The Pregnant Form as Art Form Research Paper

Introduction

One of the earliest known pieces of artwork, the Venus of Willendorf dating from the Paleolithic era, is thought to be a pregnant woman, a shape that was repeated throughout the pre-historic world presumably as a sign of fertility and prosperity. However, with the advent of Christianity and the vilification of the female form, it became necessary to hide the woman’s body, especially the ‘grotesque’ form of the pregnant woman. With the increasing strength of science, and the necessary part women play in the actual creation of the child, the female form began to take on new importance in artistic works. This renewed interest in the pregnant body began appearing as early as the Renaissance era. Through the years, how the pregnant form has been represented, misrepresented, and ignored has been a growing theme, coming into full flower in the modern art world in a variety of media. What is painted or sculpted and how this is done reveals much about the prevailing attitudes of the period in which the artwork was created. From the fully clothed, questionable nature of early artists’ renditions of pregnant women to the fully nude and exposed form of today’s pregnant sculptures, the art of the pregnant form has advanced onto the general world stage. To gain an understanding of how this change came about, it is necessary to learn more about some of the artists that have participated in the debate regarding how best to portray the multiple aspects of the pregnant woman – her impending motherhood, her swelling form, her newfound tenderness. Among these artists are Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Lucien Freud, Marc Quinn and Ron Mueck. By looking at how these artists portrayed pregnant women as well as their motivations in doing so, we can begin to gain an understanding of how the cultural attitude toward pregnancy and the female form has changed.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt gave the pregnant form new significance within the Art Nouveau movement coming out of Austria. His tendency to veer toward the erotic can be seen in his painting “Hope” (1903) which depicts a pregnant girl standing nude among a crowd of richly dressed yet bizarre individuals. Far from being a simple painting of a village girl, the girl looking out at the viewer with her large eyes, standing to provide a full profile of her large belly perhaps only days before giving birth, immediately draws concern. The skull above her head, tilted to the same degree as her own and with no discernable associated body behind her brings the idea of death into the picture while still focusing the attention on the broad, flowing curves throughout the piece. Although there are four heads in the scene behind her, including the skull, three of the four are similar in their misshapen wailing form. In addition, only three discernable bodies can be seen standing behind her, meaning one of these heads remains unattached. Again, the blame falls on the skull as a disembodied floating spirit hanging over the head of the girl, indicating the dangerous nature of pregnancy before the advent of modern medicine when the majority of women died in childbirth. Despite this evil omen and the darkness surrounding her, this woman seems to glow out at us, from her strawberry blonde hair and her almost overripe profile to her pleading eyes and breathless expression. In this image, then, is captured the aspects of hopeful mother/innocent child in mortal danger yet extremely vital.

The dark background provides a wonderfully rich contrast to her pale skin. “For the sumptuous surface of Klimt’s work is by no means carefree. Its decorative tracery expresses a constant tension between ecstasy and terror, life and death. Even the portraits, with their timeless aspect, may be perceived as defying fate. Sleep, Hope … and Death are subjects no less characteristic than the Kiss. … Klimt’s works, although they do not explicitly speak of impending doom, constitute a sort of testament in which the desires and anxieties of the age, its aspiration to happiness and eternity, receive definitive expression” (“Klimt Forum”, n.d.). The depth provided and how these colors tend to flow and blend into amorphous shapes toward the bottom of the piece help to conceal and confuse the eye, making it impossible to discern the number of bodies behind her and therefore match up heads and skulls. At the same time, these dark spaces conceal mysterious movements, whether sinister or benevolent, we will never know. From this image, we can conclude that pregnancy is at once a battle between life and death, innocence and knowledge, hope and fear, exposure and concealment.

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele represents a shift to Expressionism in Austrian art but also represents a shift in the way in which pregnant women were portrayed. Rather than the smoothly curving, softly alluring lines of the feminine that had been seen in Gustav Klimt’s work or the voluminously overwhelming draperies of van Eyck, Schiele exposes his pregnant woman to death in a violently angular prophetic moment in “Pregnant Woman and Death” (1911). Although artistically brilliant, Schiele was described by all who knew him as a rebel and a malcontent, expressing anger, fear, and instability throughout much of his work. “Woman, sex (felt as obsession and guilt) and Death (perceived as a sad departure) are the subjects that more often recur in the troubled production of this talented painter” (Puglisi, 1996). Although his later work demonstrated a greater refinement in his technique, Schiele died at the young age of 28, three days after his beloved wife died of fever, taking their unborn child with her.

