Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media
Foundling Museum
Join the Knowledge Quarter Private View of the exhibition, Wednesday, 11 March, 8:30-10:00
The writer Rachel Cusk in her memoir of pregnancy and motherhood, A Life's Work, is memorably candid about her dread of giving birth and her unpreparedness for motherhood. These symptoms she attributes to a vow of silence among mothers, broken only with ominous elliptical remarks about pain, which range from ironic contempt at the word to the reassuring, "accept all the drugs they offer you". On becoming a mother, she finds parents are just as allusive about the end of freedom and sleep. Pregnancy, as experience, is something society has never been comfortable talking about.
Unsurprisingly, expressions of fear or anxiety are muted in the artworks on display at the Foundling Museum, where curator Karen Hearn has covered a brisk 500 years of portrayal, from the medieval fixation on Mary's unpricked purity, through to modern times, and the waters broken by feminist movements and social media.
Although we rarely see signs of stress or anxiety on the sitters, there is plenty of it in the societal forces at work behind the art. The exhibition opens your eyes to a coded language of fertility symbols and furtive gestures. Pregnancy is alluded to beneath dissembling dresses, a hand placed above the subjects bump. The result is that these paintings could be the breeding ground of gossip, secrecy's prattling spawn – who might have got her pregnant? And does the sitter really mean to point to her own fertility or another's infertility? At times the secret language has a political aspect: dynastic anxiety was rife in the age of an unwedded Elizabeth I, for example. Later, the glossy image of the heavily pregnant actor Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, and its subsequent spin-offs, is still less about pregnancy as an experience and more about empowerment in the face of a number of
cultural anxieties, some around the perceived costs to the pregnant subject – costs to beauty, to athleticism, to career – and others to do with wider societal hang ups with the body. There are too many cultural anxieties to name here, and they are perfectly incubated in the exhibition space, so that you start to see pregnancy as a truly postmodern subject for any artist. Simply put, Portraying Pregnancy is the story of taboo, the taboo of life itself.
Patriarchy gave birth to this taboo. The fact that pregnancy has nearly always been portrayed by male artists contributes to the nearly always blank or serene expressions on the faces of the sitters. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1636), Hearn tells us, specialised in pregnancy portraiture, with an acute eye for fashion and decorum. One notable exception features in what is possibly the first self-portrait of a pregnant woman. The artist is Mary Beale (1633-1699), and gazing long enough at the audacity and defiance she has
painted in her face will fill you with the self-belief needed to run a marathon, or build your own house, or single-handedly reverse climate change.
The womb-like intimacy of the exhibition space brings you eye to eye with the paintings on display. The most affecting encounter is with a care-free Princess Charlotte Augusta (1796-1817), pregnant with the child whose birth will be the death of her. In a cabinet besides the painting, like a mausoleum, is the same sky-blue sarafan dress she wears in her portrait. It's an extraordinary juxtaposition, and a devastating reminder of how fatal and frightful childbirth once was, whether it was painted into the faces of the sitters or not.
Join the Knowledge Quarter Private View of the exhibition, Wednesday, 11 March, 8:30-10:00
Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