reader and loved the writings of Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, and was very fond of Rabelais and Cervantes’ Don Quixote – whose flights of fancy mirrored Ensor’s own. As a painter he was equally omnivorous looking intently at; Rembrandt, Chardin, Watteau, Rowlandson, Turner, Courbet, Delacroix and as a Belgian of course he was steeped in Brueghel the Elder and Bosch.

               

In 1883 Octave Maus created the circle Les xx (The Twenty) an avant-garde group - which welcomed the work of radical and unpopular painters, writers and musicians from all over Europe. Les Vingt organized exhibitions of work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, August Rodin, Georges Seurat and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It was at one of the Les xx shows that van Gogh sold his only painting for 400 Francs in 1889. Ensor quickly joined the group but his submissions were frequently rejected or accepted in part only. Even here, his work was often considered too outrageous to be shown. After another of his submissions - this time to Brussels Salon of 1884 was rejected – he wrote a savage pamphlet mocking his old professors in the Academy. It only served to put even more peoples backs up. However Ensor became addicted to polemics and went on to take issue with things like vivisection and the modernization of Ostend. I had no doubt that if he were alive in my today - he would have been a compulsive blogger!

             

Suddenly in 1887 – Ensor’s father died. Ensor drew tender drawings of his dead father in bed. However, rather than darken – his pallet exploded with ever more daring juxtapositions of colour.

             

In 1888, Ensor painted his masterpiece Christ Entry Into Brussels, 1889. It depicted Ensor’s fantasy of the day when Christ would enter Brussels. The historian Heusinger von Waldeck has suggested that this massive canvas might have come as a professionally competitive reaction to Seurat’s Grande Jatte - which had recently made a big impact.

             

At first, it was hard to see Christ – as he rode on a donkey in the background of the canvas. For ones attention was first grabbed by the army band and Mardi Gras revealers - that thronged the foreground. To the lower left a couple French-kissed and seemed oblivious to Christ’s presence. The largest red banner in the parade read; “Vive La Sociale” (Long Live Social Progress.) Ensor had outrageously given the figure of Christ his own features – but this was nothing new for him. Ensor frequently depicted himself as Christ – misunderstood, reviled but prophetic. Sometimes he also depicted himself as the devil – demonic and sly.

             

He had previously drawn blasphemous images like Ensor/Christ in the temple – expelling the moneylenders – or even of himself as Christ crucified on the cross. There were no easy answers in Ensor’s art – ‘good’ people had a secret dark-side - and the divine touched ‘bad’ people.

             

Christ Entry Into Brussels - was a true masterpiece in the old-fashioned sense of the word – a vast consolidation of all the lessons and discoveries of his art up to that point. Although the painting looked crude and impulsive, he actually planned each figure beforehand. The canvas was so large that Ensor painted it on an unstretched roll. He painted sections of the canvas at a time – keeping the rest of it rolled up against the wall. That is why parts of the painting look disjointed and contradictory. In 1989 – I saw this overwhelming work in The Getty Museum in L.A. - where it was fittingly the culmination of the museum’s collection of nineteenth century paintings. It was hard to recall my impressions but they were probably; fever, joy, bewilderment, awe, curiosity and empathy. It was a vast canvas teeming with incident, satire, venom and humanity - and I knew I did not understand an inch of it – but I loved it.

             

Also in 1888 - Ensor met and befriended Augusta Boogaerts - who was ten years younger and a barmaid in a local inn. He called her “the siren.” Very little is known about the extent of their relationship. Did they ever kiss? Did they ever have sex? Who knows? They never married and only saw each other irregularly. Maybe his mother disapproved – maybe Ensor prized his independence too much. However, they remained close until his death - she died the following year. In 1905 he painted a very tender but mysterious oil painting of the two of them called; Our Two Portraits. Both are dressed in dark clothes – though her hat is ringed with bright flowers. She sits at the centre of the painting seated in a chair - and holding a pink flower - as she looks out of a window to the left. Behind her in the mirror of a cabinet - we see Ensor - seated at a table looking over at her with fondness. It is as though they are completely together – yet respectful of each other’s solitude. As a statement of elderly love - it was wonderfully restrained and unsentimental.

