Louise Bourgeois: “So Brancusi was very old at the time. I know it was 53′.
He was very old at the time. And it was a kind of crucial moment in his life, where he was first self-supporting, and, he was a very strongman, lifting those enormous things, those pieces of lumber. He did that, because he was very tall and very strong.
And then, he suddenly became old and couldn’t do it anymore. And that was the changing, this changing time. I happened to meet him when his studio was much smaller than my studio in Brooklyn. It was very small. So he was cluttered with-he had a shape like this. And then suddenly, he had something to do, so he put that shape on another shape and another shape. And that’s why it’s a series of vases that are put on top of each other.
Pillars- They were pillars. And this never came to his mind,I don't know if he had one (others laughing) But it never came into his consciousness that they were pillars. That’s it. “
Amei Wallach: “So like the <Endless Column>, pillars in that sense.”
LB: “Right”
AW: “Phallic.”
LB: “I didn’t say that. You said that” AW:“I did”
LB: “They were pillars, because pillars had symbiotic reminiscences of the things that he saw in his youth.
I don’t know if he realized that mother image of the pillar. But he made it naturally. It came that way. And then when you are angry at the mother figure, you take the pillar, and you cut it in pieces, that I know.
And so it becomes-It reverts to the original shape that is a seat. It is a seat.”
LB:“It becomes a seat! You push it sideways. It becomes another seat a little lower. And then when you feel good and it feels that people like him and maybe he likes the people a little bit, then he builds up his sprits again. So it is like the game of a child.
You do it. And then you undo it. And then you redo it. And that’s the way I see him.”
-Louise Bourgeois, <Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine>
