Gastro-Vision: Bourgeois the Artist, Bourgeois the Cook

Louise Bourgeois, Avenza Revisited II, 1968-1969. Bronze, silver nitrate patina, 51 1/2 x 41 x 75 1/2 in. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth.

"Gastro-Vision" is my monthly food-art column on the Art21 blog. Here's an excerpt from this month's post:

The passing of Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) naturally prompted a host of critics to reflect on her life and artwork. They have written of her famed sculptures and textiles, recurring spider motif, pioneering exhibitions, childhood traumas, and the Sunday salons in her Chelsea home. Now, what about Bourgeois’s cooking?

They say that cooking is, like other art forms, an expression of one’s inner self. As I read Bourgeois’s obituaries, many of them recalling the artist’s charms and spunk, I began to wonder if she cooked? If her approach to food was anything like her approach to art? If her cooking looked like her artwork? Or what her artwork might tell us about her cooking? While these inquiries might seem random, chef Mario Batali has pointed out that “food, even more than art, allows an admirer to relate to [an] artist on common ground,” and there is perhaps no “better way to come to appreciate and understand an artist than through [her] appetite.” Luckily, I found that Bourgeois contributed to at least three cookbooks in her lifetime: The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook (1977) by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, Food Sex Art: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991) by Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf (aka EIDIA), and The Artist’s Palate: Cooking with the World’s Greatest Artists (2003) by Frank Fedele.

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