Book excerpt: In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.