In the Court of Louise

In the spring of 1990, before a small audience in New York, the poet, painter and enfant terrible of the New York art world Rene Ricard read a selection of poems to Louise Bourgeois. The pair stood inside Gathering Wool, a Bourgeois installation of round wooden forms being exhibited for the first time in “Disturb Me,” a group show at the Massimo Audiello Gallery on Greene Street in SoHo, alongside works by Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman and Edward Ruscha. 

The never-before-seen recording that survives from that day offers a rare glimpse into Bourgeois’s sculptural world as a living theater: a space for performance, dialogue and confession. Standing within her own work, Bourgeois listens to and enters into an exchange with Ricard as he performs, his voice oscillating between charm and provocation. 

The writer and curator Raymond Foye, Ricard’s longtime friend, writes of this meeting of the two artists’ sensibilities: “Malevolent and elegant, these were like minds. At the center of both their work is the seed of modernism planted by Baudelaire, a new beauty—decadent, erotic, malformed, but somehow still classical. This is Rene Ricard in his role as courtier, royal advisor of intelligence and wit, retainer and entertainer to the kings and queens of the art world. He offers a bouquet of poems, his fleurs du mal, he tells her. They speak the same language.”