In her new book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, art critic Hettie Judah shows that motherhood has played a significant role in the history of art. Not only in the ways that both motherhood and mothering have been depicted, but also in the way that artists who are mothers have created representations of their experiences, and in doing so shaped their artistic identities.
Sculptor Barbara Hepworth once said that: “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life.” I have long admired Hepworth’s work, and her ability to work alongside her children. Hepworth also said that “being a mother enriches an artist’s life”. I don’t think this is entirely true.
Women in the art world face a motherhood penalty, where they experience a drop in income. Male artists, on the other hand, have a bump in their income when they become parents. This inequality means that mothering is sometimes seen as a setback to creativity.
In my book (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Women (2021), I discuss how mothering has also at times been conceived as a homogeneous, mundane experience, with its edges and intersectional aspects smoothed out – too “domestic” a notion to be perceived as “high art”.
I have found that when you try to talk about this death of the individual self as you gives birth to a new human being, or the annihilation of what once was in order to raise a child, you are demonised. Guilt, anxiety, conflicts between our own desires and society’s demands from women, and our own internalised conflicts and ambivalence, are rarely documented. Motherhood is idolised.
The struggle between the self before motherhood, and the unpolished version after becoming one is not something we often see in literature or media. Novelist Rachel Cusk writes in her memoir A Life’s Work (2001) that after her daughter’s birth, her “appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed, perhaps squandered”.
Acts of Creation takes an exhaustive and incisive look at over 100 women artists who have created art representing their experiences of mothering and care-giving, from joy and grief to ambivalence. While Madonna and the Child was a popular subject in many of the religious imagery and paintings, Judah tells us that it wasn’t until the 20th century that artists dared to use their own experiences of motherhood as a source of inspiration, in all its messiness and chaos.
The book is divided into three primary themes. In the first of these themes, creation, Judah takes us through a whirlwind tour of the early medieval and renaissance art where we see a divine mother that none of the earthly mortals could ever match up to: Madonna or Virgin Mary.
Judah looks at divine mothers through time and across cultures, such as Sutapa Biswas’s adaptation of the image of Kali in her painting Housewives with Steak Knives (1985). There is also a discussion of pregnant bodies in art, something that I covered at length in my own book, including Beyoncé announcing her pregnancy with a series of photographs in 2017.
Beyoncé symbolically drew from a range of cultural and historical sources, reminiscent of Renaissance portraits of the Madonna with her blue veil with subliminal references to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485).
The second theme explored in the book is maintenance – the daily grind of caregiving and motherhood, the nurture and maternal load. Artist Betye Saar saw her roles as mother and artist as intrinsically intertwined. In the book, Judah quotes from an interview with Saar in 1977 when she was asked: “How do you handle being a mother and being an artist?” Saar replied with her own question: “What’s the difference?”
Judah also explores see the way art can take over the mother artist, consuming and subsuming them during the deliriousness and exhaustion of early motherhood. Tabitha Soren documented a year of broken sleep titled My Great American Novel (2007). This is a collection of 400 multiple exposures shot from above her bed that documents her own body as she roused to nurse her baby night after night. The work shows how the act of mothering can be a refuge, but also a trap for the mother artist. Soren was not able to find the time to write a novel as she mothers, a deeply private endeavour with no public accolades.
The third thread is that of loss, where themes of miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as IVF and surrogacy are also discussed.
The book is intensively researched, an ambitious piece of work that attempts to move beyond the usual Eurocentric discourse on motherhood, and art. Judah really shines in her discussion of the contemporary artists who have looked at embodiment and fertility, not shying away from the gory, messy and chaotic details of choices they were forced to make.
At times, the number of artists is overwhelming. Many are given only a cursory glance and I was left yearning for a more thorough and satisfying discussion of the various artworks and artists. Nevertheless, this long, thorough list, across cultures and time only shows us that motherhood has been a source of inspiration for many. And while artist mothers might have struggled to balance both, many used this daily wrestle to inform their artistic practice.
Society has long undervalued motherhood, as it has women artists. This book cements the art of creation and caregiving in the canons of art history.
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Pragya Agarwal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
