Best of the Noughts, #8 & #9: Picasso Sculpteur and Louise Bourgeois Retrospective at Centre Pompidou

I saw Picasso Sculpteur in 2000 and the Louise Bourgeois retrospective in 2008, both at the Centre Pompidou. The reason I want to write about them in the same piece - beyond not feeling sufficiently confident in my ability to write about art - is that they are both exhibitions of sculpture showcasing a real profusion of work.

By profusion, I don't mean an amount of work (although clearly they are both astonishingly prolific), but rather a work that shows energy, invention, effort and passion. In both cases, the artist carefully and brilliantly re-works and re-works and re-works a certain artistic trope, over and over, feverishly, madly, and using such a variety of means and materials that it's somewhat dizzying to contemplate. In the case of Bourgeois, it feels a lot like work - what with the scale and intellectual depth of her art - whereas in Picasso's it feels a lot like play, particularly when you see all the little yet brilliant objects he has sculpted off-hand. In both cases, you sense an artist whose sole preoccupation is the act of creating, and of re-creating. It suddenly makes so much sense to you, this need to make, to recreate things, to remodel your world and imprint on it your feelings and thoughts: it feels like the most sensible thing there could be.

In Bourgeois' case, I was very interested in the way she reflects her thoughts on gender and family through a metaphorical kind of act: the spiders she sculpts - these beautiful, spindly, dauntingly huge animals - are rendered somehow with a mounting tenderness as the exhibition progresses. At the beginning they seem to represent a primal fear - and they allude to her parents, who were weavers - but grow in scale to represent her views on motherhood. The spider is a nurturing, creating animal. The detail of her work is so incredible: her delicate embroidery sitting next to great, smooth shards of metal. At the same time, she perpetually seems to be reworking ideas of femininity and gender: in her early work, the male form is seen as an aggressor in a female world of roundness; care; comfort. There is a lot of terror here - for example in 'The Destruction of the Father' - and a lot of misunderstanding between men and women is injected into these forms, which seem otherworldly in their lack of definition. She also hints at similarities between the sexes - with 'Torso' for instance, or her brilliant 'Arch of Hysteria', where a man's body hangs weightless and genderless to rebut male views of feminine madness. This is what I love about her: she is someone who can only refract her views through the act of creation: so her devastating work centring on her feelings of loss and defeat during her years in New York is emotionally devastating because it addresses these things so simply. What I mean is that words and explanations are not needed as an extra: these works are complete. What is thrilling beyond this is this figure of Bourgeois herself, hanging over the exhibition - a relentless creator, and distiller of ideas, who has carried on composing, making, sewing, sculpting, and all on such a magnificent scale, well into her supposed dotage . This isn't her job - it's her life.

I feel that Picasso was a lot more playful than Bourgeois: I'm thinking especially of some of the smaller exhibits in this brilliant show, like his clever distortions of everyday objects such as paperclips, or his neat use of objets trouves, which he re-works into delightful flights of fancy. Nevertheless, seen over the length of his career, all of this adds up to a great batch - a block of important work. What was great with this exhibition was comparing these sculptures to the images in your mind: here comes a sculpture of Dora Maar, which beautifully changes its looks as you walk around, gathering so many expressions at once from whichever perspective you contemplate it, and you're able to see in your mind's eye his paintings of Maar in which he attempts to capture several perspectives at once into a 2D image. You get a sense of the real thoughts behind Cubism here. And it just keeps on coming: here are the sculptures of guitars (making ingenious use of cardboard and string) to complement his series of paintings; there are the meditations on absinthe (bronze, with spoons melded into a ragged, jarring sort of surface). There's a musicality to his sculpture, echoing jazz - free-form riffs on a theme, distancing themselves from pure reality, from easy melody. And all the way through there's his trademark eroticism, finding a sweet and warm, honest sexuality in women in the most inventive ways: the female form is again distilled and re-jigged with planks of wood, old metal bowls, rope, whatever you got. Again, there's that sense I alluded to, of someone constantly experimenting, always working and re-working, of trying new things. Here's his straightforward and brilliant sculpture of a goat; here's a Cubist interpretation of a woman; there's a series of little joke sculptures. It's wonderful.

What these exhibitions made me feel were a sort of love and admiration for these artists - of course - but more than that an exultation not in the object but in the creation of the object: the sheer messing around with stuff. I don't get that sense from many artists working today, but it may be that this is because these are career-encompassing exhibitions, showing the tireless imagination of two remarkable people.

Listening to: The xx, xx
Reading: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw