Behind what inspired the infamous
& the artist LOUISE BOURGEOIS
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BOURGEOIS WAS BORN ON 25 DECEMBER 1911 IN PARIS, France. she was the middle child of three born to parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn. By 1924 her father, a tyrannical philanderer, was indulging in an extended affair with her english teacher and nanny.
ACCORDING TO BOURGEOIS, HER MOTHER, JOSEPHINE, “An intelligent, patient and enduring, if not calculating, person,” was aware of her husband’s infidelity, but found it easier to turn a blind eye. Bourgeois, hoarded her memories in her diaries. As a child, bourgeois did not meet her father’s expectations due to her lack of ability. Eventually, he came to adore her for her talent and spirit, but she continued to hate him for his explosive temper, domination of the household, and for teasing her in front of others.
>> Louis Bourgeois, his children and nanny, Sadie, at the Palace de la Mediterreanee in Nice, c. 1922
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THE SCULPTURE PICKS UP THE THEME OF THE ARACHNID that bourgeois had first contemplated in a small ink and charcoal drawing in 1947. It alludes to the strength of Bourgeois’ mother, with metaphors of spinning, weaving, nurture and protection. Her mother Josephine was a woman who repaired tapestries in her father’s textile restoration workshop in Paris. Bourgeois lost her mother at the age of twenty-one. A few days afterwards, in front of her father who did not seem to take his daughter’s despair seriously, she threw herself into the Bièvre River; he swam to her rescue.
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MAMAN IS A MONUMENTAL STEEL SPIDER, SO LARGE THAT
head, gleaming in the darkness of their under-body cavity. Maman
it can only be installed out of doors, or inside a building of
was made for the opening of Tate Modern in May 2000 as part of
industrial scale. Supported on eight slender, knobbly legs, its
Bourgeois’s commission for the Turbine Hall, the grand central
body is suspended high above the ground, allowing the viewer
space of the museum. The sculpture was installed on the bridge,
to walk around and underneath it. Each ribbed leg ending in a
overlooking three tall steel towers entitled I Do, I Undo and I Redo,
sharp-tipped point is made of two pieces of steel, and attached to
referring to processes of emotional development in relation to
a collar above which an irregularly ribbed spiralling body rises,
motherhood, a central theme in the artist’s oeuvre. An edition of six
balanced by a similar sized egg sac below. The meshed sac contains
bronze casts was created subsequent to Tate’s original steel version;
seventeen white and grey marble eggs that hang above the viewer’s
their marble eggs have pinker tones than those of T12625.
>> view of the cavity of one of the Maman sculptures
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“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” -Louise Bourgeois
<< Ode à ma Mère, 1995 an original sketch that was an inspiration for the Maman sculptures
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BOURGEOIS’S 2006 SALES MADE HER THE BEST-PAID LIVING woman artist after a buyer paid $4 million for an 8-foot spider at Christie’s in London. She eclipsed the record in 2008, when another spider fetched $4.5 million. In 2011, $10.7 million at auction made a new record price for the artist, against an estimate of $4 million to $6 million. This is the highest price paid for a work by a woman artist.
>> Louis Bourgeois and her sculpture ‘Eye to Eye, 1970’
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LARGE ENOUGH FOR A GROUP OF PEOPLE TO STAND beneath and meander between its eight legs, Maman is a largescale work that “fits no genre or several: sculpture, installation and architecture.” SCULPTURE CAN BE SEEN AS A THREE-DIMENSIONAL ART form that is carved, modelled, or assembled. Installation art is a form of sculpture that shapes a viewer’s perception or experience of a space. Architecture, on the other hand, is the design and construction of a space that has been thought about in terms of function, use, environment and aesthetics. Maman blends the characteristics of these different media to create a three-dimensional work that most closely resembles architecture by influencing the viewer’s experience of a space while at the same time being that built space.
<< Maman, 1999, cast 2003 National Gallery of Canada