‘A wild cocktail of emotion, politics and desire’: the history of breasts in art
Breasts have been a focus in the culture wars of the last 50-odd years. Second-wave feminists casting off their bras in the 1970s come to mind, and then ongoing judgment-filled debates around breastfeeding, and the even more fraught, and recent, hostilities around trans healthcare. Recent celebrations of female sensuality manifested in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, widening conversations around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement all take breasts as a key motif, too.
But for all the girlies freeing their nips on Instagram, it’s much rarer to see them free on the street. We keep them under wraps and rarely articulate why they seem to be so contentious. The potency of breasts as symbols of things as disparate but overlapping as gender, eroticism and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild cocktail of emotions, politics and desires.
A new exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Breasts,sets out to examine the multifaceted ways artists have represented them. It’s a huge idea, but curator Carolina Pasti largely limits the exhibition to postwar modern and contemporary art. She’s sourced minor works from big name artists and installed them in a kitschy pink environment that isn’t even that Instagrammable, hoping to pull in visitors with the gimmick of boobs.
She begins, however, with a tiny Madonna and Child from circa 1395 that is part of the genre known as a Madonna del Lattebecause it depicts Christ drinking from his mother’s breast. There are hundreds of works like this one – it feels as if every Renaissance painter made 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 depicted as a humble woman of the people. In medieval and Renaissance Europe (and even into the 20th century), breastfeeding was something only workingclass people did: they breastfed their own children and were hired as wetnurses for middle and upper-class families. The idea that Mary would have nursed her own child, the son of God, was revelatory. The Catholic fascination with 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 delineated the boundaries 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 masses, had become too crass, too prurient, too embodied for the church.
So begins the saga of the breast in modern western culture: already rife with conflict. Of course, Pasti could have started much earlier: with the socalled Willendorf Venus,for example, made circa 25,000 BCE in Paleolithic Europe and depicting a female figure with voluptuous breasts, belly and hips. Or with one of the many sculptures of the Ephesian 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 bounds of contemporary representations of femininity but nevertheless have influenced the way breasts are understood today.
In the centuries between Madonna del Latteand the modern and contemporary visions of the breast on show at Palazzo Franchetti, perceptions of breasts shifted dramatically. Think of the history of women’s necklines in Europe as a microcosm of the way breasts were socially coded: the high ruffs in early Elizabethan England compared with the busty, dramatically low necklines of 18th-century France that sometimes even exposed nipples, followed by the prudish late Victorian dresses, when high collars returned. Class is hugely important in reading this history, too: it was generally the breasts of upper-class women that were of interest, either as objects to be hidden or displayed. Images of women in lands that were colonised by European powers were often rendered with bare breasts, signifying their perceived lack of civilisation and their inequality with white women.
In the 20th century, the development of modern art and abstraction led to depictions of the breast that were abstracted from the body. Laura Panno’s work, which Pasti cites as the main inspiration for the show, depicts breasts in isolation, without the body they belong to. The shapes and textures that make a breast become strange and heightened in this context. The repeating concentric circles of Panno’s Origineecho Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher, which is also featured in the exhibition. The sense of roundness, of being an orb, which is rarely true of actual breasts, is highlighted in works such as Adelaide Cioni’s To Be Naked, Breasts and Masami Teraoko’s Breasts on Hollywood Hills Installation.
Despite the erotic association of breasts, few of these works are particularly sexual. Chloe Wise’s Soccer,showing a chest with a curvy set of breasts leaning down over a black and white soccer ball, has the most sex appeal. The disembodiment of most of these works is too jarring to allow for any sense of human connection.
The artist’s gaze takes on outsize significance here, when power dynamics and physical interaction are implied by the interaction between artist and subject. Pasti told me that inclusivity was a fundamental value for her as curator of this exhibition, in her pursuit of “understanding how women were represented throughout art” by both men and women.
The male artists featured in the exhibition approach the breast from various points of view. Robert Mapplethorpe, the celebrated gay American photographer, took the photo titled Lisa Marie/Breastsin 1987. He positioned himself and his camera below
his subject’s chest, taking a photo that looks upward from her belly button towards her breasts, which rise up like mountains in a strange landscape of flesh. His insistence on the shape and line of this monumental embodied landscape, rather than the personhood of his subject, invites the viewer to see breasts from a new perspective. Other male depictions of breasts have an undertone of violence or control, such as Allen Jones’s Cover Story 2/4,a Barbie-esque metal cast of an idealised female body.
