Maman
Louise Bourgeois (1911 to 2010) · 1999, cast 2001
A spider taller than a house stands on the terrace beside the river, its eight thin legs planted wide enough for you to walk underneath. Look up into the body and you will see a wire mesh sac holding twenty six marble eggs. The title is the French child's word for mother, and that is exactly what Louise Bourgeois meant. Her own mother ran the family tapestry restoration workshop, patient and clever, mending and weaving, and Bourgeois said a spider was the best portrait of her she could imagine: a creature that spins, repairs and protects.
The legs are the thing to study. They taper to points so fine that the enormous bronze seems to stand on tiptoe, and the joints are knobbly and slightly uneven, more like something grown than something engineered. Walk around it and the silhouette keeps changing against the titanium curves of the museum behind. Bourgeois made the first version in steel for the opening of Tate Modern in London in two thousand, and the bronze casts that followed went to Ottawa, Tokyo, Seoul, Doha and here. Each one is the same mother, standing guard in a different city.
Bourgeois was eighty seven when she made Maman, after a career that had waited decades for recognition. Her childhood was shadowed by her father's long affair with the family's English governess, and much of her art works through anger and tenderness toward her parents. That is why the spider is both frightening and gentle at once. The eggs are safe, the legs make a shelter, and yet you feel very small standing in its shadow. Bilbao's cast has stood here since two thousand and one, and on windy evenings the river light plays across the bronze in a way that suits it perfectly.
Did You Know? Bourgeois said that if you bump into a spider's web it does not get angry, it simply repairs it, which is what her mother did with damaged tapestries.
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