Breasts have been the focal point of the culture wars of the last 50-odd years. Second-wave feminists ditching their bras in the 1970s come to mind, followed by ongoing judgment-filled debates about breastfeeding and, more recently, more worrying and recent hostilities regarding transgender healthcare. The celebration of female sensuality, which has recently manifested itself in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, expanding conversations around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement, also takes breasts as a leitmotif.
But it is much rarer to see all the girls who have their breasts free on Instagram free on the street. We keep these secret and rarely address why they seem so controversial. The power of breasts as symbols of such disparate yet overlapping things as sex, eroticism, and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild mix of emotions, politics, and desires.
A new exhibition at the ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Breasts, sets out to examine the multifaceted ways in which artists represent them. It’s a big idea, but curator Carolina Pasti largely limits the exhibition to post-war modern and contemporary art. She took small works from well-known artists and placed them in an un-Instagrammed kitsch pink setting, hoping to attract visitors with the boob trick.
Breastfeeding was something only working-class people did. The idea that Mary would breastfeed her own child, the son of God, was revealing
However, it begins with a small Madonna and Child from about 1395, part of the genre known as the Madonna del Latte because it depicts Jesus drinking from his mother’s breast. There are hundreds of works like this; It feels as if every Renaissance painter painted one at some point. The iconography of the Nursing Virgin was an offshoot of the cult of the Madonna of Modesty, as the Virgin Mary was depicted as a modest woman of the people. In medieval and Renaissance Europe (and even into the 20th century), breastfeeding was something only working-class people did: They breastfed their own children and were hired as wet nurses for middle- and upper-class families. The idea that Mary would breastfeed her own child, the son of God, was enlightening. The Catholic fascination with blood was echoed in another body fluid: milk.
However, this motif fell out of fashion following the Council of Trent, also known as the Counter-Reformation, which firmly established the boundaries of acceptable iconography in the Catholic church in response to the emergence of Protestantism in the 1560s. The intimacy of Mary feeding her child and the mass appropriation of these images had become too crude, too sensual, too embodied for the church.
This is how the meme myth begins in modern western culture: It is already rife with conflict. Of course, Pasti could have started much earlier: with the so-called Venus of Willendorf., for example, it was made in Paleolithic Europe around 25,000 BC and depicts a female figure with voluptuous breasts, navel, and hips. Or with one of the many statues of Artemis of Ephesus, made in the 1st century AD, a multi-breasted version of the Greek goddess Artemis. These ancient, pre-Christian images of women present narratives of fertility, abundance, and matriarchal power; These narratives fall outside the boundaries of contemporary representations of femininity, but have nevertheless influenced the way breasts are understood today.
In the centuries between the Madonna del Latte and the modern and contemporary visions of the breast displayed at the Palazzo Franchetti, perceptions of the breast have changed dramatically. Consider the history of women’s low-cut necklines in Europe as a microcosm of the way breasts were socially coded: the high ruffles of early Elizabethan England compared to the full, strikingly low necklines of 18th-century France, which sometimes exposed even the nipples of chaste women. It’s coming. Late Victorian dresses with high collars returning. Class is also extremely important when reading this history: often upper-class women’s breasts were of interest as objects either to be kept or displayed. Images of women in lands colonized by European powers were often depicted with bare breasts; This indicated that they lacked civilization and were not equal to white women.
The development of modern art and abstraction in the 20th century led to depictions of the breast abstracted from the body. The work of Laura Panno, which Pasti cited as the main inspiration for the exhibition, depicts breasts alone, independent of the body to which they belong. In this context, the shapes and textures that make up the breast become strange and exaggerated. The repeating concentric circles of Panno’s Origine echo Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher, which is also included in the exhibition. The sense of roundness and sphericity, which is rarely true of real breasts, is emphasized in works such as Adelaide Cioni’s Being Naked, Breasts and Masami Teraoko’s Breasts Installation in the Hollywood Hills.
Despite the erotic connotation of breasts, few of these works are specifically sexual. Chloe Wise’s Football, The image showing a curvy pair of breasts bent over a black and white football has the most sexual appeal. The disembodiment of many of these works is too jarring to allow for any sense of human connection.
At this point, where the interaction between the artist and the subject implies power dynamics and physical interaction, the artist’s gaze gains great importance. Pasti told me that inclusivity, by both men and women, is a core value for her as the curator of this exhibition in her quest to “understand how women are represented in art.”
The male artists in the exhibition approach the breast from different angles. Famous gay American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took the photograph titled Lisa Marie/Breasts in 1987. Positioning the camera and herself under her subject’s breasts, she took a photo looking up from her belly button to her towering breasts. in a strange fleshscape. Her insistence on the shape and line of this monumental embodied landscape, rather than the personality of her subject, invites the viewer to look at breasts from a new perspective. Other depictions of male breasts, such as Allen Jones’ Cover Story 2/4, have a slight tone of violence or control., Barbie-like metal mold of an idealized female body.
While some artists look forward to abstraction or other contemporary visual languages, others look to historical motifs representing breasts. Cindy Sherman’s photograph Untitled #205 shows the artist dressed as a kind of baroque, Madonna-like figure, her bare breasts and pregnant belly wrapped in tulle fabric, arranged like an Ingres painting. But the breasts and belly are clearly fake; it hangs like a transvestite on the artist’s shoulders, evoking complex readings about gender, motherhood, and transhistorical connections. Anna Weyant’s more recent painting Chest, It shows a close-up of a woman’s breast, with her arm covering her breasts. Flattened realism and empty surroundings are characteristic of Weyant’s work, giving his subject a timelessness that allows us to imagine that he is depicting a scene that is equally likely to have happened yesterday or 500 years ago.
The decision to examine a single part of the traditional female body rather than the entire body or the idea of femininity or femininity deliberately narrows this exhibition down. It gives a particularly abstract and formal look at the meme: How did this beautiful, special thing inspire artists? The subject of the works here is the curves, colors, undulations of skin and flesh rather than the cultural ebb and flow of breasts and the people who have them.
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It also creates space for conversation about whose breasts they have. Prune Nourry is the only artist to survive breast cancer and her work is Œil Nourricier #6, is a fragile, round glass breast sculpture that raises questions about the fragility of life and health. Many breast cancer survivors no longer have breasts of their own, so the mobility of this sculpture reflects that breasts can be something removed from the body.
Breasts can also be added to the body, as in Sherman’s photo or Jacques Sonck’s photo of a trans woman in Ghent. Sonck’s photograph of a bare-breasted man is also included; This reminds us that literally everyone has breasts of a certain shape or size — but when we say “breasts” we almost always mean women’s. These studies challenge the biological essentialism that still undergirds the way we think and talk about gender and bodies. If breasts can come and go from bodies with different gender identities, how do their cultural meanings evolve?
The exhibition joins a larger trend in the art world to explore embodiment, often driven by female artists and feminist perspectives. This has led to wonderfully nuanced and important examinations of the body and gender in art, such as Lauren Elkin’s latest book, Art Monsters., but also to many postures about bodies that are only superficial. The female body has been the leitmotif of western art, and a critical engagement with these women is long overdue. Breasts are just breasts without the person they belong to – but what about that? What does she think?