Maman
Louise Bourgeois (1911 to 2010) · 1999
A spider more than nine metres tall stands on eight thin, knotted legs of steel, its body suspended high above your head. You can walk between the legs and look up into a wire mesh sac under the abdomen where twenty six marble eggs are held. The scale should be terrifying, but the creature balances on the tips of its legs with the delicacy of a ballerina, and the effect is closer to shelter than threat. Louise Bourgeois titled it Maman, the French child's word for mother, and it is a portrait of her own.
Bourgeois's mother ran the family tapestry restoration workshop outside Paris and died when Louise was twenty one. The artist described her as patient, clever, reasonable and useful, like a spider, and as a weaver who repaired what was torn. Look at how the legs are built from ribbed and welded pieces, like bones or the strands of a web, and how they narrow to needle points so that the vast weight seems to hover. Stand beneath the body and the eggs become visible, a reminder that the spider is a mother rather than a monster.
Maman was made in nineteen ninety nine for the opening of Tate Modern in two thousand, when Bourgeois, then eighty eight, became the first artist to fill the Turbine Hall. Tate acquired this bronze cast in two thousand and eight, and other casts stand outside museums in Bilbao, Ottawa, Tokyo and Seoul. Because of its size it is shown only occasionally, sometimes on the riverside terrace and sometimes back inside the hall. The artist kept working until her death at ninety eight, and Maman remains the most loved image of her long career.
Did You Know? Bourgeois said the spider was her mother because her mother was a weaver, and she gave the sculpture a sac of twenty six marble eggs.
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