             

By the turn of the 1890s Ensor’s social satire and rage at the stupidity of the world had brimmed over into biting cartoons and caricatures - some of which he went on to paint in oils on wooden panels – the most permanent of painting methods. He mocked; the doctors – who cured nothing, the judges even more vile than the criminals they sentenced, the politicians so deceptive and hypocritical they were like devils - and the artists and critics so blind and stupid they could not see his genius! Ensor’s satire followed and was influenced by - a long line of English caricaturists like William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray as well as the French genius of caricature - Honoré Daumier. The line in these paintings, etchings and drawings was spiky, brittle, fluttering and acidic – yet strangely beautiful. This tradition of biting satire continued in my day by comic book, artists like Robert Crumb. Of course, Ensor’s vision of the world was over the top. Like all great comics – the wanted to shake up people’s minds with ideas they may have had themselves – but never had the courage to admit.

             

Up until the early 1890s, Ensor was content to work alone in Ostend and without any real support. However, with the last exhibition of Les xx – he lost his one and only life-line to the public. Meanwhile his families’ disapproval, irritation, disappointment and anger had grown. His paintings rarely sold and he still lived off his mother’s earnings. His isolation deepened and so did his despair – culminating with his attempt to sell the entire contents of his studio for 8,500 francs. He had no takers. God only knows how desperate he felt after that.

             

After 1895, Ensor’s output slowed down. He had lost faith in himself and could no longer put up a fight. However, he began to have a growing following amongst poets, writers and intellectuals.

             

Then in 1899 – the tide really began to change. That year the Paris journal La Plume devoted an issue to him. He began to sell works on a regular basis to private collectors – and the world began to catch up with his visions. However, by then Ensor had become detached from his art. He watched his bizarre success like a spectator. Because his earlier work began to fetch higher and higher prices – he backdated his new paintings and plagiarized his own past achievements. However, he could still pull off a few last masterstrokes.

             

After caring for his mother for many years - Ensor was at her side when she died at the age of eighty in 1915. Before she died, he drew and painted a few heart-breaking portraits of his mother on her deathbed. I found them heartbreaking beautiful. In the foreground of his largish, The Artist’s Mother in Death (1915) – was a tray of beautiful bottles of medicine. You can almost hear Ensor pray that they work.

             

In 1903, he was made a Chevalier in the Belgian Order of Leopold – the first drop in what would become a shower of belated glory. In 1929, he was made a Baron and the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts organized a massive retrospective of his work. In 1931, a monument was erected to him near the Ostende Kursaal. In 1933 he was proclaimed the ‘Prince of Painters’ and in the same year he was awarded the Band of the Legion of Honour by France! Finally, before he died - an Association of Friends of Ensor was established - who after his death founded his museum in Ostend. Ensor apparently accepted all these awards with a wry smile.

            

 In 1942 – Belgian newspapers mistakenly pronounced Ensor dead. He did nothing to correct the misapprehension and even visited his own monument wearing a black arm-band! “I am mourning myself,” he told those he met. And you still wonder why I loved the man!

             

I doubted a day went by when Ensor did not think about death. Repeatedly he painted and drew himself as a skeleton. He spent his life like a hypochondriac nihilist - convinced the end of the world was nigh. He finally did die, after a three-week illness (quietly in his sleep), on 19th November 1949 - at the age of eighty-nine. By 2008, his art had long since become a source of inspiration to Expressionists, Surrealists, Outsiders and young artists concerned with identity.

             

His funeral was the last brilliant act in his theatre of comedy. However, this time he was not a lone actor crying in the streets – he was the focus of a national celebration of comic and visionary genius. All of the high and mighty of Belgium turned out for his funeral; Cabinet ministers, judges, generals, critics and the great and good of the art world – basically everyone he had poked fun at throughout his career. The bells tolled, high-flow speeches were made and flags fluttered in the wind. It was like a scene out of one of his paintings. It sounds like one of the funniest - yet most profound - funerals in history. I wished I had been there.

Louise Bourgeois: The Wicked Little Girl

In the first week of October 2007, I saw on BBC 1 - a very telling documentary on Louise Bourgeois – who at the age of 96 - was generally considered to be the greatest living female artist in the world. In her long career (as long as Picasso’s) Bourgeois had made: Cubist and Surreal oil paintings, Tribal-like wooden towers, marble phallic shaped abstractions, rubber phallus's and breasts, architectural spaces filed with menacing domestic props and symbolic sculptures, embroidered rants, tapestry masks (which cross 18th century French Tapestry design with African masks), giant steel female spiders (their belly's full of eggs), and countless heartfelt, uncanny and symbolic watercolours, drawings and prints. At the time of the documentary Bourgeois was the subject of a major retrospective in Tate Modern in London – it was an exhibition I ached to see – but simply could not get to.

           

However, having seen two exhibitions dedicated to her – the first in The Douglas Hyde Gallery and the second in IMMA - I totally agreed that she was the greatest female artist of my today. Nevertheless, when seen in a wider historical perspective – how good was she really?

           

There was no doubt that Bourgeois had been one of the most influential artists of the previous forty years - especially on female artists. A quick look at the work made by young sculptors from the 1970s onward – revealed just how much of a debt they owed her. You only had to look for example at Kiki Smith in America, Dorothy Cross in Ireland or Tracey Emin in England - not to mention male artists like Damien Hirst. In fact, Bourgeois was the Matriarch of ‘identity-art’ and it’s most complex and intelligent exponent. But Bourgeois did not enjoy this theft of her art – she believed people were robbing her images and ideas – she was right - but it was a bit rich coming from someone who had done the same for most of her life! Her art had an original flavour to it – but like all great art it had been built upon the lessons of art history.

           

Personally, I thought she was up there with the very best hundred and fifty known artists in Western art. There were only a few dozen men or women in the west - who sacrificed so much psychic energy to their art, fought such prejudices and customs and battled so very long for recognition (she was almost seventy-one before her first major retrospective in MoMA in 1982.) However, I thought her work had not reached beyond the third rank of importance – her concerns were too private, to parochial and too baffling to ever have the universal appeal of the likes of Raphael, Monet or Warhol. Moreover, she was far from the premier groundbreaking achievements of Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Duchamp or Dalí.

           

As a female artist – I thought she was the greatest of all time. I identified with her misandry - as a counter weight to my own misogyny. I doubted she would like me and I feared I would crumble in her terrifying presence – but I would still have been tempted to talk with her. I completely identified with her passive-aggressive anger and hostility - and I felt a kinship with her unbreakable creativity. I did not know what it was like to be a little girl afraid of her father and wanting to be a man. But I did know what it was like to be a little boy afraid of my mother and wanting to be a woman! I instinctively understood her fragmented icons, her torn words, her wounded ego, her tortured and Janus faced sexuality, and her inner battle of self. I greatly admired her intellect and sound knowledge of art history and found her captivating in interviews, take for example this great quote from her: “I want revenge for being born, I want apologies, I want blood, I want to do to others what has been done to me. To be born is to be ejected, to be abandoned – therein lies the fury.” I could not have put it better myself!

           

Bourgeois at her very best – was often revoltingly ugly – lodging panic into men and turning the stomach of many women. The nasty edge to her work put off traditional art lovers who much preferred the pure beauty and genteel femininity of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler or the ironic detachment of Cindy Sherman. Even Frida Kahlo’s paintings were more inviting to the viewer – for she often made pain look stylish and brave.

