#it’s just! maman is such an interesting exploration of the spider motif | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

elleywestbrook · 4 years

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7. Artist Research. Louise Bourgeois 25/12/1911-31/05/2010.

She is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, although she was also a prolific painter and print-maker.

MoMA

Maman. 1999. Bronze, stainless steel, and marble. Tuileries Garden, Paris. 2008;

Jitterbug. 1998. Lithograph

Untitled (Spider and Snake). 2003. Drypoint and engraving, with gouache and ink additions

Louise Bourgeois is perhaps best known for sculptures of spiders, ranging in size from a brooch of four inches to monumental outdoor pieces that rise to 30 feet. Long a motif in Symbolist art, the spider encompassed several meanings for Bourgeois, who cited it most frequently as a stand-in for her mother, a tapestry restorer by trade who impressed Bourgeois with her steadfast reliability and clever inventiveness. Yet Bourgeois also appreciated the spider in more general terms, as a protector against evil, pointing out that this crafty arachnid is known for devouring mosquitoes and thereby preventing disease.

Bourgeois’s preoccupation with the spider spans her career, with examples appearing in her drawing and printmaking as early as the late 1940s, but the subject began to have a particular immediacy for her in the mid-1990s. Among the defining projects of that time is Ode à Ma Mère, a 1995 illustrated book comprised of drypoint spiders, along with a text evoking the complicated interpretations Bourgeois framed for them. Bourgeois continued to explore this theme in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking until late in her life. In 2007, she crafted a woven fabric example and also issued a series of digital prints incorporating spiders. That late series, entitled The Fragile, presents her subject in a variety of guises, often merging with a female figure and evoking the aging artist herself.

“The spider—why the spider? Because

my best friend was my mother and she

was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing,

reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable,

neat, and as useful as a spider.”—Louise Bourgeois

(The above lifted from the MoMA website)

In a 2008 film made about her life, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, Bourgeois described these spider sculptures as her ‘most successful subject’. Bourgeois uses the spider, both predator (a sinister threat) and protector (an industrious repairer), to symbolise the mother figure. The spinning and weaving of the spider’s web links to Bourgeois’s own mother, who worked in the family’s tapestry restoration business, and who encouraged Louise to participate. (the Tate)

You tube film (the Tate) about Louise Bourgeois

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CISkiELcT6I&feature=emb_rel_end

A better film about her, watch this again Elley!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifn0qwTbgcA

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Whatever materials and processes Louise Bourgeois used to create her powerful artworks, the main force behind her art was to work through her troubled childhood memories. These memories were not specific, but a layering of emotional responses to the complicated relationship she had with her parents and their relationship with each other.

Abandonment

Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, suffered from ill health and Louise cared for her for long periods of time. Josephine died when Louise was just 22. This, and her father’s unfaithfulness (he had a series of mistresses), led to a fear of abandonment, a key theme in Bourgeois’s work. The backdrop of the First World War, which began when she was three years old, made her traumatic memories of childhood even more intense.

Women vs. home

Themes of domestic life and the home reoccur throughout Louise Bourgeois’s work. Early works on canvas and paper from the mid-1940s show a female figure trapped inside a small-scale house. While her room-like Cell structures often contain objects associated with the home. Bourgeois explores the role of female identity throughout her work, often challenging the conventional role of women in the twentieth century.

Louise Bourgeois Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Artist Rooms Foundation 2011 Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation

Louise Bourgeois began to make her self-enclosed structures known as Cells  in 1989 and they became an important part of her output for many years. In these works she explores themes of being trapped, anguish and fear. The word ‘cell’ can refer to both an enclosed room, as in a prison; as well as the most basic elements of plant or animal life, as in the cells of the body. (the Tate)

Louise Bourgeois was obviously and extremely intelligent woman but at the same time childlike. She was a volatile artist and suffered from anxiety and depression. Art seemingly kept her anxieties and sanity balanced, she had a traumatic childhood but recognised that she needed this trauma as some of her best works stemmed from it. Art was therapy for her - she said it saved her life. She would transfer her emotional state into her materials.

I find her work interesting, the spider as an aggressor but also a protector is not something that would have naturally occurred to me. However I understand the reference of the spinning in regards to her mother. The weaving of various strands of a mother’s life life to produce a home for her children. Experiences cannot be separated, they form the person, that person gives birth to and is home and experience to her children. Try unpicking that into separate strands and making sense from it.

Those caged cells are intriguing too, containing and protecting or trapping?

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