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Breasts have been a focus of the culture wars for the past 50 years. I think of the second-wave feminists who ditched their bras in the 1970s, then the ongoing, judgmental debates surrounding breastfeeding and the even more fraught and recent hostilities surrounding transgender health care. Recent celebrations of female sensuality in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, expanding conversations around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement all take breasts as a key motif as well.
But for all the girls unleashing their clips on Instagram, it’s far less common to see them loose on the street. We keep them secret and rarely articulate why they seem so controversial. The power of breasts as symbols of such different but overlapping things as gender, eroticism, and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild cocktail of emotions, politics, and desires.
New exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Breasts, aims to explore 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’s taken minor works from big-name artists and installed them in a kitschy pink environment that’s not even that Instagram-worthy, hoping to attract visitors with the boob gimmick.
However, it begins with a small Madonna and Child from around 1395, which is part of the genre known as the Madonna del Latte because it depicts Christ drinking from his mother’s breast. There are hundreds of works like this – it feels like every Renaissance artist did one at some point. The iconography of the nursing Madonna is a branch of the cult of the Madonna of Humility, because the Virgin Mary is depicted as a humble woman of the people. In medieval and renaissance Europe (and even into the 20th century), breastfeeding was something only working-class people did: they nursed their own children and were employed as nurses for middle- and upper-class families. The idea that Mary would nurse her own child, the son of God, was a revelation. The Catholic fascination with blood finds resonance in another bodily fluid: milk.
But this motive went out of fashion after Council of Trent, also known as the Counter-Reformation, in the 1560s, which firmly drew the boundaries of acceptable iconography in the Catholic Church in response to the birth of Protestantism. The intimacy of Mary nursing her child, and the rapture in which these images were held by the masses, had become too crude, too lustful, too embodied for the church.
Thus begins the saga of breasts in modern Western culture: already fraught with conflict. Of course, Pasti could have started much earlier: with the so-called Venus of Willendorf, for example, made around 25,000 BC in Paleolithic Europe and depicting a female figure with voluptuous breasts, abdomen and thighs. Or with one of the many sculptures of Artemis of Ephesus, a version of the Greek goddess Artemis with many breasts, made around the first century AD. These ancient, pre-Christian images of women offer narratives of fertility, abundance, and matriarchal power that are outside the bounds of modern notions of femininity, yet have influenced the way breasts are understood today.
In the centuries between Madonna del Latte and the modern and contemporary views of the breast on display at the Palazzo Franchetti, perceptions of the breast changed dramatically. Think of the history of women’s cleavage in Europe as a microcosm of how breasts were socially coded: the high curves of early Elizabethan England compared to the busty, dramatically low necklines of 18th-century France, which sometimes even exposed the nipples. followed by the drastic late Victorian dresses when high collars returned. Class is also extremely important in reading this story: usually the breasts of upper-class women are of interest, either as objects to be hidden or displayed. Images of women in lands that were colonized by European powers were often depicted bare-breasted, signifying their perceived lack of civilization and their inequality with white women.
In the 20th century, the development of modern art and abstraction led to images of breasts that were abstracted from the body. Laura Pano’s work, which Pasti cites as a major inspiration for the show, depicts the breast in isolation, without the body to which it belongs. The shapes and textures that make the breasts become strange and prominent in this context. The repeating concentric circles of Panno origin the echo of Marcel Duchamp Prière de Toucher, which is also featured in the exhibition. A sense of roundness, of an orb, which is rarely true of actual breasts, is emphasized in works such as Adelaide Cioni’s To Be Naked, Breasts and Installation “Masami Teraoko’s Breasts in the Hollywood Hills”..
Despite the erotic association of breasts, few of these works are particularly sexual. Chloe Wise’s Football, showing a chest with arched breasts bent over a black and white soccer ball has the most sex appeal. The embodiment of most of these works is too harrowing to allow for any sense of human connection.
The artist’s gaze takes on extraordinary importance here, where power dynamics and physical interaction are implied by the interplay between artist and subject. Pasti told me that inclusivity is a core value for her as the curator of this exhibition, in her quest to “understand how women are represented in art” by both men and women.
The male artists featured in the exhibition approach breasts from different perspectives. Robert Mapplethorpe, the famous American gay photographer, took the photo titled Lisa Marie/Gurdy in 1987. He positioned himself and his camera below his subject’s breasts, taking a picture that looked up from her navel to her breasts, which rose like mountains in a strange landscape of flesh. His insistence on the shape and line of this monumental embodied landscape, rather than the personality of his subject, invites the viewer to see the breast from a new perspective. Other images of male breasts have overtones of violence or control, such as Alan Jones Cover Story 2/4, a barbie-style metal cast of an idealized female body.
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While some artists look forward to abstraction or other contemporary visual languages, others look back to historical motifs to represent breasts. Photo by Cindy Sherman Untitled #205 shows the artist dressed as a sort of baroque Madonna-style figure, bare-breasted and pregnant belly, draped in sheer fabric, arranged like a painting by Engr. But the breasts and abdomen are obviously fake, hanging from the artist’s shoulders like those of a drag queen, evoking complex readings of gender, motherhood, and transhistorical connections. Anna Weyant’s newer painting, Chest, shows a close-up of a woman’s breast with a hand covering her breast. The flat realism and empty setting are characteristic of Weyant’s work and give the subject a timelessness that allows us to imagine it depicts a scene that is equally likely to have happened yesterday or 500 years ago.
The decision to explore a particular part of the traditional female body, rather than the whole body or the very idea of femininity or femininity, makes this exhibition purposefully narrow. It encourages a particularly abstract, formal look at the breast: how has this beautiful, specific thing inspired artists? The curves, colors, undulations of skin and flesh are the subject of the works here far more than the cultural ebb and flow of breasts and the people who have them.
It also opens up a conversation about who has breasts. Cut Nourry is the only breast cancer survivor featured artist, and her work, Œil Nourricier #6, 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 breasts of their own, so the mobility of this sculpture reflects the way a breast can be something that is removed from the body.
Breasts can also be added to the body, as in Sherman’s photo, or in Jacques Sonckphoto of a trans woman in Ghent. Sonk’s photo of a bare-chested man is also included, reminding us that literally everyone has breasts of some shape or size—but when we say “breasts,” we almost always mean female. These works push the biological essentialism 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 to explore embodiment, which has often been driven by female artists and a feminist perspective. This has led to some wonderfully nuanced and substantive explorations of bodies and gender in art, such as Lauren Elkin’s recent book Artistic monsters, but also to many postures for the bodies that are deep. Female bodies are a central motif of Western art, and critical engagement with these women is long overdue. A breast is just a breast without the face it belongs to – but what about her? what does she think
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