An icon for our age

LOUISE BOURGEOIS is now probably the most famous sculptor living, yet her arrival into world fame has been late in her career - in fact, it hardly happened until her old age. She is 85 years old this year and, apparently, still active mentally and physically, when other leading artists of her generation are either dead or moving into geriatric immobility.

Since the early 1980s Bourgeois has shot into virtual cult status, which is not merely through her considerable gifts as a sculptor and graphic artist. Though she is not (to my knowledge anyway) a card carrying feminist, she has an almost iconic standing as a "woman artist" expressing a distinctive, even embattled female sensibility. This does not make her a fashionable man hater, or one of the media heroines of America (where she lives) who make comfortable livings by denouncing patriarchal society and culture, while themselves following distinctly middle class lifestyles.

Bourgeois is a vehement, visceral, uncomfortable artist who pushes her imagery to extremes, but she does not preach and her mentality is not simplistic or propagandist in the usual sense. She was born in Paris in 1911 - on Christmas Day, incidentally - to parents who ran a tapestry business. As part of this family trade, she learned to draw in her early teens, and later she attended the Sorbonne, the Ecole du Louvre and the Academic des Beaux Arts. At the Sorbonne she studied calculus and solid geometry - interesting in view of the fact that her later work, at least, is so free and non formalist. She also worked in a number of private studios, including Ledger's.

In 1938 Bourgeois married an American art historian, Robert Goldwater, and moved with him to New York where she has been based ever since. Apart from more studies at the Art Students' League, she attended W.S. Hayter's famous Atelier 17 and mastered graphic techniques. Curiously, she does not appear at this stage to have thought of herself as a sculptor; between 1938 and 1949 print making was her central activity. Still very little known, she worked virtually in private and rarely produced editions of her work many of the prints, it seems, remain as unique images. She also painted, though again, it seems to have been almost for herself alone.

Her debut as a sculptor finally came in 1949 at, the Peridot Gallery in NY, when she showed a series' of tall, thin, rather totemic pieces made from wood. Photographs suggest the various influences of Brancusi, Giacometti, Noguchi and David Smith; and the works were intended to be grouped around the viewer - the first sign of Bourgeois's concern with "environmental" and ensemble effects, rather in the Baroque tradition A little later, she organised her forms into assemblages suggesting landscape or architecture using painted wood - in which, incidentally, she seems to have preceded Louise Nevelson.

In the 1960s, still an unfashionable figure and almost ignored by the "critical punits" such as Clement Greenberg, she increasingly found her own sculptural language which often involved the use of materials hitherto discouraged, including plaster, rubber, cement etc. It was the great age of "anti form", when Claes Oldenburg was at his peak and Eva Hesse and others were producing free, quasi experimental sculpture exploiting everything from string to glass.

Bourgeois, however, went her own way and did not get trapped in this phase of New Yorker art, much of which seems dated and shapeless today, even self indulgent. Neither formalism nor anti formalism seems to have satisfied her, and she moved more and more into an area in which biological shapes and concerns - particularly women's bodies, or portions of them - have become almost obsessive. Breasts may loom out of a lump of marble, soft and hard materials are often used side by side, there is often a sense of primitive ritual and initiation. A lot of her work sprawls and needs space, and she is in fact a pioneer of "installation" art, which, has been such a mixed blessing.

WHEN her husband died in 1973 she went back to printmaking, which she has practiced industriously ever since; while pouring out a wealth of sculptures. Her energy is daunting, since somehow she has also found time to teach and to lecture. Louise Bourgeois goes deep into her past and family life for her themes - the prints, in particular, sometimes depict scenes of her husband and children, and the "home" has obsessed her as a theme, (perhaps because, as a young girl, her domestic equilibrium was broken when her father insisted on bringing his mistress into the family circle). Plainly, she is deeply conscious of the shifting role or place of women in a world which itself has changed hugely inside a generation.

Bourgeois has by most accounts a powerful personality, which has had a big, wide ranging influence on younger artists, both, stylistically and emotionally. A late developer, she has kept the best wine until last and although she has identified with America and American art, it is not hard to see how the legacy of French surrealism and all the "irrationalist" side of French art since the 1930s has bitten deep. She belongs to, no movement or group, but that has not stopped her from becoming virtually an icon for her era.