Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris and is best known for her monumental spider sculptures, most famously Maman. Made of steel and marble and rising over 30 feet tall, the towering spiders may appear intimidating at first glance, yet Bourgeois conceived them as tributes to her beloved mother.

Her mother worked in the traditional craft of tapestry restoration. Like the spider, she was a master weaver—patient, diligent, and quietly devoted to mending and weaving. She taught Bourgeois everything about the art of weaving. For twenty years, Louise lived under her mother’s guidance, nurtured by nature and bathed in warm sunlight. When her mother died during Bourgeois’s university years, the loss devastated her. She abandoned her studies in mathematics and devoted herself entirely to art, later reflecting that mathematics, like life itself, was unpredictable and without order.

The influence of her family’s tapestry business shaped Bourgeois’s lifelong artistic practice. Fabric remained a recurring medium in her work, though it was not until her final decade that she began to create fabric paintings and fabric books—perhaps as a way of reconnecting with her past, her mother, and her childhood. Bourgeois often remarked that all her creative inspiration stemmed from childhood memories.

At the age of 71, she held a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she continued to produce art relentlessly until her death at the age of 98.