While some artists look forward to abstraction or other contemporary visual languages, others look back to historical motifs of representing breasts. Cindy Sherman’s photograph Untitled #205shows the artist dressed as a sort of baroque, Madonna-esque
figure with bare breasts and pregnant belly draped in gauzy fabric, arranged like an Ingres painting. But the breasts and belly are obviously fake, hanging on the artist’s shoulders like those of a drag queen, evoking complicated readings about gender, motherhood, and transhistorical connections. Anna Weyant’s more recent painting, Chest,shows a closeup of a woman’s chest with her arm covering her breasts. The flattened realism and blank setting is characteristic of Weyant’s work, and gives her 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 examine a single part of the traditional female body, rather than the whole body or the idea of femininity or womanhood itself, makes this exhibition purposefully narrow. It promotes a particularly abstract, formal view of the breast: how has this beautiful, specific thing inspired artists? The curves, the colours, the undulations of skin and flesh are the subject of the works here much more than the cultural ebbs and flows of breasts and the people who have them.
It also opens up space for conversation about who has breasts. Prune Nourry is the only featured artist who is a survivor of breast cancer, and her work, OEil 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 their own breasts, so the mobility of this sculpture reflects the way breasts can be something that is 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 trans woman in Ghent. Sonck’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 women’s. These works push at the biological essentialism that still undergirds 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 exploring embodiment, which has often been driven by female artists and a feminist gaze. This has led to some wonderfully nuanced and substantive explorations of bodies and gender in art, such as Lauren Elkin’s recent book Art Monsters,but also to a lot of posturing about bodies that is only skin deep. Women’s bodies have been the central motif of western art, and critical engagement with those women is long overdue. Boobs are just boobs without the person they belong to – but what about her? What does she think?
Breasts is at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice until 24 November
Breastfeeding was something only working-class people did. The idea that Mary would have nursed her own child, the son of God, was revelatory
was inspired by the 2008 play Passing Strange, an existential musical whose narrator frequently interrupts and interacts with the play’s Black American protagonist and other characters.
Similarly acclaimed is the A24 and BBC TV comedy Dreaming Whilst Black, whichbecame a Bafta hopeful last month. In the show, writer-director Adjani Salmon plays Kwabena, a semi-autobiographical character who battles to be recognised by the film and TV industry. Now Salmon himself is receiving plaudits for his series. Also toying with metafiction is Fairview, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play about the power and pressure of the white gaze and its impact on Black art and the Black community, which won a Pulitzer in 2019. Fairview’s first act shows a familiar suburban Black family sitcom. But in act two, voices of imaginary white audience members are overlaid on the same performance. Eventually the fourth wall collapses completely as those white audience members fill the stage and the Black characters address seated Black and POC audience members directly.
Black Metafiction is not new. The 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, the first feature directed by a Black lesbian woman, Cheryl Dunye, took the form of a fictional documentary following a woman making a documentary about an uncredited mammy figure from an old slave film, with many asides from the protagonist to the viewer. Comedy directors the Wayans brothers were fans of a more flamboyant approach to self-reference with their parodies of popular genres, whether it was Scary Movie’s Brenda lambasting the caucasian penchant for splitting up in the face of danger in horror films, or Vivica Fox in Don’t Be a Menace … critiquing the presentation of women in the 90s hood genre (“You know there ain’t no positive Black females in these movies”). And Spike Lee’s Bamboozled has a similar premise to American Fiction, with the protagonist creating a deliberately offensive minstrel TV show to illustrate how white gatekeepers and audiences make Black people perform stereotypes for their amusement. Unlike its spiritual successor, Lee’s film was dismissed as heavy-handed and flopped at the box office.
But the difference with the projects we are seeing now is that by turning the lens inward they allow us to bear witness to how hard it was to get those stories in front of audiences in the first place. “Unless you’re immensely powerful, for Black film-makers it is always more glacial and laden with struggle. You have to bypass a lot of obstacles,” says Dr Clive Nwonka, an associate professor of film, culture and society at
University College London. “This meta-fictional approach in popular Black cinema is unpeeling the absurdities and contradictions of representation.”
Salmon says he created Dreaming Whilst Black as an emotional response to feeling “crazy” while trying to get his ideas on to television screens. “You think: ‘Is it just me?’” he says in a phone call. At times you can see Kwabena wondering the same thing as he has increasingly surreal experiences of microaggressions, moral quandaries and self-doubt. “When I made the web series it was like: ‘This is what I think about the industry, I’mma tell all of you about yourselves,’” he adds.
The pathos of these new meta projects lies in the ability of Black creatives to layer the story with sympathy for themselves. Jackson says that A Strange Loop was initially a monologue he didn’t intend to publish. “It was for me. An artistic fictionalised self-portrait: a funhouse mirror with a narrative, aesthetic, formal distance – more anti-establishment,” he says, speaking over the phone. If your dayto-day is navigating restrictive systems and ideologies, creating art that allows you to experiment and lash out can be cathartic.
