Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was born on Christmas Day in Paris, into a family that ran a workshop restoring antique tapestries. As a child, she was given a genuinely formative task: filling in the missing, damaged sections of the tapestries her parents restored, drawing the scenes back into existence by hand — an early education in mending, repetition, and the body as recurring subject matter. Around 1918, her mother fell seriously ill with Spanish influenza, and her father began a decade-long affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the family's young English governess, who continued living in the household throughout. Bourgeois later called it a "double betrayal," one that shaped nearly everything she made for the rest of her life as an artist.

When her mother died in 1932, Bourgeois abandoned the mathematics degree she had been pursuing at the Sorbonne — she later said she had turned to numbers for their certainty, a refuge from her chaotic family life — and committed herself to art instead. Her father, displeased, refused to pay her tuition; she paid her own way translating for English-speaking students at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, using the very language skills Sadie had once taught her. In 1938, she married art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York, where she raised three sons while continuing to make artwork that drew, with increasing directness, on the wounds of her own childhood.

Destruction of the Father (1974), one of Louise Bourgeois's most confrontational early installations, staged a visceral, cave-like scene built around the fantasy of literally devouring her father — the clearest statement of the rage that defined the first half of her career as an artist. In her final fifteen years, that anger gave way to a different subject: her mother. "My mother was my best friend," she said. "Like a spider, my mother was a weaver" — patient, protective, and quietly formidable. The spider became her defining late motif, culminating in Maman (1999), a monumental bronze and steel sculpture created as the inaugural commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000, when Bourgeois was nearly ninety years old.

Recognition, when it finally arrived, arrived in full: her 1982 retrospective was MoMA's first ever dedicated to a woman artist, followed by documenta 9 (1992), US representation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and a major touring retrospective at Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou (2007–08). She continued working until shortly before her death in New York on 31 May 2010, aged 98.

Destruction of the Father (1974), among her most confrontational early artworks, staged a visceral, cave-like installation built around the fantasy of devouring her own father — rage translated directly into sculptural form, decades before she would permit herself to make anything gentler.

Maman (1999), her defining late artwork, is a monumental bronze, steel, and marble spider standing over nine metres tall, created as the inaugural commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000 — an explicit tribute to her mother, a weaver, rendered at a scale that turns protection into something genuinely awe-inspiring.

Spider (1996), Louise Bourgeois's auction record at $32,804,500 (Sotheby's New York, 2023), remains the most expensive artwork by a woman artist ever sold at auction — confirmation, decades after her breakthrough, of exactly how far her reputation has travelled.

Louise Bourgeois's signed prints carry the same psychological directness as her sculpture into an intimate, often text-based format — hand-drawn imagery fused with handwritten confession, language treated as texture to cut into and repeat rather than caption added afterward. I Have Been to Hell and Back (Red), The Reticent Child (Ex Libris), and artworks from her Recueil des Secrets portfolio carry that intimacy across signed, limited edition formats both large and small.

Because her major sculptures now regularly reach into the tens of millions at auction, Louise Bourgeois prints and editions represent one of the most direct and genuinely attainable ways to own an original artwork by this artist — carrying the same raw psychological charge at a considerably more accessible scale.

For collectors, her prints and editions offer entry into the practice of one of the most significant women artists of the twentieth century, whose reputation arrived decades later than it should have. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.