Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American artist who, after a career of more than sixty years, gained wide fame only in old age. She drew her art almost entirely from personal memory — especially her childhood, her father's betrayal, and the figure of her tapestry-restorer mother. Her best-known work, the giant spider sculpture "Maman" (French for "mother"), made in 1999, is that memory made monumental.

The bronze (and steel) spider, over nine metres tall, is menacing at first sight: it rises on thin, long legs and encloses the viewer standing beneath it. But Bourgeois conceived this image not as a threat but as a homage. For her the spider represents her mother: weaving, mending, patient, protective — yet also strong and defensive. In a mesh sac beneath the spider's belly it carries marble eggs; protection and fragility, threat and tenderness, unite in the same body.

What Bourgeois did is not a cold formal experiment but the turning of emotion into sculpture. She carries the most intimate feelings — fear, love, loss, attachment — to a public scale beneath which anyone can walk. This represents an important tendency of late twentieth-century art: the rise of personal and bodily experience, especially women's experience, as a legitimate and powerful subject of art.

Casts of "Maman" now stand in Bilbao, London, Ottawa, Tokyo, and other cities; rising at museum entrances, these spiders are among the most recognised images of contemporary sculpture. If Rodin rediscovered the body, Bourgeois lodged memory and emotion in the body of sculpture.