If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain

We can imagine that Bourgeois, who suffered at times from social phobia and depression, spent a large amount of time in her studio trying to express her sentiments in the form of art, dealing with few people and a great many drafts and compositions. To the artist, the studio—unlike the exhibition space, which is more or less a stage—is the battlefield of the war against herself, and the fortress that guards her from the ordinary life. At a corner of a staircase at the Long Museum floats a headless, naked figure arching its back, named Arch of Hysteria (1993). While visiting the museum, I met Jerry Gorovoy—a nice and gentle man who worked as Bourgeois’s assistant for three decades—and he told me that he was the model for the figure. Artworks that come from their creators’ complex feelings always have the magical ability to evoke your memories and feelings, regardless of whether the works take the form of an old cage, a paragraph of words and phrases, frayed fabric, or a red head.

We could interpret Bourgeois from several perspectives, although it is difficult to obtain a comprehensive understanding of her. She worked amid the transition from the age of Modernism to the contemporary era. Her early abstract sculptures, originally made of wood and plaster and later cast in bronze, have the features of modern structuralism. Her fabric sculptures, like many of her earlier paintings, are full of personal memories and pains. She is equally famous for her incredible longevity, and everyone talks about the fact that she kept working until the last minute of her life. At the thought of Bourgeois, a tiny old lady with a wrinkled face emerges in our mind. We cannot decide whether longevity is a blessing or a torment to this woman with her abundant, intense emotions, but if we take life as a war against time, she clearly had good fortune.

I learned of Bourgeois’s life story from a documentary called The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine. She is a valuable example of an artist who proves that the process of artistic creation is analogous to that of personal healing. Her desire for self-expression derives from memories that she was unable to forget, as if she were taking inspiration from her scars. Even in her old age,