Fame did not come to Louise Bourgeois immediately. Although the artist was friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, she managed to achieve a level of fame comparable to them only in old age. In the early 1970s, the work of 60-year-old Louise Bourgeois became popular in the wake of interest in the then nascent feminist art movement.
Louise Bourgeois has always championed women’s rights in the art scene. She said: “An artist will never be allowed to work in peace if she does not prove her right to exist in the art world over and over again.” Already in 1981, a retrospective exhibition of the artist took place in MоMA. In the last 20 years of her life, Louise Bourgeois created drawings and sculptures of huge spiders that became her hallmark. For the artist, the spider figure was both the embodiment of childhood fears and a reminder of her mother, her best friend and protector.