12/08/2026
“Art is an exorcism. A tool for Survival.” ❤️
Fine artists do psychoanalysis.
Art is not decoration.
It is not polite.
It is not meant to sit quietly on a wall and make your living room look expensive.
Art is an exorcism.
A tool for survival.
Look at this woman.
Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old, sitting in her studio in 2009, brush in hand, painting her own print La Famille. Not directing assistants. Not supervising from a distance. She is doing it herself—slowly, deliberately, with the same intensity she brought to her work for more than seven decades.
The red is fierce. The lines are searching. The forms feel like they are still fighting their way out of something deep and private. Even at the end of her life, she was still excavating. Still casting out what lived inside her. Still refusing to let the past remain buried.
Bourgeois once said those exact words: “Art is an exorcism; a tool for survival.”
She meant it.
Her entire body of work—the spiders, the cells, the torn and stitched fabrics, the soft sculptures that look like both protection and threat—was never about making beautiful objects. It was about surviving what had already happened and what kept threatening to return. Childhood. Betrayal. Rage. Longing. The complicated, sometimes unbearable weight of family. She turned pain into form so it could not destroy her. She made the invisible visible so she would not be alone with it.
And here she is, nearly a century old, still doing the work. Still using her hands. Still practicing the only kind of psychoanalysis that ever truly mattered to her: the kind that happens in the studio, with materials that can hold what language cannot.
This photograph, taken by her great friend and studio assistant Alex van Gelder, is more than a portrait of an aging artist. It is evidence. Proof that the need to make, to confront, to transform does not retire. It does not soften with age. If anything, it becomes clearer. More urgent.
So the next time someone tells you art is a luxury, or a hobby, or something you do when everything else is finished—remember this image.
Remember the 97-year-old woman with the brush, still fighting, still healing, still surviving through the act of making.
Art is not a pastime.
It is a form of courage.
And for some of us, it is the only way we stay alive.
— Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, 2009
