Public Eye

I got out of the office for a little bit Friday morning to head down to the press preview of the new retrospective of French-American artist Louise Bourgeois at MOCA -- because getting out into the world is good, and because art is a tonic for the soul.

As you can see from her scary, huge -- it's the first thing the gallery visitor sees, and it must be 15 feet tall -- metal spider and assemblage above, the work of Bourgeois is not an ordinary art tonic along the lines of meditating on a Monet water lily, say.

Rather, here's what's a tonic about being in the presence of her work: Bourgeois is 96 years old, and she's still working ever day.

As MOCA Director Jeremy Strick told the assembled crowd of art scribes this morning, that means Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 and came to this country in 1938, has had a longer working career than almost any other artist. MOCA defines "contemporary" art as dating from about 1940 -- the earliest piece in its permanent collection is by Piet Mondrian, c. 1939 -- so that Bourgeois, already an artist when she came to New York with her art historian husband, was present at the creation of what we see as contemporary, and is the only major artist whose career has spanned its entire history.

In a 2007 etching in the show's final room, she scrawls in pencil below her drawing, "It is not so much where my motivation comes from but how it manages to survive."

In the New York Review of Books dated Oct. 23, Sanford Schwartz noted of the show, which most recently was at the Guggenheim in Manhattan, "Perhaps the most amazing of the many remarkable aspects of Louise Bourgeois is that if she had died in her middle seventies we would not have known how daring, strange, ambitious or disturbing an artist she could be."

I find her longevity, and her ability to work in advanced old age at the weird cutting edge of it all, shying away from nothing, an amazing affirmation of life.

The show -- made possible, by the way, by significant grants from Pasadenans Betye Burton and Ann and Olin Barrett -- opens to the public Sunday, running through Jan. 25.