The Russian aggression against Ukraine is now in its fifth month. From the first days of the invasion, Russian troops have been destroying the country’s cultural heritage. A common question has been: is this destruction deliberate? Some Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of ‘cultural genocide’.

‘Je vois red’ raged Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) on one of the loose sheets of paper that she made notes on, most often about herself and her work and, in this case, about the painting Natural history #2 (1944; Easton Foundation, New York), which struck her as all going wrong. Slipping between two languages, Bourgeois’s fury conforms to the themes of rage, the death drive and childhood aggression that the art historian Mignon Nixon has traced in the artist’s work in reference to the ideas of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.