           

Of course notions of the Western Canon like this were both ignorant of other cultures and the anonymous work of thousands of craftsmen and women throughout time - who have fashioned masterpieces without the conceit that artists after Giotto in the West have been plagued by. Just one quick example of a hardly known great non-western female artist was Lei (sister of the devout Emperor Shun in China) - reputed to be the mother of Chinese painting – a fact much lamented by the men who came after her to take over this art form.

           

Typically in the West, the mediums and subjects of female art – embroidery, tapestries, flower arranging, still-life's or maternity scenes have been denigrated as inferior art forms – while their attempts to become painters and sculptors have been handicapped by hostility masked as morality. Many female artists were restricted to the role of happy amateurs painting at home. Others who tried to make a career for themselves were blocked from the life-class, often expected to stop making art once married and certainly after having children - and their subjects restricted to the domestic scene. Which was not to say that there had not been highly successful female artists in the Western tradition – just look at Angelica Kauffmann or Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun in the seventeenth century. However even in the 1940s an artist like Lee Krasner willingly put her own career on hold – to promote the work of her husband Jackson Pollock. Thus the handicraft of women in particular had been written out of history – and this unspoken injunction against female artists - is what Bourgeois attacked head on in her work. Like a demented child tearing apart a toy soldier - she sought to deconstruct the masculine edifice and replace it with a feminine presence. One of her key strategies being the use of needlepoint, stitching and embroidery to deliver witty and sarcastic observations on the human body.

           

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her father had wanted a boy. Bourgeois maybe wanted to be a boy herself – she certainly grew up resentful of male authority and the restricted ambitions and potential for little girls. She struck me in interviews as a kind of insane Katharine Hepburn type character – fiery, tempestuous, rebellious and wickedly funny – but with a very soft, tender and hurt hidden side.

           

According to Bourgeois – her father was a tyrant, quick to physically discipline, given to prolonged monologues and rants at the dinner table and worst of all betraying Louise’s mother by carrying on with the child’s live-in Governess. Worse still, her mother accepted this unofficial menage-a-trois – leaving Louise betrayed three times over.

           

Some cynics like Brian Sewell had asked whether her childhood warranted such an exhaustive, lengthy and repetitious exploration. So what if her father was a patriarchal philanderer – he provided her with a relatively stable home, Coco Channel dresses, trips to Cannes and paid for her expensive and privileged education. Personally, I thought it crass to question Bourgeois source of pain – maybe she had exaggerated it in her art, but that was one of the main functions of the artist – to magnify the everyday.

           

However perhaps the worst thing that Louise’s father did - was to be so very like herself. Since the 1970s Bourgeois had held a Salon - in her run down home (its rooms crammed with her work and it’s walls covered in her rants and cries of pain) in New York - with the art critic Robert Storr. At such gatherings, young artists came to show them their work - and she pressed them for the meaning of it all. “But why did you want to make that?” Seemed to be her most common question. Seeing her at her Salon I could not help wonder at the purpose and value of such sessions for those artists foolish enough to bring themselves to her. Perhaps if you were also an artist interested in auto-biographical art – they might have had some value – but to a formalist they would have be utterly useless. Fundamentally, I believed that for little Louise - who had been forced to sit and listen powerlessly to her father and other men like the Surrealist rant on – it was a chance to take to the head of the table in later life.

           

Her family was prosperous and her childhood was at least materially privileged. She grew up in a large elegant Paris house - which she was to later recreate in highly detailed scaled models - the most telling one (Cell (Choisy), 1990-1993) a large marble version in a cage with a guillotine perched over it – ready to slice it in half. Houses for Bourgeois - became cages for repression, betrayal, frustration, fear, longing and pain.                                                                                             

Her mother and father mended tapestries - so from any age Bourgeois worked with them learning the ancient skills of the loom. Some of the tapestries that they mended - contained nude nymphs and Goddesses – their owners felt embarrassed by the nudity in such works and requested that the genitals be covered up. So one of little Louise’s first jobs was to help her parents sew little bunches of grapes or fig leafs over the genitals! This crass desecration of art by ignorant philistines - probably lead to her rebellious construction of phallic and vulva sculptures in the late 1960s.

