New acquisition for the Permanent Collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Louise Bourgeois (1911)
Maman, 1999
Bronze, stainless steel and marble
927 x 891.5 x 1028.7 cm
Born in France in 1911, Louise Bourgeois entered the Sorbonne in 1932 to study math, but switched to art in 1935. Four years later she married American art historian Robert Goldwater, accompanying him to New York, where she joined the Art Students League. Shortly afterwards she began work on a series of sculptures in wood entitled Personnages which embody the essential themes and obsessions of all her subsequent oeuvre, acting as replacements for people once close to the artist, some of whom are now dead, others who time, circumstance or events have distanced.
In an artistic career lasting more than fifty years, Bourgeois has created a substantial number of drawings, sculptures and installations based, although not in a strictly literal or narrative way, on her personal history. Her work arises more from a painstaking examination of the subconscious; it focuses on herself, the artist, portraying the deepest of human emotions with a coolness and lack of emotivity that forces the spectator to confront them directly. Her work abounds in the use of fragmentation (particularly parts of the human body and animal bodies), distortion, and changes of scale.
Maman is a 927 by 891.5 by 1028.7-cm sculpture in bronze, stainless steel, and marble executed by Bourgeois in 1999. In the late 1990s, the works of the mature Bourgeois displayed a profound sense of elegance, clarity, and formal perfection. It was then that she introduced the spider in the form of a huge sculpture that is simultaneously fragile and powerful, an enormous, impressively bodied architectural structure. At first, only the huge legs are visible, reaching down to the floor and resembling more than anything else a group of abstract columns. But a glance upwards reveals the breathtaking size of the rest of the structure. Walking around between the spider’s legs, the spectator feels either comfortably protected or cruelly threatened by the huge creature, or possibly both. Bourgeois explores the complexity of the human mind in Maman, and reveals the enormous power, not of the spider itself, but of our emotional relationship with it. In this complex, monumental work, Bourgeois very efficiently sums up the central themes of her creative work, publicly exorcising her emotional demons and poetically re-creating childhood associations in the form of a gigantic insect.
With this sculpture from Bourgeois’s artistic maturity, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has acquired a masterwork by a leading artist of the second half of the 20th century. The work fits the European-American profile of the Collection perfectly and complements the collection of the artist’s work owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
October 1, 2001