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There is no one today in the world that has her stature. That occupies exactly the place that she occupied.

Mostly in black and white photographs, the wrinkles and the childhood memories in different books and magazines, then the red, the repeated red, some pink, tapestries, rooms, spiders and the fierce delicacy of the pen, the etchings. Albert Camus has written: ‘It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us’. Such is not only the artistic persona of Louise Bourgeois, but also the persistent yet fugitive body of work that she leaves behind after 98 years from her birth on Christmas Day in 1911.

Every day tragedies and frustrations but also metaphysical absurdity define her work, which rightly Lucy Lippard resurrected in the Eccentric Abstraction exhibition in 1966, reawakening the presence of what was then a half forgotten middle-aged woman. It is there, in this context, that she was placed next to artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. It must have been strange to be exhibited next to these young artist, while as a young girl herself she lived in Paris above what would become Andre Breton’s gallery Gradiva, and later in New York her husband the art historian Robert Goldwater would investigate ‘primitivism’ in modern painting as she had a cup of tea with her best friend Joan Miro.

What distinguishes the legacy of Louise Bourgeois is that her artistic career was both out of synch and in synch with some of the most relevant movements of 20th century art: Surrealism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Feminism, etcetera. Moreover her professional persona is also emblematic of some of the constant 20th century struggles. The difficulty of being a female in a male dominated art world, which was often expressed in exclusion from main exhibitions and being compartmentalised into the strange category of ‘woman artists exhibitions’. Her move from Paris to New York also represents the 20th century malaise of homelessness and a certain migratory aesthetics. It is there that her French childhood became an ‘idee fixe’, so constant in her work.

Through different movements in art and personal struggles Bourgeois continued to further develop her perennial themes and methods. At the same time she has in fact remade herself as an artist during the last quarter of a century. As Robert Storr states: ‘she is a shape-shifter’ and ‘any artist born after 1965 will have had the unpredictable new Louise Bourgeois as a competitive contemporary’. How is one’s legacy interwoven with the competitive world of art?

Well, Louise held a salon, ironically called Sunday Bloody Sunday due to the emotions often caused by her enigmatic meanness. Every Sunday at 3 pm she would open her home to artists, curators and critics. Imagine freezing before her ghostly vampire-like figure, old, old like the world, beyond communication, beyond life and death. What can you say to an almost hundred years old woman, whose wisdom remains impenetrable existentially?

The poet W.H. Auden in commemorating the death of Yeats wrote that ‘the words of a dead man are modified on the guts of the living’. Louise Bourgeois died of a heart attack on May 31 2010.