Louise Bourgeois was a remarkably prolific and giving artist, who over a lifetime of working created a language — beautiful, organic, sometimes terrifying, sensual, and abstract — that taught you what listening was really about. She was self-sacrificing in her work, which often necessitated an exploration of guilt and shame and littleness, as well as that inherently fraught and awkward business of human interaction. But she went down into the shadows only to climb back up, bearing something to give, every time, and most present in her work is a strong, clear drive for rapport, what she called the “toi et moi”, our need to understand and connect with each other, without which we would be very lost. Her work communicated the universal, but in that strange, particularizing way it was also instantly recognizable as hers. As Bourgeois herself said in 1994, “All our subjects are the same: anything I say would apply to any of us. So, it’s not a mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.”