Louise Bourgeois is recognized as a twentieth-century leader for her prolific production of sculptural and installation work as well as her printmaking and paintings. She was born in Paris in 1911, and studied art at the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, Atelier Fernand Léger, and the Art Students League in New York. By the 1960s, she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work: her childhood. Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two while exploring themes of death and the subconscious.
Her first retrospective was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1982–83), and her first European retrospective was assembled by the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany (1989–91). Bourgeois was selected to be the American representative to the 1993 Venice Biennale. Her collected writings were published in 1998. In 2000, I Do, I Undo, and I Redo—three 30-foot-high towers commissioned by the Tate Modern in London—were featured in the museum's inaugural exhibition. Many of her large-scale works have been exhibited as public art, including three spider sculptures installed at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2001 under the aegis of the Public Art Fund. Major museum retrospectives have since been organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2001–02); State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (2001–03); and Tate Modern, London (2007–08)—an exhibition that traveled to the Guggenheim Museum (2008).
Bourgeois' achievements have been recognized with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973), membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1981), a grand prize in sculpture from the French Ministry of Culture (1991), the National Medal of Arts (1997), the Leone d'Oro (1999), a Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (2005), the 2006 Intrepid Award from the National Organization for Women (2006), and the Woman Award from the United Nations and Women Together (2007), among others. Bourgeois died on May 31, 2010, in New York.