Untouched since the day she died, Louise Bourgeois’ New York home-cum-studio offers an intimate portrait of the artist.
At 13ft wide, the townhouse in New York that was both home and studio to Louise Bourgeois is almost as tiny as the artist herself. It was here, on the site of an old apple orchard, half a mile from the shore of the Hudson river and Chelsea’s elevated railway, that Bourgeois moved back in 1962 when she was 51 years old. It was here too that she died almost half a century later at the age of 98.
The transition from domestic to work-space was engineered with maximum efficiency. When her husband died in 1973, she got rid of the dining table, then the stove, and turned their bedroom into a library for her self-help and psychology books.