Louise Bourgeois’s Iconic Spider Sculptures Have a Surprising History

Louise Bourgeois’s art took many different forms, and it often explored topics such as memory, sex, and trauma. But the works that have come to define the late artist’s career are her sculptures of spiders, some of which tower 30 feet into the air and menacingly loom over viewers’ heads. Below is a guide to Bourgeois’s sculptural practice and why later in her life she chose the spider as the subject of her work.
Childhood traumas and early-career experiments laid the grou