National Gallery erects $3.2M spider sculpture
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 | 1:03 PM ET
CBC Arts
Weather permitting, workers, who are being monitored by a round-the-clock webcam, will continue installing the bronze spider, which measures approximately 10 metres in height and carries a sac of 26 white marble eggs.
Calling the work "a very important and exciting acquisition for the National Gallery and for Canada as a whole," director Pierre Théberge said in a statement that the sculpture's "sheer size and extraordinary power make Maman an icon that will turn the National Gallery's plaza into a landmark."
In adding the bronze to its collection, the gallery joins a prestigious club. Bourgeois, a French-born, American artist, created six bronze casts of Maman. In addition to Canada's version, one is on long-term loan to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and another is on display in Havana.
Louise Bourgeois's Maman at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2001. (Photo courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Cheim & Read)
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum and Seoul's Samsung Museum of Modern Art have acquired the other three. A steel version of Maman is also on loan to London's Tate Modern.
"We are so lucky ... it's a fabulous work of art and once people walk through it, it will be a fabulous experience and we should be grateful we have it here," Penny Cousineau-Levine, art professor and chair of the University of Ottawa's visual arts department, told CBC News.
However, Maman's $3.2-million cost could raise a few eyebrows. Controversy swirled around past contemporary art acquisitions, notably the purchase of U.S. artist Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, the massive, striped abstract painting the gallery purchased in March 1990 for $1.76 million, and Montreal artist Jana Sterbak's Vanitas, better known as the 50-pound, "meat dress" of flank steak that the gallery displayed in 1991.
Workers raising Maman in Ottawa Wednesday.
Victoria Henry, director of the Canada Council's Art Bank, says that it's the job of a public institution to include works that may be controversial so as to get people talking about art.
"Work that is more difficult or controversial at the time becomes everyone's favourite within a few years," Henry said.
Maman joins several other Bourgeois sculptures in the gallery's collection. The 93-year-old artist – whose work is featured in institutions such as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Florence's Uffizi Gallery – is considered among the world's most important sculptors living today and will be celebrated with a retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2007.
