A Look Inside Louise Bourgeois’s Home, Just How She Left It

Unlike Paris, where the homes and studios of Auguste Rodin, Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Moreau are on the standard tourist itinerary, New York has a paucity of artist’s house museums. Painters and sculptors in Manhattan have typically inhabited lofts, and when they move on, others take over the spaces. One of the few examples is 101 Spring Street, the Donald Judd house in SoHo, which is open by reservation for tours. A pristine cast-iron building, with sunny rooms that accommodate beautifully installed Minimalist art and Judd-designed furniture, it stands as a shiny, bright masculine yang. At long last, it has its corresponding yin: the recessed, cluttered Chelsea townhouse that was occupied by Louise Bourgeois.

It seems fitting that the Judd house is supported by columns, and the Bourgeois home is topped by an oval skylight that is painted in the artist’s favorite aquamarine tint, a blend of Prussian blue, white and a touch of ocher. A wildly original artist, Bourgeois lived for almost half a century at 347 West 20th Street, a narrow, 19th-century brick rowhouse. A nonprofit organization, the Easton Foundation, which she set up in the 1980s, has opened the house to small arts-related groups. And this summer, the house will be accessible to the public, through tours arranged on the foundation’s website, theeastonfoundation.org. Shortly before she died in 2010 at 98, Bourgeois purchased the adjacent house from her neighbor, the costume designer William Ivey Long. It now functions as a small exhibition gallery of her work, temporary quarters for visiting scholars, and the site of a library and archive.

The townhouse adjacent to Bourgeois’s home now functions as a small exhibition gallery of her work, a temporary residence for visiting scholars and the site of a library and archive. Credit All rights reserved The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Daniel Krieger for The New York Times

Her own residence, though, is the chief attraction. More than...