Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was born into a family that sold and restored antique tapestries, so perhaps it’s no surprise that she became an artist. But it was the emotional dynamics between her parents that would prove to have the most lasting impact on her art. Bourgeois père was a tyrant who strayed from his marriage frequently, even as her mother ignored his philandering. The pall of co-dependency hanging over Bourgeois’s childhood would find its way into her work, especially in her famous spider sculptures, which immortalized her mother as a web-spinning arachnid. Over her long her career, she became personally acquainted with prominent Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, and while her work assimilated aspects of theirs, her style was sui generis.