DESCRIPTION

The mother as motif in art and literature, from prehistoric fertility goddesses to the Madonna and Child and beyond

Ushering us into the world, our mother is our physical and cultural wellspring. Even if she is lost or absent, we are all sons and daughters. Throughout history and across cultures, the role of the mother has shifted, expanding at times and narrowing at others, as traditional family structures are by turns questioned and reinforced. This volume of art and literature on the many representations of the mother figure in art history ranges across religion, music, film and medicine. Excerpts, essays and poems by Marcel Proust, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Gustave Flaubert, Sylvia Plath and Hans Christian Andersen meditate on motherhood alongside a wealth of visual material. Although the volume's main focus is on 20th-century and 21st-century art, Mother! Origin of Life reaches back through history to trace artistic motifs from the prehistoric era to Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, noting how contemporary artists continue to tap into such universal themes. Between more than 150 artworks, expert texts and a short anthology of motherhood in literature, this publication reveals how depictions of motherhood in the arts have been linked to broader cultural perceptions.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Humlebæk, Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 04/06/21–08/29/21

Mannheim, Germany, Kunsthalle Mannheim, 10/01/21–02/06/22

ARTISTS INCLUDE

Sophie Calle, Mary Cassatt, Rineke Dijkstra, Laure Prouvost, Frida Orubapo, Tracey Emin, Alberto Giacometti, Mary Kelly, René Magritte, Alice Neel and Pablo Picasso.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the National Books Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, The Red Parts, and Jane: A Murder. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016, she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. She is the author of six novels. The first, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. In The Lucky Ones (2003) she uses a series of five narratives, loosely linked by the experience of parenthood, to write of life's transformations, of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her latest novel is Outline (2014).

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French novelist who was best known for exploring realism in his work. Hailing from an upper-class family, Flaubert was exposed to literature at an early age. He received a formal education at Lycée Pierre-Corneille, before venturing to Paris to study law. A serious illness forced him to change his career path, reigniting his passion for writing. He completed his first novella, November, in 1842, launching a decade-spanning career. His most notable work, Madame Bovary was published in 1856 and is considered a literary masterpiece.

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) originally trained as a singer and actor, but he gained fame with his fairy tales, which were not meant merely for children but for adults as well. Andersen frequently used a colloquial style that disguises the sophisticated moral teachings of his tales. Many of Andersen's fairy tales depict characters who gain happiness in life after suffering and enduring conflicts. The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid are Andersen's most intimate works. A playwright and novelist as well as the author of children's tales, Andersen publications include the novels The Improvisatore and Only a Fiddler, as well as his personal memoirs, The Fairy Tale of My Life.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist. Born in Auteuil, France at the beginning of the Third Republic, he was raised by Adrien Proust, a successful epidemiologist, and Jeanne Clémence, an educated woman from a wealthy Jewish Alsatian family. At nine, Proust suffered his first asthma attack and was sent to the village of Illiers, where much of his work is based. He experienced poor health throughout his time as a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet and then as a member of the French army in Orléans. Living in Paris, Proust managed to make connections with prominent social and literary circles that would enrich his writing as well as help him find publication later in life. In 1896, with the help of acclaimed poet and novelist Anatole France, Proust published his debut book Les plaisirs et les jours, a collection of prose poems and novellas. As his health deteriorated, Proust confined himself to his bedroom at his parents' apartment, where he slept during the day and worked all night on his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, a seven-part novel published between 1913 and 1927. Beginning with Swann's Way (1913) and ending with Time Regained (1927), In Search of Lost Time is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction in which Proust explores the nature of memory, the decline of the French aristocracy, and aspects of his personal identity, including his homosexuality. Considered a masterpiece of Modernist literature, Proust's novel has inspired and mystified generations of readers, including Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham.

Neville Rowley is currently a visiting professor of art history at the University of Campinas, Brazil.