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A FEW WEEKS after my father died in late 2017, my mother came to visit me in New York. We spent the time between Christmas and New Year’s quietly in my Brooklyn apartment, but a few days before her birthday I asked if she wanted to visit the Museum of Modern Art. Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, a retrospective of the artist’s work, was in its final weeks there. That morning, a blizzard swept through the city, bringing with it words like “bomb cyclone,” “bombogenesis,” and “winter hurricane.” We listened to the radio as the mayor warned New Yorkers to stay at home. But the subways were running, and the museum was open, and my mother wanted to go. She had been cooped up for two years taking care of my father and needed a birthday.
If you look up Louise Bourgeois, as I think my mother did on her phone, the top search results include photographs of the artist posing with indelicate sculptures. If my mother had asked me why I wanted to take her to see this artist’s work—but she didn’t—I would have thought, Because I want to see it, I would have mumbled some shapeless words, I would not have been aware of any reasonable answer.
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“I AM NOT PARTICULARLY aware or interested in the erotic of my work.” It makes a nice joke as a possible caption to the famous portrait of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe. In the photograph, taken in 1982, Bourgeois is wrinkled but not yet definitively old (she would live until her ninety-ninth year). She wears a dark furry coat and she smiles, with a nearly two-foot-long sculpture of a penis tucked under her arm like a purse or an errand. It’s a delightful picture, and there was a time when I tagged Bourgeois’s own words to it and passed the joke along.
In my early twenties, when the art world was new to me, I found myself at a gathering where a sculptor who taught at an art school asked me which artists I liked. I mentioned, among others, Louise Bourgeois. “Everyone loves Louise Bourgeois,” she said, as if I were an eight-year-old who had just announced that her favorite place on earth...