the own world of mother and child

Some of the experiences of women are rarely found in art. Especially the most physical ones, such as menstruation, menopause, birth, abortion. Of course this is because there were hardly any female artists for a long time. But undoubtedly also because these experiences remain quite invisible not only in art but in the whole of life. It is not self-evident to share those impressions. An exception is young motherhood. That subject has been hijacked in art by Christianity: Mary and her child Jesus are both a symbol of a religious promise (redemption in the Lord) and an extremely mundane, human example of bonding. Recognizable to everyone.

And while it was initially portrayed as quite distant, it gradually became more and more loving, with room for the overwhelming feelings a new mother can have for the child that came out of her body and started breathing on its own. Rafaël brought that soft variant to a great extent in the Renaissance; Jesus became cuddly, Mary became human, their bond became inseparable. The Dutch painters in the 17th century gave it a secular twist, but those too paintings of mother and child are an allegory of bourgeois values, simplicity and virtue.

In Dresden, where I saw this painting at an exhibition, I was struck by this painting by Gerhard Richter, especially this detail. You don’t immediately see what it is, it’s blurry like the brain of a woman who has just given birth, wrinkly like a newborn, and blotchy like your clothes after a day of mothering. In short, you do not have immediate access to what you see. There are obstacles. With distance, squinting, and looking longer you see a mother and a child who seems to be waiting for a burp after drinking. They cling to each other. She does this to protect what just belonged to her own body, he because he is not yet aware of his existence apart from his mother. In the eyes of a baby, he is part of her.

That makes this a different mother-and-child than we are used to from art. It will be obvious that it concerns the painter’s own son and his wife. (I actually don’t know how many artists used to have their own wives and children model for Mary and Jesus, I think that would be fun to find out one day). So whoever wants to can see a ‘commentary on art history’ here. Other paintings Richter made of his wife were also seen as ‘contemporary Vermeers’, such as his painting reading† That’s all true, but I think there is also something completely different going on here: the distance is the subject.

In the way in which Richter paints his baby and his wife, there is also that inaccessibility that he himself has towards them. They are still one, as a man is not one with his baby. The bond between his wife and baby is something he can’t quite grasp. Therefore: hazy, spotty, wrinkled. This detail is an attempt to get close. And an acknowledgment that, despite the physical separation, mother and child still form a world all their own in those early days.