           

At the age of fifteen, she studied mathematics in the Sorbonne in Paris, and her grounding in geometry informed her early Cubist paintings. In her late twenties Bourgeois trained in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then worked in the studios of Bissiere and the great Cubist painter Fernand Leger. It was Leger who convinced her that her real talent lay in sculpture. He was right – she never had any real painterly gift – her paintings tend to be naïve, graphic, and linear – more interesting for their potential realization in the third dimension than for their brushwork, colour or painterly texture.

           

In the 1920s she hung around the Surrealists– but her hackles rose when they treated her as just another bit of skirt – according to her they were misogynistic men and the only women they cared for were either sluts or rich society women who would buy their art. When she said that Marcel Duchamp was like her father – it was not a compliment!

           

A year before the outbreak of World War Two - Bourgeois escaped to New York – with her new husband Robert Goldwater a reputable art historian and specialist on African art. She said he was more like her mother than her father – a real compliment in her book! Bourgeois intently fell in love with the American metropolis - she admired its scale, its ambition, its tolerance, its multi-culturalism and its greater freedom for women. I was also sure she chuckled at the gross phallic posturing of Manhattan's sky-scrappers.

           

No doubt, Goldwater and Bourgeois spent many a long hour talking about primitive art and its importance in Modern art. The out-standing biographer John Richardson in ‘Picasso a Life’ volume two (1997) described perfectly the Spaniards search for ‘the-sacred-fire’. Picasso found it in African art – which although technically brutal, simplistic and crude – exploded with psychic energy, feeling and Voodoo. I think Bourgeois found the same thing in Tribal art – but it took her decades to move beyond mere imitation of its form into a true expression of its feeling.

           

In 1949, she gave up painting and became a full time sculptor – she was thirty-eight. The fact is that Bourgeois was a late developer – her first sculptures in New York – her so called Skyscraper works were far too indebted to Brancusi, Picasso and Tribal art. She was still using other men's grammar and other men's forms. Despite the fact that MoMA bought one of her sculptures from her 1947 show – her work was ignored by the New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s. In an art market dominated by macho Abstract-Expressionism, cynical Pop art, over theorized Post-Painterly Abstraction, and pious Hard-Edged Abstraction – Bourgeois’ work looked retarded, ugly and the work of a crazy outsider.

           

Bourgeois created her first undoubted masterpiece Fillette (Little Girl) in 1968 while still largely ignored. Made of battered latex - it looks like a mangled and abused horse-sized dildo complete with balls. It is a truly ugly and compelling work – a misandristic assault on the male genitalia – made by a woman sick of sitting in silence, while men postured around her. However after a third or fourth look – one finds in it and other phallic images by her - a suppressed and surprising tenderness and tongue in cheek black humour. It is telling that she carried it under her arm like an umbrella at her triumphant MoMA show in 1982!

           

In my experience women are fascinated by penises and their responses range from; fear, disgust, contempt, hysteria, hilarity, affection, love - and uncontrollable lust. Bourgeois managed to punctuate her phallic objects with all these emotions – sometimes within a single piece. She also linked aspects of the phallus with elements of the female body – by turns making it look like a breast, a torso, an udder or some strange growth.

           

It was only in the early 1970s that her work began to gain wider influence amongst a new generation of artists and feminist concerned with issues Bourgeois had been exploring for decades – identity, the body, gender and patriarchal structures. Now I had repeatedly attacked the rise of Feminist historians and their hyping of mediocrities like Gwen John and Tamara de Lempicka – but we can at least be thankful that they discovered and promoted Bourgeois – though she herself remained a loner belonging to no school.

