Louise Bourgeois

Bourgeois grew up inside her parents' business: a Paris gallery and a workshop at Choisy-le-Roi that repaired antique tapestries, where as a child she was set to filling in the worn or missing sections of a weave. Her father ran a decade-long affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the Englishwoman hired to tutor his children, who lived in the household the entire time while Bourgeois's chronically ill mother looked away. Bourgeois studied mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne from 1930. Her mother's death in 1932 broke that plan, and she left mathematics for art school within the year, training under Fernand Léger among others, and rarely explained the switch.

She married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved with him to New York, where she worked in relative obscurity for four decades, carving totem-like wood figures in the 1940s before shifting through several sculptural languages without settling on one. The break came in 1982, when the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective at 70 and she said publicly, for the first time, what the work had been about all along: a childhood spent absorbing her father's betrayal. Destruction of the Father, from 1974, restaged that household as a cannibal feast. In her 80s she built room-sized Cells on confinement and fear, and in 2000 Tate Modern's Turbine Hall got Maman, a bronze spider more than 30 feet tall, built as a tribute to her mother the weaver.

Recognition came so late that it reads now like an indictment of everyone who had overlooked her: Bourgeois was 70 before the art world gave her a serious retrospective, and she had spent the intervening decades making the work in relative obscurity while raising 3 sons — 1 adopted — with a husband she outlived by 37 years. Her eldest, Michel, died in 1990, a loss almost absent from the critical writing that otherwise treated every detail of her childhood as material. The imbalance is stark: an artist who spent a career publicly dissecting a decades-old paternal betrayal said almost nothing, in that same public voice, about her own son's death. Some rooms of the self, evidently, stayed closed even after 1982 opened the rest of the house.

She worked until the week she died, finishing pieces just before heart failure took her at 98 on May 31, 2010, in New York. Her final year included I Do, made in support of same-sex marriage, activism she had first joined with ACT UP in 1993. The Easton Foundation, built from her estate, now controls a body of work whose market only inflated after she stopped adding to it: a cast of Maman sold for 10.7 million dollars in 2011 and another for 28.2 million in 2015. The retrospective that took 70 years to arrive now travels constantly, to the Tate, the Pompidou and the National Gallery.

Louise Bourgeois's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Femme Maison series artwork
  Women's bodies replaced by houses 1946
• Destruction of the Father artwork
  Restaged her childhood household as a cannibal feast 1974
• Cell series artwork
  Room-sized enclosures on confinement and fear, built through her 80s 1991
• Maman artwork
  The Tate Modern cast premiered in 2000, over 30 feet tall 1999
• I Do artwork
  Made in her final year, in support of same-sex marriage 2010

• December 25, 1911 aged 0 Born in Paris
• 1930 aged ~19 Begins studying mathematics and geometry at the Sorbonne
• 1932 aged ~21 Her mother dies, and she leaves mathematics for art school
• 1938 aged ~27 Marries Robert Goldwater and moves to New York
• 1945 aged ~34 Holds her first solo exhibition
• 1974 aged ~63 Creates Destruction of the Father
• 1982 aged ~71 The Museum of Modern Art gives her a retrospective at 70 She spoke publicly for the first time about the autobiographical roots of her work.
• 2000 aged ~89 Maman premieres at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
• May 31, 2010 aged 98 Dies in New York City, age 98

• Alexander Calder 1898–1976
  Sculptor who invented the mobile and whose kinetic sculptures changed modern art. fellow sculptor of her adopted city
• Jackson Pollock 1912–1956
  Abstract expressionist whose drip painting technique revolutionized modern art. exhibited alongside without joining the movement
• Jasper Johns b. 1930
  Painter and printmaker whose Flag and Target paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. shared her late-career market surge
• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. preceded her in reshaping American art