This extensive and detailed book, originally published in 2007, provides an overview of Bourgeois' entire career. Arranged as an A-Z, the book includes entries covering individual works, art movements, other artists and themes that have played an important role in Bourgeois’ life and art. The entries are written by a stellar cast of internationally respected authors and critics, including Paulo Herkenhoff, Rosalind Krauss, Julia Kristeva, Donald Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Mignon Nixon, Linda Nochlin, Alexander Potts, Robert Storr, Marina Warner and Deborah Wye. The book includes an illustrated biography, selected writings by the artist and a full chronology, making it the most thorough and up-to-date publication on the artist in print.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, settling in America in 1938. She began exhibiting in New York in the 1940s and has played a vital role in contemporary art for over half a century. Her 1982 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the gallery’s first ever retrospective of a woman artist. Since then, Bourgeois has exhibited worldwide, producing a beguiling body of work featuring spiders, cages, architectural works, drawings and a number of found and sculpted objects ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental.