Birth Art

"Art is the expression of the profoundest of thoughts in the simplest way”
Albert Einstein

In 1931 when Jacob Epstein created his resplendent representation of fecundity in Genesis, it was treated by many within the art world as well those with less insight, as a affront to civilisation. The critics in the 1930's could be forgiven for being closed in their world view, particularly in relation to the subject matter of pregnancy. Victorian values still loomed, and childbearing was felt to be a matter that women had to stoically tolerate but certainly not celebrate. Epstein's majestic sculpture, fashioned on traditional African tribal art was undoubtedly a confrontational piece that aimed to challenge the values and beliefs of the population of the inter-war period. In 1963, Epstein reminisced that:-

“It was the duty of adult males to control and censor the kind of art to which the working classes and women were allowed to access.”
Epstein 1963

This statement carries a significance that has far reaching consequences, that reach far beyond those of the patriarchal art fraternity of the early twentieth century. In fact the quotation could be applied to a large extent to any given time in recorded history.

As recently as 1991 the Annie Liebowitz photograph of a heavily pregnant Demi Moore provoked a public outrage and led to some shops in the US refusing to sell the publication without it being placed within a paper bag. Incredibly, the idea of subjecting a maternal figure to a gaze that had tones of eroticism challenged the liberal mores of many of those living in the last decade of the 20th century.

If pregnancy in a visual form has the potential to create a furore, what of the even more transgressive concept of representing the woman in labour or giving birth?

Jonathan Waller is an artist who was prompted to pursue the theme of birth in his work as a result of the long and difficult birthing experience of his wife. The ordeal left him feeling raw, and exposed, but also in awe of women undergoing the process of birth. The cathartic experience of creating works that celebrated the strength and wonderment of labour and birth led to a series of larger than life paintings depicting the event in detail (as on our homepage). In 1996, on the eve of an exhibition where one of his birth studies was to be hung, Jonathan discovered that the gallery (where he regularly exhibited) had removed the painting from view. Ironically, the incident brought major publicity and some acclaim for his birth works. However, during a major exhibition in Cheltenham two years later, amongst the more positive comments in the guest book were included others were less complimentary such as,

“These pictures are not suitable for children walking by. If we must have them, put them in the other room. Why are there so many? One (or two at most) would suffice.”

Waller's artwork continues to have the potential to shock because the image of women giving birth is so incredibly rare. So why is one of life major events, a rite of passage, so overlooked. There are several theories which although slightly contradictory may shed light on this phenomenon. Chicago (1999) suggests that the experience of birth lies within a woman's realm and therefore is not considered important enough to be worth representing; that there is an element of secrecy attached to certain female bodily functions, or that women in the throes of giving birth are considered to be ritually unclean. Another could be that men undermine the significance of birth artistically because it is fundamentally the greatest creative act ever to be undertaken and one which by virtue of their sex they are necessarily denied. Alternatively, should we be subjecting an act which relies on a primal response (Odent 1999) to the public gaze in any way, shape or form.

Until very recently, representations of motherhood in art largely remained within the control of men. Women most often rendered silent and impotent, seldom able to express their views, values and beliefs about a elemental part of their existence.

“….pregnancy, birth and nursing are interpreted by both sexes as handicapping experiences; as a consequence women have been made to feel that by virtue of their biological functions that they have been biologically, naturally placed in an inferior position to men”
Ashley Montagu 1957

To explore this question more fully it may be useful to look way, way back at prehistory, to view how our fore bearers dealt with this subject within their cultures and societies.

The earliest evidence we have indicates that the role of the mother in Neolithic and Paleolithic times was wider than at any time during history. Their nature was more fully expressed, their contributions to their society were more valued, their creativity was celebrated and their influence on civilization was highly influential. The earliest gods were female, motherhood was divine. The “Great Mother” did not attempt to disguise her pregnancy. The very earliest known religious icons were naked female figurines often in an advanced state of pregnancy. ( Ehrenberg M 1989) The Venus of Willendorf is one such example of the reverence of the maternal state.

More recently in history in Aztec art we may witness the deification of the birthing state, with statues of goddesses as birthing woman, squatting in an upright position. Tlazolteotl, probably the most famous of these was known, amongst other things as the mother of childbirth.

Egyptian historical evidence also bears testimony to the importance of childbirth in that ancient civilisation. Women delivered their babies kneeling, or sitting on their heels, or on a delivery seat. This is shown in the birth hieroglyphic.

Terra mater is an example of how motherhood was proffered goddess status in ancient Rome, and according to Ehrenberg (1989) this mother as 'goddess' status was replaced by around 600b.c, with the firm establishment of a patriarchal paradigm. In this paradigm, in contrast to the experience of our Paleolithic and Neolithic foremothers, maternal power was viewed as something which rendered women culpable, and thus less worthy and capable of effecting social influence. To a greater or lesser extent, this would have appeared to have remained as the existing ideology throughout history thereafter.

  The advent of Christianity can be seen to have perpetuated the idea that birth was something that should not be publicly acknowledged. A necessary evil, the 'Curse of Eve.' Christ is acknowledged in theological terms as the product of an immaculate conception, and this has led to a persistent iconic representation of his mother the 'Virgin' Mary. In the middle ages Mary is depicted in a pregnant state, notably pointing to her swollen abdomen. Otherwise, although images of the Christ child and his mother abound , an image of the actual blood and guts birth of Christ is to my knowledge, non-existent. The Madonna and Child image has influenced Western art enormously, and the representation is almost without exception idealized.

Chicago (1999) suggests that as one of the most fundamental of all human processes, birth itself has no need of any particular framework to give it an aura of the sacred. Yet it could be said that at an artistic level the potential of the subject has been hijacked by a religion that has denied us access to a discourse for centuries.

It is fair to say however, that there are genre paintings that illustrate the setting and context of birth and these give us considerable historical insight into the celebration of the event within different times and cultures. These are sometimes biblical in nature. For example, The Birth of Mary shows the birthing room with the birthing supporters (all women) attending to the needs of the mother and her newborn child. Jan Stein's painting is a delightful lively account of a birth in which the whole of the community appear to be involved. There are many metaphors, analogies and sub-plots in evidence when the painting is studied carefully. The broken eggs for example would represent infidelity. The sausages being held aloft are an overt phallic symbol. The apparent father of the baby is shadowed by a character who is making what would have been instantly recognised as the sign of the cuckold. This delightful and lively work, illustrates the social nature of birth in 15th century Holland and serves to remind us of a time when the event was more than the medicalised procedure that it has become for most of us in western industrialised society.

The twentieth century has far more images relating to childbirth than previous centuries, but these tend to focus more on the gestation and post natal period and the actual business of birth is by and large seriously under represented. Where they do exist they are often overlooked for work that could be said to lie within the male domain. Artists such as Egon Schiller, an Austrian painter was renowned for his erotic portraits. However, his heart rendering representation of Pregnant Woman meets Death is given much less consideration, in spite of the fact that the painting prophesied the death of his wife in late pregnancy as a result of contracting Spanish flu. Likewise, Otto Dix is often identified as the artist who painted the horrors of the Great War whilst his studies of pregnant women and even the image of his newborn son, held aloft in the hands of a midwife (Newborn Baby on Hands 1927) is given far less recognition.

The oft cited 'Why are there no great women artists?' is a grave and unfair accusation. In fact there have been many great women artists but they also are frequently overlooked, particularly when the subject matter with which they are dealing lies outside the mainstream catalogue of acceptable material.

In the late years of the nineteenth and the early years of the 20th century, the German art world produced two female artists of notable acclaim, Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn Becker.

Both of these women sought to represent the life of women in Germany in the early years of the 20th Century. Kollwitz was a social realist and her imagery is marked by poverty stricken women barely able to care for or nourish their children. Her art resounds with compassion and serves as an indictment of the social conditions in Germany at that time. Her work, Mother with Dead Child' '(1903) is a harrowing and emotionally challenging representation of childhood mortality where the mother almost screams her grief at the viewer. She also produced several works, illustrating the hardship of pregnancy and childrearing for the working class women of the time.

