Bourgeois grew up in Paris in an apartment above a gallery where her parents repaired and sold antique tapestries, and the family spent weekends at a country villa and workshop doing the same work^[2]. From a young age she designed the missing or worn sections of damaged tapestries and helped wash and mend them alongside her mother, to whom she was extremely close^[2]. That closeness sits at the centre of her account of the spider motif decades later: her mother ran the workshop, was clever and resourceful in the way Bourgeois associated with spiders, and the two were, in Bourgeois's own words, best friends^[1]. The technical skill with dyes and fabric she picked up as a child in that workshop later fed directly into her work as a sculptor^[1].

The household tension that runs through Bourgeois's work traces to a specific, sustained betrayal: her father's affair with the family's live-in tutor, who doubled as his mistress for close to a decade while residing with the family^[3][1]. Bourgeois's mother, meanwhile, contracted a serious illness that she chose to conceal from her husband, and Bourgeois found herself in the position of nursing her through it^[3]. Bourgeois described her mother as gentle and long-suffering against a domineering, womanising father who was, by most accounts, impossible to satisfy^[4]. These specific, named circumstances, not a generalised unhappy childhood, are what Bourgeois returned to across decades of work, including in her later Cell installations, which she said dealt directly with feelings of abandonment, betrayal, powerlessness and loss rooted in this period^[3].

Bourgeois worked for most of her career largely unrecognised outside a small circle of admiring peers. A 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when she was around seventy, marked the turning point that brought her wider attention^[4]. At the time, art critic Robert Hughes noted she was likely the least-known artist ever to receive a MoMA retrospective, describing her earlier reputation as slight compared with contemporaries such as Louise Nevelson^[5]. Two developments changed that: the end of the assumption that abstraction was art's only serious path forward, which opened space for her idiosyncratic late-Surrealist sculpture, and the rise of feminist art criticism, which found in her work a sustained, embodied treatment of female experience^[5]. She continued producing major work into her nineties, including the spider sculptures that only began once she was already in her eighties^[1].