Jerry Gorovoy met Louise Bourgeois in the late 1970s and was her assistant and best friend for over thirty years. Bourgeois made lots of drawings and sculptures of Jerry Gorovoy’s hands along with her own hands. She referred to these as intimate ‘portraits’. The Welcoming Hands 1996, located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, is a bronze sculpture of her hands clutching those of Jerry’s.

Bourgeois also depicted a representation of her friendship with Gorovoy in the multipart work 10 am Is When You Come To Me 2006. It consists of twenty hand-painted sheets that depict her hands and those of Gorovoy. The hands are mostly painted over printed musical score paper in red gouache paint. You can tell Bourgeois’s hands by the wedding ring she wore. The title relates to the time Gorovoy would arrive at Bourgeois’s studio or home to begin their daily routine working together.

Louise Bourgeois
Give or Take (2002)
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Artist Rooms Foundation 2013
© The Easton Foundation

Louise Bourgeois
10 am is When You Come to Me (2006)
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Artist Rooms Foundation 2013
© The Easton Foundation

Hands reoccur in many of Bourgeois’s works, often as a symbol of being dependent on someone who supports you. Give or Take 2002 can be read as a commentary on the sometimes conflicted reliance of friendship. This sculpture presents a two-handed limb – one open, the other clasped – an object that is simultaneously gentle and cold.

Earlier in her career Bourgeois had also used friendship as inspiration. Personages 1946-55, are totem-like wooden sculptures that she grouped together to create installations. They depict individuals and Bourgeois’s relationship with them, reflecting her homesickness and the people she left behind in Paris. Knife Couple 1949 is an example of these. Bourgeois often used her roof as a studio and the tall forms of the Personages suggest the skyscrapers and rooftops that surrounded her.

Love lifts them up so their feet scarcely touch the ground. Sweeping down like a comet, or an angel, he bends over backwards to kiss her. Chagall will soon be married to the teenage Bella, his beloved muse, and so the gravity-defying strength of their partnership begins. This is a vision of wild and sensual love, but also of transcendent adoration. The shawl-draped room is a kind of shrine. Chagall wrote of his future wife: “I had only to open my window and blue air, love and flowers entered in with her.”