With its eight delicate legs standing over seven feet tall, the skeletal form of Bourgeois’s Spider can seem at turns menacing or protective. The artist’s interest in spiders is an homage to her mother, Joséphine, who contracted the Spanish flu in 1918 and passed away from health complications related to her illness in 1932, when the artist was only twenty-one. The spider invokes the process of weaving, referencing her mother’s work as a seamstress in the family’s tapestry business. “I came from a family of repairers,” Bourgeois explains. “The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” (1) In a career spanning eight decades, Bourgeois maintained a distinctive and personally inflected iconography that drew upon her early interest in surreal imagery and exploration of the unconscious. Her works are often autobiographical and psychologically fraught, couched in childhood memories and themes of loss, trauma, fear, vulnerability, sexuality, and love. She first explored the motif of the spider in a small ink and charcoal drawing from 1947, which she later reprised in prints, drawings, and large-scale installations during the mid- 1990s. Bourgeois was in her eighties when she began creating spiders in the form of sculptures. Cast in 1997, Spider is one of the earliest sculptural iterations of the subject, which Bourgeois produced in various scales — ranging from the intimate to the monumental — and materials, including editions executed in bronze and steel. Bourgeois expanded on the deeply personal symbolism of this imagery in interviews and publications. In 1995, she published the poem “Ode to My Mother,” explaining her use of spider imagery to represent her mother: “[T]he spider — why the spider? [B]ecause my best friend was my mother, and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful as an araignée [spider]…I shall never tire of representing her.”(2)

(1) Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 14–15.

(2) Quoted in Robert Storr, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2016), 545.