The art world and motherhood: the end of a final taboo?

“There are good artists that have children,” Tracey Emin once said. “They are called men.”

But while motherhood is underrepresented in art, a new exhibition aims to break this taboo. The realities of motherhood, the “years of broken nights, ridiculous laughter, reading practice, nosebleeds, scraped knees, teenage arguments and broken hearts”, have rarely been portrayed, said the exhibition’s curator Hettie Judah on the i news site.

Although a “wealth” of art about real motherhood exists, “quite often it stays out of sight for years in artists’ portfolios, or damp sheds”, wrote Judah. She hopes her “Acts of Creation: on Art and Motherhood”, which is currently touring in Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Dundee, will “provoke conversations between women around subjects that are still little discussed”.

A binary choice: ‘art or children’

For female artists, motherhood is “venerated in theory” but “belittled in practice”, wrote Ligaya Mishan for The New York Times. It is still seen, by others and often artists themselves, “as an obstacle, if not the end”.

We may be “long past the cliché of the father as a doting outsider”, but we’re “still in thrall to the idea” that “when a woman has a child, she finally understands her reason for being on earth”.

Art careers appear to start derailing for women in their 30s, wrote Judah in The Guardian in 2020. The choice is “often presented as binary: art or children”. After interviewing 50 female artists, she found that many felt they “needed to keep the two sides of their identity separate”, as though they were “somehow operating beneath the radar: secret mothers, infiltrating the house of art”.

Reviewing the new exhibition for The Guardian, Laura Cumming recalled the infamous words of the writer Cyril Connolly, who said in 1938 that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art, than the pram in the hall”. But procreation itself, countered Cumming, “may be the vital inspiration”. This exhibition’s “mystery, profundity, love, grief and amazement” offers a “riveting riposte” to Connolly.

‘Real and raw’

The exhibition explores the “pleasures, pains, hopes and anxieties of motherhood”, said Chloe Ashby in The Independent, and “brings together artists making work during the past 60 years”.

“Thanks to the easing of market and curatorial resistance, it’s true that motherhood, in general, is becoming less taboo,” she added. Judah told Ashby that there had been a few hugely successful artists who have engaged with the subject in recent years –with “depictions that are real and raw as opposed to mythic and non-biological”.

But while the subject of parenthood has “gained greater currency in avant-garde circles”, the “real-life hurdles that mothers face have not gone away”, said Skye Sherwin on Art Basel.

Although “having a baby isn’t quite seen as the career dead-end it once was”, artist residencies are “usually structured around the idea of artists as lone individuals, not people who are caregivers in a family group”, and “exhibition private views take place during children’s bedtimes”.

As Scottish painter Caroline Walker told Sherwin, to see motherhood as a “universal” subject, and “not dismissed as a niche interest”, is “still a work in progress”.