Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois grew up outside Paris, in Choisy-le-Roi and then Antony, where her parents ran a workshop restoring antique woven wall hangings. As a girl she redrew the worn-out parts of the designs, often the feet of figures. That was her first real contact with art.

She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne, then switched to art after her mother died in 1932. Fernand Léger saw her drawings and told her she was a sculptor, not a painter. In 1938 she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York. She stayed for the rest of her life and became an American citizen. So she was not born an English speaker: she is at Lady Gallery because New York is where she made her work, over more than seventy years.

Recognition came late. Her first retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, opened when she was 70. Around it she explained that her imagery came from childhood, above all from her father’s long affair with the children’s young English tutor. Destruction of the Father (1974) was her first large piece in soft materials like latex and fabric. In her eighties she built the Cells, closed rooms filled with personal objects.

Start with Maman (1999), a spider more than nine metres high. She described it as a tribute to her mother, who mended fabric the way a spider spins. That same year she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. She kept working until the week before she died, in New York, in 2010, aged 98.