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Lot Essay
In 1996, decades after she had already captivated the art world, Bourgeois introduced a dramatic series of larger-than-life bronze spiders, including this exemplary specimen, forthrightly entitled Spider. Returning to a theme that she had originally contemplated in a 1947 ink drawing, Bourgeois took the initial concept from paper to bronze, magnificently bringing her imagined world to life. Her numerous spiders range in size and style from the present lot, to the cage-enclosed mixed media installation Spider (1997), and culminate in the colossal and aptly named Maman from 1999. A steadfast, exquisitely gargantuan arachnid, Maman was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London and Guggenheim Bilbao where it was received with international acclaim and resulted in Bourgeois being hailed as "Spiderwoman." With unbelievable dexterity, the present lot, Spider, defies the weight and density of its bronze artifice and takes on a sense of fragility, delicately poised on its nimble outstretched legs. In spite of this airy nature and levity, Spider's scale and subject nevertheless project power and even provokes a sense of fear and trepidation in the viewer. Bourgeois's juxtaposing dualities in the work--levity and weight, light and dark, good and bad, attraction and repulsion--all work together to produce a dynamic and elusive understanding to the work, allowing it to continue to mystify and astound viewers.
Throughout her oeuvre, Bourgeois continually demonstrated her penchant for characters and storytelling. While not offering a narrative in the traditional sense of a an old master painting, her sculptural forays have often been inspired by her desire to relate her audience to her sculpture, as well as its disparate components to one another, in order to create her mise en scène. Indeed, in an installation of her early work in 1949, Bourgeois sets up her appropriately named "personages" in relation to the others, so "they can look around the room, but usually look at each other" (L. Bourgeois, quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, Louise Bourgeois: Personages, exh. Cat., Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2012, p. 19). As evidenced by this early anthropomorphizing of her totemic creations, Bourgeois continued to relate her sculptures in this way both to one another and her audience throughout her career. While itself an individual figure, Spider looms grandly above the viewer, mounted on the wall, as if observing the entire room around her.
While her pieces tend to convey a sense of familiarity or distancing, comfort or discomfort, and familial or alien--all natural and inter-relational human responses--Bourgeois tended to reject these initial romantic associations to nature. On this topic, Bourgeois claimed "This kind of 'how wonderful nature is' attitude depends on the accidental, whereas the work of art is primarily voulu [willed], and should be a matter of the artist's decision" (L. Bourgeois quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, Personages, exh. cat., Kukje Gallery, Seoul, p. 20). Where oftentimes female artists are charged with the necessity to be divinely inspired by nature, the meaning in their work can be dangerously simplified as their natural predilection toward sensitivity, familial and explicitly "feminine" overtones. Bourgeois rejects this simplification of her work and instead would rather view her work in terms of what she refers to as its voulu state of being, allowing the work to exist as it will rather than a forced reaction to her feminine nature.
Despite her protestations to the natural elements of her work, Bourgeois's themes time and again recall clearly autobiographical tendencies and her role within her family. Bourgeois was greatly affected by her mother's illness that led to her untimely death in 1932, and her father's romantic relationship with Bourgeois' English tutor, Sadie. In a symbolic act of rebellion and destruction, Bourgeois's 1974 installation Destruction of the Father both signals a clear distancing of herself from her biological father, and possibly an act of closure for the artist in regards to this initial betrayal. Her father's duplicitousness left Bourgeois with the permanent understanding that men were typically childish and weak, yet also led her on a search for father figures amongst her artistic role models, such as Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi. Additionally, like many of her European contemporaries, Bourgeois relocated to New York City during the Second World War and she associated with a number of exiled Surrealists, such as André Breton, Andre Masson and Joan Miró. Clear elements of Surrealism are evident from her early drawings to her later, larger sculptural installations that reference her interest in sublimation and the unconscious.