Modersohn Becker painted women in the childbearing period, but they were presented in a more robust and less deprived manner. Her painting New Mother, serves as a contrast to the idealised Madonna and Child images, viewed earlier. The nude mother and child lay together in a complete state of unity and the image to me radiates 'mother love'. Nudity in this picture conflicts with feminist ideas of the female nude as object of public consumption, because Modersohn uses the state in such a way as to obliterate notions of sensuality and sexuality.

In the painting Self Portrait'' Mohdersohn represents herself as pregnant when she was not. It was at the precise point when she had decided to abandon her husband, Otto Modersohn, in northern Germany to remain working as an independent artist in Paris. Some critics interpret the painting as 'looking forward to motherhood' Becker was 30 when she painted her Self Portrait, thirty one when she died as a result of complications after childbirth, relatively old to bear a first child in the first decade of the twentieth century. The following words from her journal demonstrate her longing for a child and make the Self Portrait of her phantom pregnancy all the more poignant.

“There are times when this feeling of devotion and dependence
lies dormant…..The all at once this feeling awakes and surges
and roars, as if the container would nearly burst. There's no
room for anything else. My Mother. Dawn is within me and I feel
the approaching day. I am becoming something.”
 Modersohn-Becker (1980)

Frida Kahlo, a Mexican artist, began to paint in 1925 whilst recovering from an accident that left her permanently disabled. It also left her unable to bear children, a fact which haunted her for during her turbulent marriage to fellow-artist Diego Rivera, and was a theme that dominated many of her paintings.

  Although paintings such as Henry Ford Hospital depict the sense of loss, betrayal and loneliness that she must have felt at the time of her three or more miscarriages, other self portraits explore issues about her own early childhood, and identify her personal construct of mothering. The images in paintings like My Birth (1932) and My Nurse and I, focus heavily on a fragmented and incomplete relationship with her mother.

In My Birth, the knees of the woman on the bed are bent and spread in the position of giving birth. Frida's head is newly born, but fully grown and adult in feature. It is difficult to establish whether she is dead or alive. Above the bed hangs a portrait of the Virgin of Sorrows bleeding and weeping, stabbed by two daggers. Kahlo said “This is how imagined I was born”. The image condenses a fear and a wish, an understanding she had between herself and her mother, that her birth had been a kind of death to her mother (Herrera 1989). Kahlo could only have been born after her mother died and consequently, the experience of bonding between them never took place. Without a consistent primary caregiver, attuned to provide the mirroring she needed to thrive and develop adequately, she had in a sense, given psychological birth to herself (Grimberg 1989).

Her painting My Nurse and I (1937) shows Kahlo still working on the issue of a faulty attachment and its consequences. Kahlo considered this work a companion to My Birth. The painting depicts herself as half infant, half woman. She appears in the arm of her Indian wetnurse presumably because she cannot remember the features of her nurse, she covered the face with an Aztec mask. The mouth of the infant/adult drips milk, though she is not actively engaged in suckling. She looks directly at the viewer, making no eye-contact with her nurse.

  American, Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a figurative painter who worked during the decades of realism, postwar abstract expressionism, 1960s Pop and 1970s minimalism. She persevered in her work in spite of a turbulent personal life, that impacted on her working life, until the 1960s. Although she produced some landscape work during her career, her primary focus by far was on portraiture. Her subjects were usually family and friends and she represented them as human beings, in real life situations with true emotions. In fact she deplored the term 'portrait' and described herself as a "collector of souls".

Neel's work is remarkable for including at least eight pregnant nudes and she thought the whole picture of woman without pregnancy was trivial.

"It's treating woman as sex object. But you know, sex results in something."
Neel (http://www.uam.ucsb.edu/Pages/pregnant_woman.html)

Nancy, Neel's daughter in law, featured in many of Alice Neels works including the representation of her as a young mother getting to grips with the demands of motherhood. Her somewhat startled expression could be seen to illustrate the demands of the role. Neel portrayed Nancy as an individual with an identity recognizable over many years, with an understanding of how that identity responded to the pressures of time and family life.