The woman in this painting is shown bent submissively to Death yet curiously towering over him. Her submissiveness negates her apparent position of power and induces a sense of curiosity about the painting. The black of her cape indicates the shade of her grief, but the bright focal point of the painting is focused on the broad open expanse of her protruding belly. The child in her womb is encircled carefully by the mother’s arm, but that arm is so small and still that it provides scanty if any, protection. Not even her clothing seems capable of concealing and keeping safe the child within her as her top stretches and clings to her curves. The rich textured reds of her skirts are overtly reminiscent of aging blood while a small square of brilliant red helps draw the eye to the unborn child. The gaze of Death also rests upon the woman’s womb, making it clear for whom he has come. The rounded squares that make up the larger blocks of color and the angular features of the faces reinforce the harsh reality this painting is struggling to depict. From this image, too, we see the death and grief that becomes associated with the pregnant form. Additionally, this painting takes another bold step toward the pregnant nude in the choice of color to represent the woman’s shirt, with only a slightly darker color usage in her upper chest area to mark the difference.

Lucien Freud

By 2002, the pregnant form has become a more accepted part of the art culture as it again begins to focus on other aspects of the female form than the pregnancy itself, although allowing the pregnancy to take a central role in the work. This can be seen in “Naked Portrait 2002” by Lucien Freud. According to Martin Gayford (2002), Freud decided to take on the subject of a pregnant woman, not a typical subject for him, at the suggestion of the model for the piece, supermodel Kate Moss. “One day, Freud was reading the style magazine Dazed and Confused, edited at the time by Moss’s boyfriend, Jefferson Hack … when he discovered an interview with the model. In this, she revealed that one of her remaining unfulfilled ambitions was to pose for Freud” (Gayford, 2002). In addition to the unfamiliar subject of pregnancy, Freud most often paints subjects he encounters in his daily living, struggling to capture a sense of the ‘real person. However, the idea of painting a supermodel posed a challenge in itself to show the woman in a light not usually seen by the agency cameras.

The picture features the model lying nude upon a bed of rumpled sheets in a semi-reflective pose as if dreaming of what her future baby will be like. Her stomach is only slightly rounded in early pregnancy, which nevertheless provides her with pleasing curves that accentuate her pregnancy against her otherwise lithe frame. However, this pose places her shins in the forefront of the picture, a part of the body that is not usually focused upon in modeling shoots. These shins lead the eyes up to the curve of her arm and around to her stomach before moving back to her legs. It is this portion of the legs that continues to draw the eye back in. At the same time, Freud opted to paint the image so that it sits at a canted angle within the frame, blocking out the corners with elongated white triangles to provide even more emphasis upon the reclined attitude of the model as well as to increase the sense of excitement and eager anticipation. “The result is smoothly painted, adding to the sleek look of the sitter – who, far from waif-like, appears positively voluptuous” (Gayford, 2002). The impact of the piece is one of quiet and relaxed expectation, reflecting the beauty of the woman and the beauty of life at the same time. Death has escaped the piece, allowing life and vitality to flow through unchecked, reflecting the modern-day miracles of science to alleviate the fear and mortality rate of the pregnant woman.

The image of Boudicca

A modern sculpture of the pregnant form has been drawing a great deal of attention since its execution in 2005 and that is Marc Quinn’s “Alison Lapper Pregnant” designed to decorate Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth until 2007. His reasoning behind the choice of subject, he told a BBC News reporter, was to balance the square’s feminine aspect, offsetting the image of Boudicca the warrior queen with that of Lapper, an image of modern-day heroism and protective motherhood. The three-and-a-half-meter-high statue depicts Quinn’s disabled friend Alison Lapper at a time when she was 8 months pregnant. Lapper is a prominent artist herself who suffers from a chromosomal condition called Phocomelia which caused her to be born with no arms and shortened legs. Because of this birth defect, her mother rejected her, forcing her to grow up in a care home. Her subsequent rise to the position of a respected artist has many envisioning her as a champion of the many abilities disabled people possess. “It is a work about courage, beauty, and defiance, which both captures and represents all that is best about our great city. Alison Lapper pregnant is a modern heroine – strong, formidable, and full of hope. It is a great work of art for London and for the world” (London Mayor Ken Livingstone cited in Lewis, 2005).

