The French American artist Louise Bourgeois spent her life making artwork – mostly alone – in her New York studio. Now, with a global pandemic, and the country on lockdown, it’s an arguably perfect time to look back on some of her drawings, which capture the poetry of solitude.

To celebrate her work, the New York gallery Hauser & Wirth has launched its first online exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings, 1947 – 2007, showcasing 14 drawings from the artist’s long career, which spanned seven decades. The gallery is calling it an online exhibit presentation and the drawings are featured alongside a short documentary of the artist in her studio.

“It’s a response to the current situation, in the sense that we’re all glued to our devices,” said Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth. “Obviously, we’re not capable of going out into museums and galleries, but we’re still interested in art. This is a possibility to share that.”

The drawings on view range from abstract landscapes to strange swirls, black holes and a pair of eyes gazing back at the viewer. There’s a pink butterfly, grass-strewn landscapes and one that simply says: I Love You.

“With drawing, she was capable of dealing with her anxieties,” said Payot. “To some extent, it has a nice parallel in what we’re all going through, collectively and individually. This selection of drawings is a great mirror for our current day-to-day.”

There’s one piece from 1986 called Spit or Star, which depicts two pairs of scissors, large and small, referencing her own family history in the French tapestry business. Often, her reference to the tools of the trade are connected to emotional repair, rebuilding and self-healing.

“Scissors are an aggressive tool of cutting, but they were also a familiar, tender thing with her family business,” said Payot. “It’s both.”

Louise Bourgeois – Spit or Star, 1986. Photograph: Photo: Christopher Burke

There’s also a red and blue landscape, Untitled, from 1970, which calls to mind the curves of a woman’s body. “That’s something repeating throughout her oeuvre, the body,” said Payot. “This piece is 50 years old, but looks like something out of a young artist’s studio from Brooklyn.”

Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 in Paris, started drawing as a child, and helped her parents through the day-to-day of their tapestry business, drawing templates for torn fabrics that needed repairing. Later, after becoming an artist in her own right, her drawings became the starting point for her larger artworks, like her steel and bronze sculptures. But her drawings were also a daily meditation.

“The drawings really had a healing effect, as she was overcoming pain and anxiety through her drawing,” said Payot. “We all need this, these days.”

Though she had her first solo show in 1945 at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York, it wasn’t until the Museum of Modern Art gave Bourgeois a retrospective in 1982, when she was already 70, that she took the art world by storm, riding the wave as a global art star until her death in 2010.

Drawings were a daily ritual of the artist, and she used ink, watercolor and pencil to record her thoughts through images and words. “I need to make things,” she once said. “The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.”

Louise Bourgeois in her home on West 20th Street, New York, 2000. Photograph: Jean-Francois JAUSSAUD/Photo: © Jean - François Jaussaud; © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the gallery’s short video (which could very well be the start of a feature documentary), Bourgeois explains: “My childhood has never lost its mystery, it has never lost its magic and it has never lost its drama.”

Fade to black.

“In this video clip, Louise speaks about the importance of drawing to her. It’s very touching,” said Payot. “When you do an exhibition online, it can’t just be a couple of images, we needed to add more. It’s the only way to see art now because you can’t go anywhere. For us, it’s a challenge but we’re working with that dilemma.”

Bourgeois is known for her giant spider sculptures but has also been called the reluctant hero of feminist art, for taking on the patriarchy, having lived through two world wars and making artwork about motherhood, rather than showing women as naked muses to male artists

The main theme in her work is overcoming the trauma of her childhood, though she didn’t always explain herself. She did once say, however: “To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.” Blocking out the busy New York art world was something she was an expert at. Loneliness didn’t seem to faze her.

Louise Bourgeois – Untitled, 1970. Photograph: Photo: Christopher Burke

Payot said that she hosted social gatherings for artists in her studio, where they would discuss artworks, like an old school Parisian salon. Bourgeois would often criticize other artists and their artworks. “That was her way to communicate and be in touch with the world,” he said. “But most of the time, she was isolated, interested in her work and not anything else.”

Though Bourgeois made much of her artwork about her childhood trauma and the complicated relationship between her mother and father, she also made artwork about the years her mother was critically ill from influenza and Bourgeois took care of her (sadly, her mother Joséphine died when her daughter was just 22).

Drawings were essential to her artistic process. They were often the start to her paintings and prints, even after she turned to sculpture in the 1940s. Some of these works, too, started as drawings. Her most well-known pieces, themed around a spider motif, started out as an ink and charcoal drawing in 1947.

Though she kept a written diary and a spoken diary (where she recorded her voice on to a tape recorder), her drawn diary was the most important to her. “Having these diaries means that I keep my house in order,” she once said.