the mother of all artists and the grooviest seventysomething

Ties that bind: The Couple, 2007-09, by Louise Bourgeois

© COMPTON VERNEY, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMIE WOODLEY

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists to have lived. I was only there for the tail end of her career but, absurdly, that was when all the action happened. She had been inventive, emotional, hair-raising and brilliant for many decades of her long creative life, but only in the final stretches was she noticed properly and fêted.

Bourgeois’ late blossoming was like someone taking a finger out of a dyke. Her belated fame cleared the way for all manner of previously silent voices to join the clamour: older women, people who worked with textiles, installation artists, inhibited surrealists, antimodernists of every persuasion. All of them realised with a jolt that if Bourgeois could suddenly be appreciated, so could they.

Older women