The artist's Surrealist tendencies have often given her work a dreamlike, and even haunting feel, as her imaginative installations and anthropomorphized figures border between reality and otherworldly. However, the very real spider motif in the artist's body of work has always represented a portrayal of her mother. The spider is a commonly seen trope through history, from its inception in the Roman legend of Arachne, who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and transformed into a spider, to Salvador Dali's Daddy Longlegs of the Evening - Hope! from 1940, in which the daddy long-legs acts as a symbol of good luck in the haunting dusk of Dali's imagination. Through these various mythologies and references, the spider is also universally symbolic of the mother, the creator or builder, as well as the destroyer. Both feared and revered in nature, the spider is fiercely protective of her young, and strong enough to defeat an impending threat. Incidentally, the black widow is even known for devouring the male spider--the father--after mating, in order to protect her offspring. This understated power that the spider possesses is the way in which Bourgeois most directly links the spider to her mother. She said in an interview, "with the spider, I try to put across the power and the personality of a modest animal. Modest as it is, it is very definite and it is indestructible...It establishes the fact that the spider is my mother, believe it or not...At some times of the day, the spider is at her best, raring to go and kind of aggressive...I connect her to my mother" (L. Bourgeois, interview with M. Cajori and A. Wallach, quoted in J. Gorovoy et al. Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 1997, p. 254). This statement perfectly embodies the complex duality of the spider both of nature and myth that becomes manifested in Bourgeois's work.
Throughout her long and distinguished artistic career, Bourgeois used memories of her family and her past in order to set a scene for her work. While her work becomes a way to simultaneously protect against and free her from these memories in a constructive way, they can just as easily become a trap to become lost among them. From her early Femme Maison paintings from the 1940s to later works, Bourgeois vacillates between creating feelings of safety, and a sense of losing oneself or being trapped. Spider, too, possesses these alternating feelings of security and danger, as the sculpture can either be seen as protector or predator. In actuality, Spider takes on both of these roles concurrently, which speaks to the incredibly complex role of the mother as nurturer and guardian.
In her vast body of work, Bourgeois oscillates between the evidently figural and the more abstract; between the real and the uncanny. Spider is boldly direct in its figurative nature, yet it is unlike any spider that exists in life; rather it seems to have crawled to life from the pages of a Surrealist journal. Without frame or pedestal, Spider steps into the viewer's reality, breaking the distinction between the two separate planes of the real and the imagined. Both eerily real and larger than life, the work defies the viewer's expectations and questions the preconceived notions of the way a spider should inhabit space. The spider motif remains one the most iconic and meaningful to the artist during a career that spanned nearly eight decades. Representing the extremely personal connection to her mother as well as her own identity as a mother, a child, a woman, Spider stands as a remembrance of the intimate connection to her past, while also evocative of an extreme power in this universal trope.
Throughout her oeuvre, Bourgeois continually demonstrated her penchant for characters and storytelling. While not offering a narrative in the traditional sense of a an old master painting, her sculptural forays have often been inspired by her desire to relate her audience to her sculpture, as well as its disparate components to one another, in order to create her mise en scène. Indeed, in an installation of her early work in 1949, Bourgeois sets up her appropriately named "personages" in relation to the others, so "they can look around the room, but usually look at each other" (L. Bourgeois, quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, Louise Bourgeois: Personages, exh. Cat., Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2012, p. 19). As evidenced by this early anthropomorphizing of her totemic creations, Bourgeois continued to relate her sculptures in this way both to one another and her audience throughout her career. While itself an individual figure, Spider looms grandly above the viewer, mounted on the wall, as if observing the entire room around her.
While her pieces tend to convey a sense of familiarity or distancing, comfort or discomfort, and familial or alien--all natural and inter-relational human responses--Bourgeois tended to reject these initial romantic associations to nature. On this topic, Bourgeois claimed "This kind of 'how wonderful nature is' attitude depends on the accidental, whereas the work of art is primarily voulu [willed], and should be a matter of the artist's decision" (L. Bourgeois quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, Personages, exh. cat., Kukje Gallery, Seoul, p. 20). Where oftentimes female artists are charged with the necessity to be divinely inspired by nature, the meaning in their work can be dangerously simplified as their natural predilection toward sensitivity, familial and explicitly "feminine" overtones. Bourgeois rejects this simplification of her work and instead would rather view her work in terms of what she refers to as its voulu state of being, allowing the work to exist as it will rather than a forced reaction to her feminine nature.
