Part-gothic horror, part-Acorn Antiques: Louise Bourgeois, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the Father’ (1974). The father in question was not her American late husband Robert Goldwater, the father of her children, but her own French father Louis Bourgeois, long deceased. Set in a space evoking the interior of a digestive tract, the installation’s centrepiece was a table bearing the remains of an imagined feast at which Louise and her brother had eaten their dominating father after dismembering him and cutting off his penis.

You have been warned. There is nothing soft about Bourgeois’s soft sculptures, though — on the evidence of the Hayward’s new exhibition of her late textile works —they did soften with age. In her eighties this extraordinarily tenacious artist, still working until the week before her death in 2010 aged 98, returned to the material she had first handled as a child in her parents’ Parisian tapestry restoration workshop, where she was given the task of redrawing the feet worn away at the bottom of antique tapestries. Her industrious mother ran the workshop in a Paris suburb, while her cheating father fronted the gallery in the Boulevard Saint-Germain and conducted a succession of affairs, including with his daughter’s young English tutor. Bourgeois kept this childhood trauma to herself and her psychotherapist until at the ripe age of 70, to coincide with her first retrospective at MoMA, she spilled her guts in, of all places, Artforum.

For a male artist this could have been career-ending, but the art world loves a woman with a traumatic history. Although self-confessedly therapeutic, Bourgeois’s art is not confessional: unlike Frida Kahlo’s or Tracey Emin’s, it’s not all about her. It does, however, enshrine a lot of personal memorabilia: in ‘Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife)’ (2001), frocks from her past are mounted on dressmaker’s dummies; in ‘Untitled’ (1996), old items of lingerie are suspended on cow bones from a metal frame reminiscent of a drip stand.