When Louise Bourgeois was a child, her father, who owned an antique tapestry gallery in Paris, had a 10-year long affair with her English governess. His betrayal, and its effect on the family dynamics, left Bourgeois with deep anxiety and bouts of depression. In 1938, at 26, she married the art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York with him, leaving France and her father behind (her mother died in 1932). There she began pursuing art in earnest, creating sculptures, paintings, and installations that explored female sexuality and the stresses of domesticity. She used her art to excavate her own traumatic childhood experiences. Female body parts, houses, and spiders were all recurring motifs in the artist’s work. “Art,” as Bourgeois once remarked, “is the experience and re-experience of a trauma.” —Paulina Prosnitz