Good morning.

Today, a spider taller than a house… and the daughter who built it as a love letter to her mother.

Let’s begin.

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Why She Called the Spider “Mother”

Louise Bourgeois—Maman

L	ondon. May 2000. A new museum opens in an old power station on the south bank of the Thames. It is called Tate Modern, and its vast Turbine Hall needs a first artwork big enough to fill it.

The artist chosen is 88 years old. Her name is Louise Bourgeois, and she sends a spider.

It stands more than nine metres tall, about the height of a three-storey house. Visitors walk right underneath its thin steel legs and look up at its belly. There, a mesh sac holds a clutch of white marble eggs.

Many people find it frightening. Bourgeois found it tender, and she gave it a child’s word for a parent… Maman, French for “Mummy.”

“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver.”

Louise Bourgeois

Her mother, Joséphine, ran the family business with Louise’s father. They restored old tapestries in a workshop outside Paris, repairing holes and rebuilding lost threads. As a girl, Louise helped by drawing the missing parts so the weavers could fill them in.

Joséphine fell ill when Louise was a child, and she died in 1932, when her daughter was just 20. Almost seventy years later, the daughter made her a monument.

After London, Bourgeois cast six more Mamans in bronze. One of them stands beside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, on the bank of the river. This is her.

Trump’s Dollar 2.0 – what you need to know

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Maman by Louise Bourgeois beside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Louise Bourgeois, “Maman,” 1999 (cast 2001). Bronze, stainless steel and marble. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Start from a distance. The spider seems to tiptoe, its whole weight balanced on eight long, jointed legs. Its body is ribbed bronze, dark and rough like bark.

Now walk underneath. The legs surround you like the bars of a cage, or the walls of a shelter. Directly above hangs the sac of eggs.

That double feeling is the point. A spider spins silk to protect its young and also to trap its prey. In other words, Maman is a guardian and a hunter at once, strong and fragile at the same time.

Each of the six bronzes changes with its setting. In Ottawa, the spider stands on the plaza of the National Gallery of Canada, which bought it in 2004 for C$3.2 million, about a third of its yearly budget at the time.

“Maman” outside the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (cast 2003). Photo: Radagast, Wikimedia Commons.

Bourgeois knew that mix well. As a girl, she discovered that her father was having an affair with her English governess, who lived with the family for years. Her mother knew, and stayed silent. Louise spent the rest of her life turning those feelings into sculpture.

In 1938 she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York. She first drew spiders in the late 1940s. Yet fame came very late. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened in 1982, when she was 70.

Bourgeois was still working at 98, and died in New York in May 2010.

The original steel spider was made for one building in particular.

Tate Modern, the former Bankside Power Station on the Thames, London, 2001. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Today that original belongs to Tate, and bronze casts stand in Bilbao, Ottawa, Tokyo, Seoul, Doha and Bentonville, Arkansas. In 2019, a smaller Bourgeois spider sold at Christie’s in New York for about $32 million… reportedly a record at the time for a woman sculptor.

I stood under one of them on a grey afternoon, expecting to be unsettled. For the first minute I was. Then I noticed the eggs, and the way the legs curve inward like arms, and the fear turned into something closer to gratitude. I phoned my mother that evening, for no particular reason.

The Guggenheim’s own guide to the sculpture is short, clear and worth five minutes: Maman, a guide from Guggenheim Bilbao →

Bourgeois spent her life repairing, the way her mother repaired tapestries. Her spider is not a monster at all… it is a weaver, guarding her eggs, the way a mother once guarded her.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Literature Arachne

In the Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–about AD 17) tells of Arachne, a young woman so skilled at weaving that she challenged the goddess Minerva to a contest. Arachne’s tapestry was flawless, and it mocked the gods. Furious, Minerva turned her into a spider, doomed to weave forever. Our word for the spider family, arachnid, comes from her name. Bourgeois’s weaver mother has an ancient ancestor, and Velázquez painted the story in Madrid around 1657.

Diego Velazquez, The Fable of Arachne (Las Hilanderas), about 1657

Diego Velázquez, “The Fable of Arachne” (“Las Hilanderas”), about 1657. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

II	Psychology Thirty Years of Analysis

From 1951, after her father’s death, Bourgeois spent around three decades in Freudian psychoanalysis in New York. For years almost nobody knew. Then, after 2004, boxes of her private writings from those sessions were found in her house. They show how closely her art and her therapy worked together… sculpture was her way of repairing what talk alone could not.

III	Craft Aubusson Tapestry

The tapestries the Bourgeois family repaired belonged to a great French tradition, centred on the town of Aubusson in central France. Its weavers have worked wool on looms there since the late Middle Ages. In 2009, UNESCO added Aubusson tapestry to its list of the world’s intangible cultural heritage. The craft that shaped a sculptor’s childhood is now protected as a treasure in its own right.

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Curious & Controversial

◆	How many eggs does Maman carry? Sources disagree wildly, with counts of 10, 17, 20, 26 and 32 all in print. The different casts may simply differ… so count them yourself if you visit.

◆	Bourgeois made her family story public in 1982, in a magazine project she titled “Child Abuse.” Some critics felt she leaned too heavily on her biography. She insisted the pain was real and the art was the cure.

◆	Her 1982 MoMA show is often described as the museum’s first retrospective for a woman artist. The claim is repeated everywhere, though the exact “first” depends on how you define a retrospective.

◆	Visitors missed the spider badly when it left the Turbine Hall in 2000. Tate staff reported fielding questions about it long after it was gone, and in 2025 the steel original returned for the museum’s 25th birthday.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

Perfect timing. Tomorrow, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Pompidou open Louise Bourgeois: Extreme Tension, the first show devoted to her in a Paris public institution since 2008. It gathers her drawings and prints, the private, intimate side of an artist known for giant sculpture.

Where: BnF Richelieu, Galeries Mansart and Pigott, Paris 2e. From 20 October 2026 to 21 February 2027. Tickets: €15; €10 reduced. Insider tip: Go on a Tuesday, when it stays open until 8 p.m.; on other days it closes at 6 p.m., and it is shut on Mondays. Details at centrepompidou.fr →

Worth Reading

Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father — edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (1998). The artist’s own writings and interviews, sharp, funny and fierce, in her own voice.

Explore Further

Browse: Maman at Guggenheim Bilbao →, the museum’s collection page, with photographs of the spider by the river.

Read: Tate acquires Maman →, Tate’s announcement on bringing the original spider into its collection.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. Where was Maman first shown, in 2000?

A) Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

B) Museum of Modern Art, New York

C) Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London

D) Centre Pompidou, Paris

Answer: C. It was the first commission for the Turbine Hall when Tate Modern opened.

2. What was the trade of Louise Bourgeois’s family?

A) Making lace

B) Restoring tapestries

C) Sewing wedding dresses

D) Printing books

Answer: B. Her parents restored old tapestries, and as a girl she drew in the missing parts.

3. In Ovid’s story, who turned Arachne into a spider?

A) Juno

B) Venus

C) Minerva

D) Diana

Answer: C. Minerva, goddess of weaving, punished Arachne after their contest.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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Some artists make monuments to kings. Louise Bourgeois made hers to a woman who mended old cloth, and it became one of the most loved sculptures of our time.

Tomorrow, a play that opened in London in 1952 and has run almost without a break ever since… and the ending its audiences have kept secret for over seventy years.

Until tomorrow,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. Say it the French way, mah-MAHN, with the stress at the end. And the Bilbao spider stands outdoors by the river… you can walk underneath it without buying a ticket.