When the writer and conservative Hettie Judah invited on Richardson to participate in an exhibition entitled Creation acts: on art and maternity Last year, the artist was not too happy. Richardson, who had contributed to the pioneer feminist exhibition Portrait of a housewife In 1977, was initially “fairly upset”, by Judah, about being joined another group group on maternity half a century later. “In another 50 years,” asked Richardson, “are we going to do it again?”
Richardson's frustration was justified: discussions on the spell – and the shortage – mothers of artists have apparently gone in circles for decades. We already know that the disproportionate domestic obligations of women can frustrate or completely crushed their creative aspirations (see: Essay by Tillie Olsen in 1965 “Silent“And Linda Nochlin's 1971” Linda Nochlin “Why was there no great women artists?»). However, even if the socio-political landscape moves under the feet, we continue to ask the same question without resolution: can a mother be an artist? A recent wave of novelsas well as non-fiction works published in the past two years such as Julie Phillips The baby on the fire escape,, Catherine Ricketts The artist's motherBegoña Gómez Urzaiz AbandonedAnd Joanna Novak Days of contradiction.
Judah has long sought to complicate this conversation. His controversy 2022 How not to exclude mothers of artists (and other parents) Argued that the art world has a lot to gain by better meeting the needs of artists with children. His second book on the subject tries something more ambitious: to establish a cannon of women artists who have made maternity muses. A study of art through and around mothers, Creation acts accompanies it Eponymous tourism exhibition in which Richardson finally chose to participate. Judah tells the anecdote Richardson at the start of the book to recognize that his subject is not revolutionary; The book and the exhibition, she writes, “consciously takes on the paths of previous companies in the hope of keeping them present in memory and presenting to artists the work of their ancestors.”
Creation acts Includes more than 100 works – paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, performance and more – covering thousands of years and several continents. The book has a broader scope than its homonymous exhibition, highlighting not only contemporary artists, but also representations of maternity as far as the Upper Paleolithic. Of Madonna has Roman charity At “female“Stereotype, this complete accounts of mothers in art history helps to contextualize recent works of the artist mass, many of which refer to longtime tropes.
The overview of Judah, condensed in a few precious pages, often feels superficial and as the book progresses, it becomes clear that it is more interested in taxonomy than in analysis; The works of art, which are vaguely organized by theme (“creation”, “maintenance”, “loss”) are rarely put into conversation between them. But what Creation acts Lack in the connective tissue, it compensates in the event of a shiny conservation. The book is the most exhilarating when he traces the surprisingly long line of mothers whose art has been influenced by the education of children. If, As Rachel Cusk writes“The experience of maternity loses almost everything in its translation in the outside world”, then the works gathered here confront and overthrow this ineffability.
The book opens with an obsessive reproduction of “The Painter”, the portrait of Marlene Dumas in 1994 of his daughter, who represents what Judah calls “the monstrous child” – an alternative vision of the criticism of the British critic Cyril Connolly “now criticized”landau in the corridor“, Which he described as” the dark enemy of good art “. She continues to examine the work of an impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who represented her own mothering, as well as the maternal work of wet nurses; Dijkstra, whose respective portraits of waiting and postpartum women have individual maternity experience; The artist's mother.)
In addition to institutional and material support, the artists to need models and Judah proves in a resolute way that women sharing the same ideas have always found ways to create in the middle of the constraint. One of his first examples is the English painter Mary Beale, including the exquisite 1666 “Self -portrait“” shows the artist alongside an unfinished work of his two sons – an explicit wink to his mother's identity. However, a large part of Beale's work, and that of countless other mothers of artists, has been forgotten or erased, leaving us with what Phillips, The baby on the fire escapecalls an “empty place on the map where mothering and converging creativity”.
“It seems to me,” says Judah, “that the same works are done again and again because part of our art history remains unwritten.” She remembers that when Judy Chicago started her Birth project A series in the early 1980s, she had never met the painful painting of Frida Kahlo in 1931 “My Birth” – she was therefore “in the impression that no female artist had properly approached the previous subject”. Fifty years after Kahlo, Chicago was, to borrow Richardson's sentence, “start again”. Creation acts joins an increasing set of works which convenes the past and examines the present so that the artist-mother can enter a new territory, where they can transcend the same old questions of self-negotiation- if Mothers can be artists, if Maternity can inspire good art – and rather focus on their own self -determination.
Creation acts: on art and maternity (2024) by Hettie Judah is published by Thames & Hudson and is available online and via independent booksellers.
