Louise Bourgeois's Maman: Anatomy of a Giant Spider

Louise Bourgeois's monumental sculpture Maman (1999) stands 9.2 x 8.9 x 10.2 meters and weighs 3,658 kg, made of steel and bronze. Its belly contains 17 white and grey marble eggs in a meshed sac with irregular ribs and nipple nubbins pierced by diamond, circular, and triangular holes. The legs evoke Gothic cathedral columns. The work was installed on a bridge overlooking three steel towers titled I Do, I Undo, and I Redo. Bourgeois first drew a spider in 1947 in ink and charcoal, then in 1994 with red ink and crayon, and later that year created her first spider sculpture from found objects: a glass jar of blue liquid inside a steel globe on bent steel tube legs. Maman's name references the French word for mom, and the artist published nine etchings, Ode to My Mother, explaining the spider as a maternal figure. Bourgeois saw the artistic process as a spider's secretion of thread. The sculpture also embodies fear, revolt, and death, reflecting Bourgeois's premature birth on Christmas Day and the loss of her mother at age 21.