Louise Bourgeois
The sculptor of the spider.
Louise Bourgeois made sculptures about memory, childhood and the body. Her giant spider Maman stands outside several museums.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her parents ran a workshop restoring old tapestries, and as a child she helped draw in missing parts of the patterns. One event shaped her entire career: for several years her father had an affair with the children's English governess, who lived in the family home. Bourgeois later described the betrayal and the silence around it as the source of her art.
She first studied mathematics at the Sorbonne but switched to art and attended several of the Paris art schools, including classes with Fernand Léger. In 1938 she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. In the 1940s she made tall, slender wooden sculptures that she called personages, figures standing in for the friends and family members she had left behind in France.
In the 1960s she worked in latex, plaster and marble with organic forms that recall body parts, breasts and genitals. For a long time she was overlooked beside her male colleagues, and major recognition came late, with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982, when she was over seventy. In 1993 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. In the 1990s she built her Cells, room-like installations with old furniture, clothes and mirrors that form charged spaces of memory.
Her best-known work is the giant spider Maman in bronze and steel, more than nine metres tall, which was shown when Tate Modern in London opened in 2000. Several casts now exist, including outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The spider is a tribute to her mother, who, like the spider, wove, mended and protected.
Bourgeois worked intensively right up to her death in 2010, at the age of 98. She is now regarded as one of the most significant sculptors of the 20th century and an important model for artists working with memory, the body and psychology.