Despite her protestations to the natural elements of her work, Bourgeois's themes time and again recall clearly autobiographical tendencies and her role within her family. Bourgeois was greatly affected by her mother's illness that led to her untimely death in 1932, and her father's romantic relationship with Bourgeois' English tutor, Sadie. In a symbolic act of rebellion and destruction, Bourgeois's 1974 installation Destruction of the Father both signals a clear distancing of herself from her biological father, and possibly an act of closure for the artist in regards to this initial betrayal. Her father's duplicitousness left Bourgeois with the permanent understanding that men were typically childish and weak, yet also led her on a search for father figures amongst her artistic role models, such as Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi. Additionally, like many of her European contemporaries, Bourgeois relocated to New York City during the Second World War and she associated with a number of exiled Surrealists, such as André Breton, Andre Masson and Joan Miró. Clear elements of Surrealism are evident from her early drawings to her later, larger sculptural installations that reference her interest in sublimation and the unconscious.
The artist's Surrealist tendencies have often given her work a dreamlike, and even haunting feel, as her imaginative installations and anthropomorphized figures border between reality and otherworldly. However, the very real spider motif in the artist's body of work has always represented a portrayal of her mother. The spider is a commonly seen trope through history, from its inception in the Roman legend of Arachne, who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and transformed into a spider, to Salvador Dali's Daddy Longlegs of the Evening - Hope! from 1940, in which the daddy long-legs acts as a symbol of good luck in the haunting dusk of Dali's imagination. Through these various mythologies and references, the spider is also universally symbolic of the mother, the creator or builder, as well as the destroyer. Both feared and revered in nature, the spider is fiercely protective of her young, and strong enough to defeat an impending threat. Incidentally, the black widow is even known for devouring the male spider--the father--after mating, in order to protect her offspring. This understated power that the spider possesses is the way in which Bourgeois most directly links the spider to her mother. She said in an interview, "with the spider, I try to put across the power and the personality of a modest animal. Modest as it is, it is very definite and it is indestructible...It establishes the fact that the spider is my mother, believe it or not...At some times of the day, the spider is at her best, raring to go and kind of aggressive...I connect her to my mother" (L. Bourgeois, interview with M. Cajori and A. Wallach, quoted in J. Gorovoy et al. Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 1997, p. 254). This statement perfectly embodies the complex duality of the spider both of nature and myth that becomes manifested in Bourgeois's work.
Throughout her long and distinguished artistic career, Bourgeois used memories of her family and her past in order to set a scene for her work. While her work becomes a way to simultaneously protect against and free her from these memories in a constructive way, they can just as easily become a trap to become lost among them. From her early Femme Maison paintings from the 1940s to later works, Bourgeois vacillates between creating feelings of safety, and a sense of losing oneself or being trapped. Spider, too, possesses these alternating feelings of security and danger, as the sculpture can either be seen as protector or predator. In actuality, Spider takes on both of these roles concurrently, which speaks to the incredibly complex role of the mother as nurturer and guardian.
In her vast body of work, Bourgeois oscillates between the evidently figural and the more abstract; between the real and the uncanny. Spider is boldly direct in its figurative nature, yet it is unlike any spider that exists in life; rather it seems to have crawled to life from the pages of a Surrealist journal. Without frame or pedestal, Spider steps into the viewer's reality, breaking the distinction between the two separate planes of the real and the imagined. Both eerily real and larger than life, the work defies the viewer's expectations and questions the preconceived notions of the way a spider should inhabit space. The spider motif remains one the most iconic and meaningful to the artist during a career that spanned nearly eight decades. Representing the extremely personal connection to her mother as well as her own identity as a mother, a child, a woman, Spider stands as a remembrance of the intimate connection to her past, while also evocative of an extreme power in this universal trope.