           

Her breakthrough into greatness coincided with the death of her father and her beloved Robert – which plunged her into a “fantastic depression” – her words and I think they are telling. She doubted that she had earned her new-found respect - and could not sleep at night. Joseph Beuys another truly great Shaman of the twentieth century had a similar breakthrough after a prolonged ‘fantastic’ depression. These were not depressions of collapse – they were depressions of liberation. It is strange to note that the Portuguese's Paula Rego – another great female artist (equally interested in the complexes of the family) should have also produced some of her greatest works since her husband’s death.

           

Like a woman with absolutely nothing to gain or lose – Bourgeois began to create her greatest masterpieces – redolent with isolation, sexual anger and autobiographical staging. Moreover, as her work hit its stride – her newfound finances, assistants and curatorial support gave her the freedom to create ever more complex, ambitious and vast constructions. The fact is that success in art breeds success – each sale helps fund the following more ambitious projects. I sense that Bourgeois had been waiting for this moment all her life – and she threw herself into it joyfully – like a patient who meets her Park Avenue therapist at a party and unburdens herself for five hours without spending a penny.

           

In the mid 1980s Bourgeois began making her ‘cells’ – semi-architectural spaces in which she installed ambiguous and menacing objects some found - some crafted. Edward Kienholz may have influenced her – but there was a Freudian and Symbolic overtone to her work that made it her own. Bourgeois by now had little interest in nature - apart from the meat of flesh and the animal fears of the family. Her work became increasingly autobiographical and drawn from painful memories of her childhood in France. Her work re-staged the most private and traumatic episodes of her life in such an unpalatable way that viewers often flinched away.

           

In 1993, she represented American at the Venice Biennale, and in 1999, she was the first artist to fill the vast Turbine hall in Tate Modern. Which she did with did with three vast observation towers that the viewer mounted via a curving stair at the top of which were seats winged by large parabolic mirrors. Adjacent to the towers and spanning the Turbine Bridge was huge thirty-five feet high Spider sculpture (Maman now outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) – looming over the viewer protectively or threateningly according to your view point. Of course, Bourgeois was only responsible for the drawing and planning of such vast sculptural works – assistants and foundries did most of the brute work – but unlike other artists of this approach – Bourgeois managed to infuse such ‘factory-made’ work with genuine magic.

           

I had seen her in interviews many times over the years and could not think seeing a more intimidating or sour looking woman in all my life (apart maybe from my mother when ill.) I was reminded of Kate Nash’s song Foundations: “You said, I must eat so many lemons, because I am so bitter. I said I’d rather be with your friends mate, because they are much fitter!” In fact, Bourgeois’ bitterness and black humour was refreshing in an art world full of namby-pamby, hippies - trying to commune with nature or the Earth Goddess.  Bourgeois like the brilliant Post-Feminist Camille Paglia – held no such Utopian notions of femininity – she was as terrified by the chthonian nightmare as by the patriarchal daydream. Paglia tellingly described in (Sexual Persona, 1990, P.5-6) Western Civilizations fear of the chthonian thus: “Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood… The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities, which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

           

Perhaps in October 2007 - Brian Sewell was right when he wrote in The London Evening Standard: “Her work is enthusiastically exhibited only because she is, or pretends to be, a woman who hates men. This is political correctitude gone mad: the work of any male sculptor who did with female genitals what she has done with the penis would never see the light of day and, regarded as a psychopathic danger to society, nor would he.”

           

As a male artist of this kind of ilk – I could testify to the truth of his statement, but if the art world could grant the likes of Picasso, the right to his misogyny - then it had to grant Bourgeois the right to her misandry.

           

Personally, I believed art was an arena in which artists could battle with their demons - safe in the knowledge that the only detrimental effect on society – was offending a few narrow minded prudes. Even if Bourgeois did hate men (which I doubted) at least she had the courage and honesty - to let everyone into the anti-chamber of her fears. I did not believe that repression or lies could ever be a cure for mental instability – so the artist had a duty to express the unexpressed. In fact many women have feelings of hatred towards men and many men have feelings of hatred towards women – but what was more damaging to society I thought than these fears and prejudices – was their unspoken and unreflective promotion of acts of cruelty and injustice.