Maman was created By Louise as an ode to the loving but tumultuous relationship that the artist shared with her mother. Maman was created to express the complexity of the relationship that parents have with their children.
When did Louise Bourgeois make Maman?
Maman is the largest of a series of steel spider sculptures that Bourgeois created in the second half of the 1990s, picking up a motif that she first depicted in a small ink and charcoal drawing in 1947.
What is the main idea of Louise Bourgeois work?
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.
What is the relationship between Jean Bourgeois’s mother and Father Like?
Bourgeois’s mother and father had very different characters. Her mother had a logical and intellectual approach to life, in contrast to the emotive and passionate character of her father. These opposing forces became a key theme of much of her later work.
How tall is Bourgeois’s Maman?
At more than thirty feet tall, her work Maman, an homage to her mother cast in bronze, stainless steel and marble, is a spider that towers above all the rest and not just literally. Bourgeois’ bold imagination and ambition to create such a work with not only technical precision, but deep love, reflects an artist of depth.
How was the Maman created?
1999–2002Maman / Created
What type of sculpture is Maman?
SculptureInstallation artMaman/Forms
What characteristics describe Louise Bourgeois Maman?
What characteristics describe Louise Bourgeois's Maman? Maman is French for "mom." It is an example of sculpture in the round. Maman is a metaphor for the way Bourgeois's felt about her own mother.
What is Louise Bourgeois Maman made of?
BronzeMarbleStainless steelMaman/Media
What does Maman sculpture represent?
Maman was created By Louise as an ode to the loving but tumultuous relationship that the artist shared with her mother. Maman was created to express the complexity of the relationship that parents have with their children. The large spider was designed to hold eggs in the belly area, just like a mother expectant does.
When was Maman created?
1999–2002Maman / Created
Who made the Maman sculpture?
Louise BourgeoisMaman / ArtistLouise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. Wikipedia
What inspired Louise Bourgeois?
"Everything I do is inspired by my early life," Bourgeois wrote in the 1980s, and what inspired her most was her father's affair with little Louise's English tutor, Sadie, whose neck, the artist said, many years later, she would like to wring. That Bourgeois's art was an unending exorcism is not in doubt.
What inspired Louise Bourgeois art?
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.
What is the Maman made out of?
BronzeMarbleStainless steelMaman/Media
What is the subject matter in Maman?
Almost 9 meters tall, Maman is one of the most ambitious of a series of sculptures by Bourgeois that take as their subject the spider, a motif that first appeared in several of the artist's drawings in the 1940s and came to assume a central place in her work during the 1990s.
How did Louise Bourgeois make her sculptures?
Her first three-dimensional works like her totem-like figures were collectively known as Personages 1946-55. These sculptures were made from wood, and were installed as environmental installations. Bourgeois often used her roof as a studio and the Personages recall the skyscrapers and rooftops that surrounded her.
Why was Maman created?
Maman was created to express the complexity of the relationship that parents have with their children. The large spider was designed to hold eggs at the belly area, just like a mother does when she is expectant. By the time Louise was creating Maman, her mother had already passed.
Where was Maman made?
Also, how was Maman made? Maman (sculpture) The sculpture was created in 1999 by Bourgeois as a part of her inaugural commission of The Unilever Series (2000), in the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern . This original was created in steel, with an edition of six subsequent castings in bronze.
What is a maman?
Maman is a monumental steel spider, so large that it can only be installed out of doors, or inside a building of industrial scale. Supported on eight slender, knobbly legs, its body is suspended high above the ground, allowing the viewer to walk around and underneath it. Each ribbed leg ending in a sharp-tipped point is made of two pieces of steel, and attached to a collar above which an irregularly ribbed spiralling body rises, balanced by a similar sized egg sac below. The meshed sac contains seventeen white and grey marble eggs that hang above the viewer’s head, gleaming in the darkness of their under-body cavity. Maman was made for the opening of Tate Modern in May 2000 as part of Bourgeois’s commission for the Turbine Hall, the grand central space of the museum. The sculpture was installed on the bridge, overlooking three tall steel towers entitled I Do, I Undo and I Redo, referring to processes of emotional development in relation to motherhood, a central theme in the artist’s oeuvre. An edition of six bronze casts was created subsequent to Tate’s original steel version; their marble eggs have pinker tones than those of T12625.
What does Maman's curving legs mean?
Maman ’s curving ribbed legs evoke gothic columns that rise to lofty heights above the congregation of an open cathedral, while its marble eggs recall the contents of Cell (Three White Marble Spheres) 1993 (reproduced in Louise Bourgeois: Maman, p.51), in which a small white marble sphere nestles between two much larger ones.
What is the meaning of encountering Maman?
Encountering Maman always from the perspective of the child looking up from below, the viewer may experience the sculpture as an expression of anxiety about a mother who is universal – powerful and terrifying, beautiful and, without eyes to look or a head to think, curiously indifferent. Further reading.
What does the name Maman mean?
The title Maman translates as ‘Mummy ’, the appellation a child uses for its mother. Like the title Fillette (meaning ‘little girl’) that Bourgeois gave to a large plaster and latex penis that hangs from a wire (1968, reproduced in Morris p.147), the title Maman enhances dynamic contradictions at the heart of the sculpture.
