Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris and became one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an artist whose work drew relentlessly on personal memory, childhood trauma, and the complexities of family relationships. The daughter of tapestry restorers, she studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to art, and moved to New York in 1938 with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater.
For decades Bourgeois worked in relative obscurity, producing paintings, prints, and increasingly powerful sculptures that explored themes of sexuality, motherhood, and the body with unflinching honesty. Her breakthrough came with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, when she was seventy-one — making her one of the rare artists to achieve recognition and critical acclaim in old age. From this point her work grew in scale and ambition: The Destruction of the Father (1974), a cavernous environment of organic forms, dramatizes a fantasy of devouring the patriarchal father; her “Cell” installations of the 1990s enclose personal objects in cage-like structures that function as chambers of memory and emotion.
Maman (1999), a thirty-foot bronze spider installed at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, is her most famous work — a monument to her mother, the weaver and protector, rendered in a form that is simultaneously nurturing and terrifying. Bourgeois continued producing major work until her death in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight, and her example — her insistence that art must come from the deepest personal sources — has inspired generations of artists.