New York artist Louise Bourgeois (born 1911) was one of the most celebrated sculptors in the period following World War II. Although the stylistic evolution of her work defies art historical categorization and her iconography is completely intimate and overtly sexual, Bourgeois' sculptures are exemplary of 20th-century artistic currents during the most controversial period of American art.

At the age of 82, Louise Bourgeois represented the United States in the prestigious 1993 Venice Biennale. Bourgeois' sculptures were on special exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C.; her prints were on exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and a selection of her drawings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although this may have been a hallmark year in Bourgeois' lengthy career, her relatively quiet emergence into American mainstream art began over fifty years earlier in New York City.

Bourgeois was...