The statue itself is quite breathtaking. The smooth texture of the marble seems impervious to outside barbs and influences, instead of reflecting the pure nature of its glassy matrix and revealing its inner beauty along every curve. Lapper sits proudly open to anyone’s gaze. Each of her shortened limbs is depicted in smooth detail with no attempt to hide or diminish them, yet also no attempt to accentuate them. Her stomach dominates, but her head is held high and proud, reflects a fierce determination and will to survive in the set features of her face. Her eyes hold firm and steady, focused on the future and ready to face it eye to eye with no holding back or giving in. Because of the lifelike quality of the sculpture, her softness is also conveyed through the marble. She is at once the soft and vulnerable mother-to-be and the proud warrior queen challenging any who cross her reflecting yet another shift in the presentation of the pregnant form – that of the strong woman capable of taking on the world and winning.

Ron Mueck

The idea of the pregnant woman as all-powerful is also established in the work of Ron Mueck, who works in hyper-realism to depict figures that are purposefully is-scaled to properly convey the attitude Mueck is trying to present. This is the case in his sculpture “Pregnant Woman” (2002). “At first, it’s the sheer technical brilliance of the figures that astounds. From the stubble on the chin of the small Man in a Boat to the mole on the neck of the 8 foot-tall Pregnant Woman, the attention to detail is awe-inspiring” (Carter, 2003). Her scale, 8 feet tall as opposed to the average mid-5 feet range, as well as her superb realism, contributes in large part to her impressive quality. Standing with her hands over her head and her feet slightly apart, this woman is not trying to hide any part of her body from the observer. Her face is slightly flushed as if the room were too hot for her to bear in clothing and her hair is pulled up in an untidy knot, as a busy mother might be. This slightly flushed look provides her with a natural reason for having her hands above her head as she takes a moment to relax and cool off. She looks down toward the ground in a serene moment, which also affects, thanks to her large size, allowing her to look down upon her visitors. This position provides her with an inherent power beyond that of her impending motherhood. With this position, she takes on the persona of everyone’s mother, exasperated and warm from keeping up with all her children even as she gets ready to bear another.

Conclusion

The treatment of the pregnant form by the early 1900s as reflected in works like Klimt begins to reflect the attitudes of the time – the woman’s important role in creating life and bringing it forward, the life and death risk she takes in tackling such an endeavor and the hope she has for the future. In bearing this risk, the pregnant woman is also facing the supreme heartbreak and anguish of losing her child before it is even born, as expressed in Schiele’s piece. A century and several medical advances later and the pregnant woman is now seen reclining on a bed, comfortably reflective and calmly anticipating the birth of her growing child as shown in Freud’s depiction. However, the 21st-century woman is also a strong woman, capable of taking on supreme challenges and overcoming them. The epitome of this strength is seen in the form of Quinn’s “Alison Lapper” as a courageous woman faces the near birth of her child with unflinching clarity and challenge, despite her lack of arms and ineffectual legs. The pregnant woman returns to her full power as expressed in the Venus of Willendorf with Mueck’s realistic, overly large sculpture of a pregnant woman. Offering absolutely no defenses and looking down upon all who visit her, she establishes her authority without a twitch and with only a gentle expression of calm waiting upon her face. The pregnant form is now strong and gentle, overwhelming and in need of protection, calm and excited, a paradox in totality and a symbol of women’s strength and resiliency.

References

Carter, Jonathan. (2003). “Hyperrealist Sculpture that Keeps up with its Neighbors.” Collective. Vol. 206. BBC. Web.

Gayford, Martin. (2005). “A Model Painter.” Telegraph UK. Web.

“Klimt Forum.” (n.d.). LAKS Vienna. Web.

Lewis, Caroline. (2005). “Alison Lapper Pregnant Takes Plinth Position in Trafalgar Square.” 24 Hour Museum. Web.

Puglisi, Ada. (1996). “Egon Schiele: The Suffering Face of the Secession.” Societa Industria Farmaceutica Italiana for research in Ophthalmotherapy. Web.