Louise Bourgeois, Spider installation, Cleveland

Louise Bourgeois, Spider installation, Ottawa

Louise Bourgeois, Spider installation, NY

Spider Invasion

By Dan Tranberg

Louise Bourgeois has never been one to mince words, not about her art or her life.

Of course, when you're 91 years old and an internationally famous artist, there's no real reason to sugarcoat anything.

"I'm more interested in form and abstract qualities than I am in subject," she said in a 1994 interview. "The subject is only subject; it's not a mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it."

That's not to say that Bourgeois' subject matter is uninteresting. One look at her three large metal spider sculptures, currently installed in Star Plaza at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, and you can't help but wonder what's going on.

But the initial answer is an easy one: For decades, Bourgeois has used the spider to explore issues related to memories of her mother, who died when the artist was 20.

"My mother was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider," she once wrote.

Walking around the enormous bronze and stainless-steel spiders, one of which is 30 feet tall and weighs 24,000 pounds, you can feel the intensity of Bourgeois' feelings. There's nothing simple about these sculptures. They are simultaneously calm and ominous, approachable and imposing.

Implying a mother and her two offspring, the three forms are rich with details that reveal Bourgeois' amazing virtuosity with materials. Employing casting, carving and fabrication techniques, they are as beautiful to examine up close as they are to see from a distance.

The largest piece, titled "Maman," includes an egg sack below its rounded belly. Constructed with steel mesh, it contains white polished-marble eggs that have an alluring, gemlike quality. These and other details give you the feeling that motherhood and family relationships are potent issues for Bourgeois.

Indeed, the artist's many accounts of her family history are loaded with enough juicy details to fill a gripping novel. In 1998, she wrote in Interview magazine: "I was brought up in a dysfunctional and promiscuous family setup where no one would talk about sex. On the surface, sex simply did not exist. But in fact, we thought of nothing else. My father slept around with everyone, including Sadie, our English tutor, who lived in the house."

Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 on Christmas Day. Her family owned and operated a tapestry restoration business, which has fed critics' frequent analogies between seamstresses weaving tapestries in the artist's childhood and spiders weaving webs in her art.

One quote of hers is often cited: "My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama. All of my work in the past 50 years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood."

But it's what Bourgeois does with her subjects that gives her art its magic. Unfettered by the technical difficulties of any medium, she continues to produce works that are as masterfully crafted and innovatively conceived as they are charged with psychological intrigue.

Bourgeois' spiders, which were installed in New York's Rockefeller Center last summer, will remain on view in Cleveland through Oct. 1.

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This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, July 5, 2002