MAMAN, LOUISE BOURGEOIS
SPIDER, LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Unlike Newman’s Voice of Fire and Rothko’s No. 16, French sculptor Louise Bourgeois’s Maman — a 9.25-metre-tall bronze female spider carrying a sac of 26 marble eggs designed in 1999 as a tribute to the cleverness, craftiness and protectiveness of Bourgeois’s own mother — sparked no serious controversy when it was purchased by the National Gallery in 2004 for $3.2 million, nearly half the institution’s annual acquisitions budget. Perhaps critics had learned that the gallery knows something about art that they don’t. Positioned outside the entrance to the gallery, Maman became an instant Ottawa landmark and is today one of the most popular backdrops for selfies among tourists to the nation’s capital. And the colossal sculpture is in exceedingly good company: other versions of the same artwork are displayed outside London’s Tate Modern and Spain’s Guggenheim Museum. Huge sculptures from an earlier and similar series on the same theme, titled Spider, are equally acclaimed and coveted by their owners, including the Denver Art Museum and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In November 2015, a privately held example of one of the six Spider sculptures created by Bourgeois, who died in 2010 at age 98, was sold at Christie’s in New York. There was buzz ahead of the event that the sale might shatter the all-time highest price paid at auction for a work by a female artist, that being the $44 million spent by a collector at Sotheby’s in 2014 for the Georgia O’Keeffe painting Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1. Bourgeois’s Spider fell short of that mark, but established other records with the eye-popping hammer price of US$28.2 million. — surely drawing another round of self-satisfied smiles at the National Gallery of Canada. Randy Boswell is a professor of journalism at Carleton University and a former Citizen and Postmedia News reporter specializing in historical subjects. He has frequently covered major art auctions and written many stories about Canadian culture.