Artist's web of female issues

The French-born artist Louise Bourgeois, who died on Monday, was a pioneer of art that depicted the lives of women in the early 20th century, writes AIDAN DUNNE

WHEN TATE Modern opened in 2000, the first artist invited to exhibit in the vast Turbine Hall was Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American sculptor who has just died. She devised a huge long-legged sculpture of a spider which she titled Maman(she associated spiders with her mother), and three architectural towers stocked with smaller sculptural objects.

The playful surrealism of her work and the strange darkness of her imagination had a fantastic impact on the visitors who flocked to this new cathedral of the art world.

Bourgeois was born into a family of tapestry restorers in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911.

Her mother, Josephine, who named her after the radical anarchist Louise Michel, was a strong woman and an independent thinker, but her growing daughter was appalled by the fact that she chose not to notice her domineering husband’s 10-year affair with the English governess. A vision of family and home as a crucible of power relations, with extremes of strength and vulnerability, desire and frustration, anger and fear and, above all, pain, became central to Bourgeois’s work over her lifetime.

Initially she studied mathematics, then switched to art. When she married art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 they moved to New York City, where she remained, saying that it was her move across the Atlantic that allowed her to flourish artistically.

Through the 1940s her Femme Maison series of paintings featured the startling hybrid image of a woman merging with the domestic dwelling that entraps and defines her.

In making intensely personal work rooted in an embodied, female perspective she was ahead of her time, and she was respected though relatively overlooked until Lucy Lippard included her in her Eccentric Abstraction show in 1966.

Gradually, with the increasingly cultural impact of the feminist movement, art and its audience developed in ways that were more responsive to Bourgeois’s work, and her reputation grew steadily from the mid-1970s.

New York's Museum of Modern Art devoted a retrospective to her in 1982. In a celebrated photograph of her taken by Robert Mapplethorpe at the time, the grinning, diminutive Bourgeois clutches her own distinctly phallic sculpture, Fillette, under her arm. By the 1990s there was a widespread preoccupation with body and gender issues in art and, as Elaine Showalter wrote, Bourgeois became "a magnetic figure for art critics, especially feminist art historians and theorists".

As well as conventional materials like bronze and stone she used a range of other media with bodily associations, including her own discarded clothing and latex. The Cells, spiders and other images she used throughout the 1990s were recognisably derived from her earlier work, and she didn’t mellow with age. What remains striking is her willingness to combine the sensual with the disturbing, the erotic with the repellent. She is widely acknowledged as an influence on a younger generation of artists including Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley. Closer to home one can detect a distinct empathy and, on occasion, outright influence, in the work of Dorothy Cross, Daphne Wright, Maud Cotter and Alice Maher.