The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of March 28, 2024

Untitled

Untitled

1995
(American, 1911–2010)
Platemark: 10 x 25.1 cm (3 15/16 x 9 7/8 in.); Sheet: 10 x 25.1 cm (3 15/16 x 9 7/8 in.)
© The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Location: not on view

Description

Louise Bourgeois uses art to express personal concerns and obsessions. One of the dominant themes of her work is her own youth, which she considers a magical, mysterious, and dramatic time. Many of her deeply symbolic sculptures, drawings, and etchings address her childhood relationship with her parents. In Ode to My Mother, the spider, an insect known for entrapping victims in its web, serves for Bourgeois as a caring mother figure, protecting her offspring from harm. These nine illustrations, which were issued in a portfolio accompanied by poetic text in French and English, capture the committed but delicate love between daughter and mother. Both Bourgeois and her mother, whom she called her best friend, repaired tapestries in the family business. Like spiders, they were weavers. Bourgeois once described her mother as deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful as a spider.
  • ?-1999
    (Pettibone Fine Art, New York, NY)
    June 7, 1999
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Picturing Motherhood Now. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 16, 2021-March 13, 2022).
  • {{cite web|title=Untitled|url=false|author=Louise Bourgeois, Editions du Solstice, Harlan & Weaver|year=1995|access-date=28 March 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1999.118.9