Portrait of the artist and mother

On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written to coincide with a touring exhibition of the same name, this ambitious book is more of a survey – a highly illustrated, annotated and well-researched one – than a traditional narrative. Judah’s energetic text displays the hunger of someone after a fast who can’t decide where to start at the buffet. This ravenousness goes somewhere towards redressing the historical paucity of women in the written histories of art.

The book isn’t organised chronologically, but rather thematically, with chapter titles such as ‘The Monstrous Child’ and ‘Maintenance’. This allows the author to make conceptual connections. Berthe Morisot’s self-portrait with her daughter, ‘The Drawing Lesson’ (1889), is compared with Suzanne Valadon’s ‘Family Portrait’ (1912), which in turn sits next to Ishbel Myerscough’s naked family portrait ‘All’ (2016). By juxtaposing work from different eras without filling in the chronological gaps, Judah frees the reader to follow thematic threads – in this case, how female artists portray their place within the family. In each of these works the artist looks directly at the viewer, while family members are either obscured, lost in thought or, as in Myerscough’s case, sharing the artist’s outward gaze. This last example shows how an artist’s family in 2016 is more capable of seeing the world from a mother’s point of view than in previous generations. 

One chapter, ‘The Mother in Western Art: A History in Fragments’, adheres to a more conventional art-historical approach, yet it is in these pages that Judah brings in male artists. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of pregnant women are presented – drawn from cadavers, obtained secretly and illegally under cover of darkness.