Art · 20th century
1911–2010 · French-American
Sculpture and installation — confessional, psychoanalytic modernism
Louise Bourgeois turned a childhood in a family tapestry workshop, and her father's long affair with her English governess, into seventy years of art about memory, the body and the mother. She is best known for giant steel spiders and for the Cells, caged rooms furnished with beds, mirrors and marble body parts. Fame came late: her first major retrospective was at 70.
A nine-metre steel spider with a sac of thirty-two marble eggs, made for the opening of a converted London power station (1999)
Tate Modern, London (casts in Bilbao, Ottawa, Tokyo, Doha and elsewhere)
Maman — 'the spider is an ode to my mother', who repaired tapestries
Image: John Talbot · CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Three steel towers with spiral stairs and mirrors, installed with the giant spider in the first commission for a vast former turbine hall (2000)
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
The inaugural Turbine Hall commission when Tate Modern opened in 2000
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A red, cave-like room of latex forms hung from the ceiling above a table, made about a family dinner and a fantasy of cannibalism (1974)
Glenstone Museum, Maryland
The Destruction of the Father — the work she said released her from her childhood
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A series of drawings and sculptures in which a house replaces a woman's head and torso (1947)
Various collections
Femme Maison — 'woman house'; an emblem of feminist art from the 1970s onwards
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Caged rooms of found doors and wire mesh containing beds, spools of thread and marble body parts (1991)
Various collections, including Tate and the Guggenheim Bilbao
The Cells, made from the 1990s; each one is about a kind of pain
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A three-metre bronze spider, one of a series, that sold for $32.8 million in 2019 — a record for a woman sculptor (1997)
Private collection
Spider (1997), which incorporates a caged Cell beneath the body
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia