by Breasts have been the focus of culture wars for the past 50 years. Second-wave feminists wearing their bras in the 1970s come to mind, and then there are the ongoing full-fledged debates about breastfeeding, and the even worse, and more recently, trans health care wars. Recent celebrations of women’s sensuality have been shown in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, expanding conversations around sexual pleasure, and the positive body movement all breasts as a main motif, too.
But for all the girls popping their nappies on Instagram, it’s much rarer to see them for free on the street. We keep them under wraps and rarely express why they are seen as so controversial. Because of the power of breasts as symbols of things as different but overlapping as gender, eroticism and motherhood, they are the nexus of a wild mix of emotions, politics and desires.
A new exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Breasts, it attempts to examine the multifaceted ways in which artists have represented them. It’s a huge idea, but curator Carolina Pasti largely limits the exhibition to post-war modern and contemporary art. She found miniature works from famous artists and placed them in a kitschy pink environment that is not even that Instagrammable, hoping to draw visitors in with the gimmick of the breasts.
Breastfeeding was not only for working class people. The idea that Mary would nurse her own child, the son of God, was remarkable
She begins, however, with a tiny Madonna and Child from circa 1395 which is part of the genre known as Madonna del Latte because it shows Christ drinking from his mother’s breast. There are hundreds of works like this – it feels as if every Renaissance painter did one at some point. The iconography of the nursing madonna was a branch of the cult of the Madonna of Humility, because the Virgin Mary was represented as a humble woman of the people. In medieval and Renaissance Europe (and even into the 20th century), breastfeeding was restricted to working-class people: they breastfed their own babies and were employed as wet nurses for middle-class families and cream. The idea that Mary would nurse her own child, the son of God, was remarkable. The Catholic interest in blood found resonance in another fluid of the body: milk.
But this motif fell out of fashion after the Council of Trent, also known as the Counter-Reformation, in the 1560s, which firmly set out the limits of acceptable iconography in the Catholic church in response to the birth of Protestantism. The intimacy of Mary feeding her child, and the rapture in which these images were held by the mass, had become too heavy, too sensitive, too disturbing for the church.
Thus begins the saga of the breast in modern western culture: already full of conflict. Of course, Pasti could have started much earlier: with the so-called Venus of Willendorf, for example, made around 25,000 BCE in Paleolithic Europe and showing a female figure with voluptuous breasts, belly and hips. Or with one of the many statues of the Ephesians Artemis, a version of the Greek goddess Artemis with many breasts, made around the first century CE. These ancient, pre-Christian images of women offer narratives of fertility, abundance and matriarchal power that sit outside the boundaries of contemporary feminist representations but nonetheless influence the way breasts are understood today.
In the centuries between Madonna del Latte and the modern and contemporary visions of the breast that were on display at Palazzo Franchetti, the perception of the breast changed dramatically. Think of the history of women’s necklines in Europe as a microcosm of the way breasts were socially coded: the high ruffs of early Elizabethan England compared to the busty, dramatic low necklines of 18th century France that sometimes even revealed nipples, and the prudish. late Victorian dresses, when high collars returned. Class is also very important when reading this history: upper class women’s breasts were usually of interest, as things to hide or show. Images of women in countries colonized by European powers were often rendered bare-breasted, reflecting their perceived lack of civility and their inequity with white women.
In the 20th century, the development of modern art and abstraction led to depictions of the breast being removed from the body. The work of Laura Panno, who cites Pasti as the show’s main inspiration, shows breasts alone, without the body to which they belong. The shapes and textures that make a breast become strange and higher in this context. The concentric circles represent repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s Panno Priière de Toucher’s Basis, which is also featured in the exhibition. The precision, that it is an orb, which is often not true of actual breasts, is emphasized in works such as To Be Naked, Breasts and Masami Teraoko’s Breasts on Hollywood Hills Installation by Adelaide Cioni.
Despite the erotic association of breasts, few of these works are particularly sexual. Chloe Wise Soccer, showing a chest with a curvy series of breasts leaning down over a black and white soccer ball, has the greatest sex appeal. The deconfiguration of most of these works is too abstract to make any sense of human connection.
The artist’s gaze is extremely important here, where the interaction between the artist and the subject implies power dynamics and physical interaction. Pasti told me that inclusivity was a core value for her as the curator of this exhibition, in her quest to “understand how men and women were represented throughout art” by both men and women.
The male artists featured in the exhibition approach the breast from different perspectives. Robert Mapplethorpe, the famous American gay photographer, took the photograph entitled Lisa Marie/Breasts in 1987. He sat himself and his camera under his subject’s breast, taking a photograph that looks up from her belly button towards her breast, which rises up like mountains. in a strange landscape of flesh. His insistence on the shape and line of this iconic landscape, rather than the personality of his subject, invites the viewer to see breasts from a new perspective. Other male depictions of chests have violence or control, such as Allen Jones Cover Story 2/4, Barbie-esque metal cast of an ideal female body.
While some artists look to abstraction or other contemporary visual languages, others look back to depict historical breast motifs. Cindy Sherman’s photograph Untitled #205 shows the artist dressed as a baroque, Madonna-esque figure with bare breasts and a pregnant belly draped in gauze fabric, dressed like an Ingres painting. But the breasts and belly are clearly fake, hanging from the artist’s shoulders like the shoulders of a drag queen, evoking complex readings about gender, motherhood, and transhistorical connections. Later painting by Anna Weyant, Chest, she shows a close-up of a woman’s chest with her hand covering her breast. Flattened realism and blank space characterize Weyant’s work, giving it a timelessness that allows us to imagine it depicts a scene that could just as likely have happened yesterday or 500 years ago.
The decision to examine one part of the traditional female body, rather than the whole body or the idea of feminism or womanhood itself, makes this exhibition purposefully narrow. It fosters a very abstract, formal view of the breast: how did this beautiful and specific object inspire artists? The curves, the colors, the undulations of skin and flesh are the subject of the works here much more than cultural beaches and breast flows and the people who have them.
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It also opens up a space for conversation about who has breasts. Prune Nourry is the only artist featured who survived breast cancer, and her work, Œil Nourricier #6, it is a fragile, round glass sculpture of a breast that raises questions about the fragility of life and health. Many breast cancer survivors no longer have their own breasts, so the mobility of this sculpture represents the way a breast can be something removed from the body.
Breasts can also be added to the body, as in Sherman’s photograph, or in Jacques Sonck’s photograph of a transgender woman in Ghent. Also included is Sonck’s photograph of a loincloth, reminding us that everyone has breasts of some shape or size – but when we say “breasts”, we almost always mean women. These works stress the basic biological imperative that still underpins the way we think and talk about gender and bodies. If breasts can come and go from bodies of different gender identities, how does their cultural meaning evolve?
The exhibition joins a larger trend in the art world of investigating embodiment, which has often been driven by female artists and a feminist perspective. This has led to some wonderful and substantial explorations of bodies and gender in art, such as the recent book Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin, but also with a lot of posturing about bodies that are only skin deep. Women’s bodies have been the central motif of western art, and a critical engagement with these women is long overdue. Breasts are breasts without the person they belong to – but what about her? What does she think?