Some of the second wave feminist artists defiantly flaunted the theme of birth in an attempt to demystify and normalise this universal human experience. When Monica Sjoo exhibited God Giving Birth, many women recognized the painting as an attempt to create a powerful symbolic image of one of the realities of femininity and women's lives. However, she was see by the establishment as pushing the boundaries just too far and the painting almost led to a prosecution under the blasphemy laws.

When Judy Chicago decided to approach the subject area by inviting women to participate in the production of an amazing collection of needlework art, which collectively became the Birth Project.

“Since there were so few images, I decided that I would have to go directly to the women, ask them to tell me about their birth experiences.”
Chicago 1985

The pieces were created from quilting, appliqué, patchwork and other traditional needlework forms. Chicago, a controversial feminist artist of notoriety, had rocked the art world with her 'Dinner Party' exhibition, where she had displayed sculptures of the genitalia of influential women in history. Likewise, Birth Project brought Chicago both acclaim and disapproval in equal measures. In addition to ensuring that the neglected subject of childbirth was represented in the eighty pieces that made up the collection, Birth Project served to make a further valuable point about gender and art. Chicago recognised that needlework in was considered to be 'women's work,' and was not valued as a medium for art-making. The magnificent Birth Project with its raw and powerful imagery defied that assumption and may have contributed to a renaissance in traditional women's crafts, but with the recognition that these are now valued as art and not just handicrafts.

The healing power of the aesthetic has finally achieved mainstream recognition in health care. Courses in Arts in Health abound, artists and poets in residence are now found in many hospital departments and artworks adorn the walls of clinics, surgeries and other venues where health care is offered. Sadly, this trend is not as readily observable in the maternity hospital. However, one British artist in residence has in the last decade accessed the labour ward and produced work which offers an insightful perspective into the domain of late twentieth century birth. When she exhibited her collection entitled A Shared Experience' ' at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1993, Ghislaine Howard recognised that the depictions of the events shown in her paintings and drawings were rare in western art. She stated in the foreword of her catalogue,

“It is a salutary thought that an experience that all humans have shared is so rarely seen in art galleries.”

My only reservation about the work in the collection is that for me, it portrays a very clinical birth experience. I am certain that Ghislaine Howard was merely recreating what she faced within the hospital setting. What I feel is achieved is a portrayal of birth with women as passive recipients who are not actively engaged in the birthing process. This is more of a criticism of the delivery of care within the current maternity system than of Howard's powerful work. It has led me to feel that we do need more positive affirmations of the essential mystery, primacy and wonderment of women's bodies, and in women's ability to "know best" about the things their bodies require and the choices which they need to make. We know that images can have profound effects on the physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual and social well-being of humanity and we must welcome the growth of the arts in health movement. Yet birth in Britain in the year 2003 is in something of a crisis and in chronic need of reconsideration. With a national Caesarean section rate of 25% and midwives leaving practice at an alarming rate, it feels as though women have lost the belief in their bodies to grow and bear babies without the intervention of increasing technology. If we are to curtail this trend, which may have serious implications for the future health and well being of society, then we need to change public and professional attitudes and increase awareness. Art has the power to confront and challenge dogma and ideology. Art allows the imagination to flourish and as I began with a quotation from Einstein, so shall I end:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

* * * * * * *

In the next article of this series, I will focus on ways in which we can practically encompass the inclusion of art in midwifery, in practice and in education.

Odent M (1999) The Scientification of Love. Free Association Press.

Chicago J Lucie-Smith E (1999) Women and Art – Uncontested Territory. Weidenfeld Nicolson

Ehrenberg M (1989) Women in Prehistory: British Museum Press

Modersohn Becker P (1980) Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker

Grimberg S (1989) Frida Kahlo: Meadows Museum.

Herrera H (1998) Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo: Bloomsbury

Chicago J (1985) Birth Project. Doubleday & Co.

Montagu AMF (1957) The Direction of Human Development. Watts