Birth taboo: why art does not show mothers as mothers

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Year after year, Christians celebrate the Incarnation of the Divine Child.

This is how familiar the child, wrapped in diapers and lying in the manger, is greeted by Mary and Joseph and the shepherds, ox and donkey.

A pleasure to contemplate the mother's love in Andrea Mantegna's sensitive “Madonna with the Sleeping Child” around 1465, which had to spend Christmas without an audience in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.

The musing Mary gently supports the child's head with her hand and cheek.

Agnostics and atheists can also identify with the birth of Christ as a reason for celebration;

the beauty of a newborn as in Raphael's Sistine Madonna from 1512 will probably not be hidden from anyone.

And yet there is always a big taboo associated with the topic: the actual birth itself.

Unique grace: "The Sistine Madonna" (1512) by Raphael

Source: State Art Collections Dresden

Only recent art approaches this existential side of motherhood.

As soon as Corona allows, the Kunsthalle Mannheim will open an extensive exhibition on the subject together with the Copenhagen Museum Louisiana

.

It is planned for January in Copenhagen.

The museums have thus chosen a topic that could not be more important or more controversial.

Hardly any other term provokes more diverse associations, feelings and role clichés than “mother”.

Maltreated by the supermother

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With works by Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso and Paula Modersohn-Becker through to Louise Bourgeois and Rineke Dijkstra, the exhibition focuses on the 20th century, in which, year after year and work of art, the traditional role of women is increasingly questioned was redefined: Ulrike Rosenbach, who photographed the head of a child in 1977, covered over and over with kissing mouths, maltreated by the mother.

Cindy Sherman as “Madonna” in 1989 with a bare breast like a feeding machine or Louise Bourgeois' drawings and sculptures that try to get closer to the secret of childbirth.

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But the disputes still continue, as the debate about the study “Regretting Motherhood” by the Israeli sociologist Orna Donath from 2015 showed.

A surprisingly large proportion of women admitted to feeling trapped in the role of mother, and even to regret motherhood.

The photographer Heji Shin drew criticism a few years ago because she accompanied three women during the birth of their child and captured the moment of the breakthrough through the birth canal.

All iconographic conventions associated with the narrative “birth” or “infant” were thus torpedoed.

Does our rejection result from “the fear of our origins from within another human being?” Asked the writer Siri Hustvedt at the time.

She felt the tiny bruised head of the little newborn, the expression of agony on his face, moving to the extreme.

Birth is and remains the great taboo.

The breaking of a taboo by Otto Dix

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But there was one artist who didn't care.

Nobody has devoted himself to the topic as intensively, relentlessly and realistically as Otto Dix, born in 1891.

He recorded the birth of his son Ursus in drawings, you can see the open legs of the mother, from which the child emerges.

He is even in the picture as a viewer.

He processed the shock of this experience with the same expressive stylistic devices as the horror of war.

Women and their children, that is his symbol for life - and death.

On his graphic cycle “The War” from 1924 one discovers a woman breastfeeding her dead baby.

Modern Madonna picture: "Mother and Child" by Otto Dix from 1932

Source: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 202

The Kunsthalle Mannheim will show the painter's drawing "Mother and Child" from 1932, which we can also read as a modern Madonna picture.

The woman's eyelids appear heavy as lead, the back is slightly bent, the chest is too big for the narrow body, but her devotion belongs entirely to the blissfully drinking baby.

The echo of the physical pain so soon after birth can still be felt when the adrenaline withdraws, the limbs are carrying the heaviest weights and the drinking child sucks the mother's body.

As long as Corona may keep the museums closed, we can already look forward to the exhibitions in Copenhagen and Mannheim.

The more realism goes into dealing with the experience of childbirth, the more beautiful and freer the enjoyment of the old masters feels in the end.

Because there is one thing that no contemporary work of art has ever been able to dispute with: the unique grace of the relationship between mother and child.