“Everyone in the audience has to deal with what’s on stage, and with each other, and then with what Usher wanted you to feel,” Jackson says. “A delirious joy and terror because that’s how he feels as a young, fat Black gay man in a world that is not so kind to him.”
Class and white approval is an inescapable layer within these meta-explorations into which Black narratives get funded and commissioned. But meta elements and turning the lens inwards allows Black creatives to reconnect with their community and show what they’ve been up against. The experimental techniques in A Strange Loop allow us to see how Usher balances his parents’ expectations (they want him to make something palatable like a Tyler Perry movie, a very Black cultural reference) with his self-image.
In Dreaming Whilst Black, meanwhile, Kwabena is asked to switch from making a project about a Windrush romance to a project that exploits Black hardships, based on his incarcerated cousin. His inner turmoil over being asked to make “another hood movie” takes the form of two hilarious apparitions: a plummy-voiced shaved-head version of himself that isn’t “tied to his roots” and a dashiki-clad Kwabena who slurs in patois: “Me ah you brudda but the version ah you who nuh bow to nuh white man.” As he betrays that more rebellious voice, he’s isolated from his community and is instead embraced by the industry sycophants who distorted his vision in the first place. In the final shot of the series, Kwabena hears “and now you’re in the industry”, before giving a bemused and bewildered look to camera, returning the viewer’s gaze. It looks like a win but given his love of community, we can sense his defeat.
“What’s driving the commissioning is the real question,” says Salmon. “I think because of the reckoning of 2020 we were talking about racism so it’s like: ‘Let’s make a show about racism,’” he says, which leads to other hilarious faux pas that Dreaming Whilst Black will reference in its upcoming second season. “The show basically writes itself,” he says
Jackson offers one last explanation for the recent proliferation of Black meta narratives. “This might sound negative but we’re in a world that encourages constant navel-gazing. There’s an incredible amount of narcissism, but like the Greek myth once you go deep enough you’re going to fall in and drown. With Black creatives doing meta storytelling I think some of us are drowning,” he laughs.
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songs, which are in English, Swahili and Kikuyu, are infused with traditional African instruments and sounds.
“These are the sounds I grew up with,” says Kanja. “Since Africa has not been well represented on the global metal scene, it’s time to offer something different, fresh and captivating.”
Kanja was raised in a Christian home. His mother, a government worker and devout church leader, wanted him to go into the ministry, while his father, also a civil servant, didn’t see music as holding much promise. But Kanja’s affinity with music was apparent from early on in his childhood, when he would hold make-believe concerts with his siblings in the family living room, singing along to their favourite tunes on the radio. As an extrovert with a cheery disposition and a love of the outdoors, he didn’t fit stereotypical ideas of a metalhead.
“People think [metal] is just for emo or gothic kids, but it’s the opposite,” says Kanja, who found a diverse and close-knit circle of friends in Nairobi’s small but active underground metal community.
Kanja formed his first band, Lust of a Dying Breed, after arriving in Nairobi as a teenager. It went on hiatus shortly after they released their first record in 2012, as the band struggled to make a living from music. He took a series of jobs, working at a security company, then later in gold mining, farming and the family’s tourism business. But it was not long before he began writing again and started to play with other artists in makeshift studios and friends’ basements as part of another band, The Seeds of Datura.
In 2017 he decided to pursue music permanently, and grew out dreadlocks that he vowed not to cut, believing they would deter employers from hiring him if he was ever tempted to go back. His friends nicknamed him Spikeheart because of his spiky locs. As a solo act, he has performed at events including the Venice Biennale, the Roskilde music festival in Denmark, and the Roadburn festival in the Netherlands.
Making inroads into the global metal scene is not easy, says Kanja. African artists face many barriers making, producing and marketing music on the continent, such as access to instruments and record deals. There are also fewer audiences, venues and promoters for metal in the region.
“I’ve seen artists being taken advantage of because they don’t have the information or resources, so they just go for these really bad deals that don’t help them in the long run,” says Kanja, who attributes his burgeoning career to the support from other artists in the metal community.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them,” says Kanja, who hopes to help other African artists get their music out there through his Haekalu (“temple” in Swahili) label, which is based in the the Ugandan capital, Kampala, where he now lives. “Many artists in my scene don’t have the resources or tools to navigate the music business side of things, and it’s easy to get stuck. So having a homegrown label that can help artists push their music further than they thought it could go is very important for the [regional metal] scene”.
Metal has always been a minority – people just hear the growls or the screams, but for me they are like poetry