French-American contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois, known for her series of giant metal spiders, died Monday in New York at the age of 98, a spokeswoman said. “I am very sad to confirm that Louise passed away this morning at Beth Israel Hospital after suffering a heart attack on Saturday night,” said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.
Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois studied mathematics at the Sorbonne and later studied art at the Louvre and the École des Beaux-Arts. She married American art historian, Robert Goldwater, and the couple moved to New York in 1938. She continued her studies in the U.S. and began her art career there. Her work was almost unknown to the wider art world until she was 70, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her career.