Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn’t Sorry, art for the masses

Art is weird, in the eye of the beholder, and difficult to define. Children are weird, loved by their parents more than others and sometimes exhibit behavior that’s difficult to define. Louise Bourgeois was a French-American artist who was a gifted painter but is most famous for creating large-scale sculptures. These are the big sculptures that you see around major cities that define the area and are must-see spots when you visit them. Even if you don’t know her reputation you’ll glean some idea of her work from the book’s title, Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn’t Sorry. For some readers, all you’ll need to do is mention ‘giant spiders’ and show them the artwork in the book to bait their interest hook to high.

This is the fifth children’s book in the series by Fausto Gilberti. They all have the same punch line in that they profile an artist who is popular among those circles and says that they weren’t sorry. I say ‘those circles’ because my knowledge of art, beyond the very basics of name awareness, is limited. We read Banksy Graffitied Walls and Wasn’t Sorry and really enjoyed it. Of Gilberti’s other three books, I was familiar with two of the artists, but the third one left me searching online to see who Yves Klein was. And even though I didn’t know his name, I did recognize his style of art, which leaves me with a high certainty that I’d enjoy Yves Klein Painted Everything Blue and Wasn’t Sorry, as much as I did this book.

Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn’t Sorry is an illustrated book that contains more words than most books that share this description. The difference is that Louise Bourgeois has a reading level higher level than what most fourth-graders will expect. Those fifth-graders will be fine with the reading level. This is a smart book that’s clever enough to keep the content happy, fast-moving, and educational, that’s presented at a level to be entertaining but has a mysterious factor that those younger ages desire.

The tricolor pages go a long way toward engaging readers. The colors are set against white pages with Bourgeois being presented as a black, Tim Burton-esque figure with minimal details. The details are drawn in red with the myriad of spider webs, doodles of tapestries that she’d do for her mother or random other things that are sprinkled amongst the pages. She was a very smart student who loved math, as well as, her family.

When her mother became deathly ill her drawings increased because they helped her cope with the sickness. The drawings continue, morphed into sculptures and paintings. She led a very colorful land successful life as an artist. In her autumn years, when she was 87 in 1999, she created her most famous work, which was a giant spider. It’s as tall as a house, made of metal and marble, and lives outside of Tate Modern in London. Bourgeois named her giant spider Maman, which means mother in French as an homage to the woman who shaped her life.

Maman proved to be so popular that she created six bronze versions that are featured at entrances to other art museums around the world.

The sentences in Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders are simple for the most part, but even the ones that are complex are written in a direct manner. This will allow younger readers to not be intimidated by those longer words that they don’t know. The images and their stark silliness that alludes to a playful sense of evil or mystery is what’ll keep kids interested in reading the book. It’s also what will attract them to it. They’ll wonder why the lady with the big eyes is on a swing underneath a giant spider. Those readers will assume that the scope of the spider is merely intended as a metaphor or allegory, but will be stunned to learn that this giant spider exists. Louise Bourgeois made that giant spider, it’s real and you can even go see it, conveniently located outside of an art museum. The book is not a call to action, but it’s certainly going to get some young readers interested, or at least curious, about art and the world that operates around it.

Louise Bourgeois Made Giant Spiders and Wasn’t Sorry is by Fausto Gilberti and is available on Phaidon Press.

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