As a sculptor, Louise Bourgeois is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential American artists. Born in Paris in 1911, she came to New York in 1938 and pursued a singular path in her art after World War II, creating a body of sculpture and installation works that was first surveyed in a retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1982.

Her increasing recognition since then culminated with the selection of her work to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

For most of her long career, her considerable body of printed work, exploring at an intimate scale many of the same personal and artistic concerns as her sculpture, remained largely unknown. In 1990 Bourgeois decided to donate her complete printed oeuvre to The Museum of Modern Art; that decision has made it possible for this important aspect of her achievement to be catalogued and presented to the public comprehensively in this book.