Louise Bourgeois came to fame late in life. Not until she was 70 did the art world fully embrace her tortured, deeply personal and psychologically loaded abstract sculptures, and then the world seemed to be overrun by her gigantic spiders. Into her 90s, she was still working six days a week and presided over a room full of young artists who came to pay homage at the feet of their heroine at the weekly salons she held in her Chelsea brownstone in Manhattan.
"I became a sculptor because it allowed me to express - this is terribly, terribly important - what I was embarrassed to express before," she said.
The third daughter born to a French couple who dealt in antique tapestries, she learnt later in life that her father had a 10-year affair with the English governess appointed to teach the young Bourgeois children, and the dreadful fact of his betrayal was the fuel for much of her subsequent art, most notably her celebrated 1974 tableau, The Destruction of the Father. It featured a table bearing a selection of biomorphic shapes moulded in latex and communicated, Bourgeois explained, a childhood fantasy of a dinner table where family members pull a pompous father onto the table, dismember him and consume his body parts. For this, and other sculptures, Bourgeois found her work championed by the nascent feminist movement, something with which she was never entirely at ease.
Bourgeois never intended to be an artist. Her passions were mathematics and philosophy, the subjects she studied at the Sorbonne from the age of 20, after 12 years at Paris's Lycée Fénelon.
She liked solid geometry, a field in which, she said, "relations can be anticipated and are eternal". But she became disillusioned with mathematics and turned to painting. During her early 20s she studied with various artists in Paris, finding her favourite in Fernand Léger, who told her that she was not a painter but a sculptor.
In 1936, she met Robert Goldwater, an American art history student. The two married, moved to New York - a city she loved - and had three sons. She was attracted by his rationality - the same quality that had drawn her to mathematics - and by the fact that he never once showed her any anger.
Her first solo show, which took place in 1949, featured Personages, slim, pole-like figures, some bronze, some wood; one had wings, another was spiked with nails while others bore similar signs of suffering. Over time, her figures became messier and wilder. She withdrew from the public sphere while continuing to show her work, which fell under the umbrella of Abstract Expressionism.
As the vogue for Modernism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, Bourgeois's sculptures attracted more attention, and in 1966 featured alongside sculptures by a young Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse in the Eccentric Abstraction exhibition that would achieve lasting fame. By that decade's end she was carving large figures from marble in Italy, entering a new phase that she referred to as "symbolic abstraction". The symbolism was blatant and she was always eager to explain in detail to members of the press exactly what an object's intended significance was.
With Goldwater's death in 1973, she flourished. In 1982, New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Bourgeois retrospective: it was the first time that the institution had honoured a female artist.
In 1992, the Guggenheim inaugurated its new SoHo branch with a show entitled From Brancusi to Bourgeois. The following year, she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. In 2000, when the Tate Modern opened in London, its first exhibition was by Bourgeois: her massive, spooky spider entitled Maman stood sentinel in the gallery's Turbine Hall.
She is survived by her two sons. A third predeceased her.
Born on December 25, 1911; died on May 31.
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THE BIO
Favourite book: ‘Purpose Driven Life’ by Rick Warren
Favourite travel destination: Switzerland
Hobbies: Travelling and following motivational speeches and speakers
Favourite place in UAE: Dubai Museum
Libya's Gold
UN Panel of Experts found regime secretly sold a fifth of the country's gold reserves.
The panel’s 2017 report followed a trail to West Africa where large sums of cash and gold were hidden by Abdullah Al Senussi, Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief, in 2011.
Cases filled with cash that was said to amount to $560m in 100 dollar notes, that was kept by a group of Libyans in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
A second stash was said to have been held in Accra, Ghana, inside boxes at the local offices of an international human rights organisation based in France.
How to get there
Emirates (www.emirates.com) flies directly to Hanoi, Vietnam, with fares starting from around Dh2,725 return, while Etihad (www.etihad.com) fares cost about Dh2,213 return with a stop. Chuong is 25 kilometres south of Hanoi.
Isle of Dogs
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Ed Norton, Greta Gerwig, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson
Three stars
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
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“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
