When you break a bone, an x-ray gives you a clean visual proof of the damage. Childhood trauma offers no such image. Louise Bourgeois spent seventy years trying to build one anyway, sculpting anxiety, betrayal, and humiliation into monumental forms that the entire world would have to look at. This episode is a deep dive into the French-American artist whose career sat almost entirely outside the prevailing movements until the late-life retrospective that finally made her unignorable.

We trace the formative wound: a father who openly conducted a long affair with the family's English tutor while the household pretended not to see, set against her mother's quiet collapse. We unpack how that betrayal showed up in her work as recurring motifs of houses, hands, cages, and the spider, the towering Maman whose long legs reread her mother as  ...