SecondFood has been a focus of the culture wars for more than 50 years. I’m reminded of the second-wave feminists who took off their bras in the 1970s, then the ongoing judgment-laden debate over breastfeeding, and more recently the more alarming hostility surrounding transgender health care. Recent celebrations of female sexuality have seen the likes of #freethenip, hot girl summer, wider discussions around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement, which have all used breasts as a key theme.
But for all the girls feeling free on Instagram, it’s much less common to see them free on the streets. We keep them secret, rarely elucidating why they seem so controversial. The power of breasts as symbols of different but overlapping things like gender, eroticism, and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild mixture of emotion, politics, and desire.
New exhibition “Breasts” at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Set out to examine the multifaceted ways in which artists express themselves. It’s a great idea, but curator Carolina Pasti largely limits the exhibition to postwar modern and contemporary art. She sourced small pieces from big-name artists and installed them in a kitschy pink environment that wasn’t even Instagram-friendly, hoping to attract visitors through the boob gimmick.
However, she began with a small Madonna and Child painted around 1395, which is part of the “Latte Madonna” genre For it depicts Christ drinking from his mother’s bosom. There are hundreds of works like this – it feels as if every Renaissance painter created one at some point. The iconography of the Breastfeeding Virgin is an offshoot of the cult of Our Lady of Humility, as 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 the working class did: they breastfed their children and were employed as wet nurses by middle- and upper-class families. The idea that Mary would feed her own child, the Son of God, is instructive. The Catholic fascination with blood found resonance in another fluid of the body: milk.
But the theme fell out of fashion after the Council of Trent (also known as the Counter-Reformation) in the 1560s, which clearly drew the boundaries of acceptable imagery in the Catholic Church in response to the birth of Protestantism. The intimate act of Mary feeding her child, and the rapture of the masses over these images, had become too crude, too salacious, and too embodied for the Church.
So begins the breast saga in modern Western culture: already fraught with conflict.Of course, Pasti could have started earlier: the so-called Venus of Willendorf, For example, one created in Paleolithic Europe around 25,000 BC depicts a female figure with voluptuous breasts, belly and buttocks. Or one of the many sculptures of Artemis in Ephesus, a many-breasted version of the Greek goddess Artemis, made around the first century AD. These ancient, pre-Christian images of women provide narratives of fertility, opulence, and matriarchal power that transcend contemporary representations of femininity but nonetheless influence how breasts are understood today.
In the centuries between Madonna del Latte As well as modern and contemporary breast visions on display at Palazzo Franchetti, the way breasts are viewed has changed dramatically. Consider the history of women’s necklines in Europe as a microcosm of the way breasts were socially coded: the high necklines of early Elizabethan England compared with the full, extremely low necklines of 18th-century France that sometimes exposed nipples, followed by the prim French late Victorians One-piece dresses, high collars are back. Class is also very important when reading this history: often one is interested in the breasts of upper-class women, either as objects of concealment or display. Women in lands colonized by European powers were often depicted with bare breasts, demonstrating their perceived lack of civility and inequality with white women.
In the 20th century, the development of modern and abstract art led to depictions of breasts abstracted from the body. Pasti cites the work of Laura Panno, which depicts isolated breasts without the bodies to which they belong, as a key inspiration for the exhibition. In this condition, the shape and texture of the breasts become strange and prominent. Repeating concentric circles of Panno’s Origine Echoing Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher, this work is also on display in the exhibition. Works such as Adelaide Cioni’s “To Be Naked, Breasts” and Masami Teraoko’s “Breasts on Hollywood Hills Installation” Both emphasize a sense of roundness and sphere, which is rarely seen in actual breasts.
Despite breasts’ association with erotica, few of these works are specifically sexual.chloe wise football, Showing boobs and curvy breasts leaning against black and white football, sexiest. Most of these works are too detached from reality to allow for any human connection.
The artist’s gaze assumes transcendent significance here as the interaction between artist and subject suggests power dynamics and physical interactions. Pasty told me that inclusivity is a fundamental value for her as curator of this exhibition, as she pursues “understanding how women are represented in art by both men and women.”
The male artists in the exhibition approach breasts from different angles.The famous gay American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took this photo titled “Lisa Marie/Breasts” In 1987, he positioned himself and his camera just below his subject’s breasts, taking a photo that looked from her navel up to her breasts, which rose like mountains in a strange carnal landscape. He sticks to the shapes and lines of this monumental landscape rather than the personality of his subjects, inviting the viewer to see the breasts from a new perspective. Other depictions of male breasts have connotations of violence or control, such as Alan Jones’s cover story 2/4, Barbie metal cast of an idealized female body.
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While some artists look forward to abstraction or other contemporary visual language, others look back to historical themes representing breasts. Photo by Cindy Sherman “Untitled” #205 The artist is dressed as a Baroque Madonna-like figure, with her bare breasts and pregnant belly covered in tulle, arranged like an Ingres painting. But the breasts and belly are clearly fake, hanging from the artist’s shoulders like a drag queen, evoking complex readings of gender, motherhood and transhistorical connections. Anna Weyant’s latest painting “Breasts”, Shows a close-up of a woman’s breasts, with her arms covering her breasts. The flat realism and blank backgrounds that characterize Veillant’s work give her subjects a sense of timelessness, making us imagine that the scene it depicts could have happened yesterday or 500 years ago.
The decision to examine single parts of the traditional female body, rather than the entire body or notions of femininity or femininity itself, made the exhibition purposefully narrow in scope. It promotes a particularly abstract, formal view of the breast: How did this beautiful, concrete thing inspire the artist? The curves, colors and undulations of skin and flesh are the subject of the work here, not just the cultural ebb and flow of breasts and the people who possess them.
It also opens up space for discussions about who has breasts. Prune Nourry is the only breast cancer survivor to feature artist with her work Œil Nourricier #6, is a fragile glass sculpture of a round breast that raises questions about the fragility of life and health. Many breast cancer survivors no longer have their own breasts, so the sculpture’s mobility reflects the way breasts can be removed from the body.
Breasts can also be added to the body, as in Sherman’s photographs or Jacques Sonck’s photographs of trans women in Ghent. Sonker’s photos of topless men are also included, reminding us that virtually everyone has breasts of some shape or size – but when we say “breasts,” we almost always mean women’s breasts. These works advance the biological essentialism that still underpins the way we think and talk about gender and bodies. If breasts can come from bodies of different gender identities, how did their cultural meaning evolve?
The exhibition joins a larger trend in the art world exploring figuration, often driven by female artists and a feminist gaze. This has led to some subtle yet substantive explorations of bodies and gender in art, such as Lauren Elkin’s recent book Art Monsters, But there are also many gestures about the body that are only superficial. The female body has been a central subject in Western art, and critical engagement with these women is long overdue. Breasts are just breasts, not the person they belong to – but what about her? What does she think?
