Jerry Gorovoy, Louise Bourgeois's assistant for thirty years, and their work together

On the road I read an essay about Jerry Gorovoy, the American who worked as Louise Bourgeois's assistant for almost thirty years. The author describes him as a man who protected the artist and tirelessly promoted her work.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, moved to New York in 1938 and became one of the major figures of twentieth-century art. The general public knows her above all for her enormous sculptures of spiders, while critics particularly prize her "Cells", that is, installations in the form of enclosed spaces containing objects that preserve the artist's memories.

When Gorovoy was a teenager, a fortune-teller predicted that he would link his life with a much older woman. More than ten years later he began a tense friendship and collaboration with the 68-year-old Louise Bourgeois. In 1980 the young curator Gorovoy included one of her works in a group exhibition at the Max Hutchinson Gallery, and that exhibition became his curatorial debut. Their friendship began with a quarrel. After that Gorovoy and Bourgeois worked together for thirty years, until her death in 2010 at the age of 98.

If the story of the fortune-teller is not invention, it is amusing to wonder: might a man not have programmed himself in this way, fixing on precisely that age wedge and in the end joining himself to it?

Their working day began at 10 in the morning. Bourgeois once compared herself to a person at the bottom of a well looking for a saviour, and said that in her case Jerry comes and lowers a rope. The artist dedicated to their friendship a work called "10 AM Is When You Come to Me". It consists of twenty sheets of music paper on which Bourgeois traced and coloured her own hands and those of Gorovoy. The viewer tells the artist's hands apart by the wedding ring. The critic Robert Storr even called Gorovoy Bourgeois's muse and a man without whom her late works are hard to imagine.

Today Gorovoy heads the Easton Foundation, which manages Bourgeois's legacy. He curates the artist's exhibitions around the world. In particular, he spoke about his years of work with Bourgeois and about the creation of the "Cells" series at the Garage Museum in Moscow