Mother (iconography)
The iconography of the mother as an artistic representation of mothers has played an important role in the visual arts worldwide and since prehistory.
Art history
An example of a possible early cultural veneration of the female figure as a symbol of fertility are the Venus figurines of the Upper Palaeolithic, the most famous being the Venus of Willendorf .
The mother image in the fine arts has changed many times. Depending on the prevailing ideology and time, the mother has been portrayed very differently. The experienced situation also contributed to this. To the women's concentration camp Ravensbrueck several mothers Monuments remember.
The earlier bourgeois mother image was represented by Ernst Wilhelm Hildebrand (1875). Paula Modersohn-Becker often depicted mothers in her pictures. The contact between mother and child played a major role. In rural life, women had an important position as a mother in the domestic sphere, as Hermann Bayer (1829–1893) represents.
During the First World War, the mother became important as a protector in a cruel environment, such as Aksel Waldemar Johannessen portrayed. In the time before the Second World War, women were seen as the “guardians of home and hearth”, as Erich Schmidt-Kestner 's mother group portrays. After the Second World War, a memorial was erected in Bremerhaven to commemorate the “mothers and children who died in the war”.
Such monuments were much larger in the Eastern Bloc, as the monument in Šilutė's cityscape shows. The artist of socialist realism Walter Womacka (1925–2010) created a picture of the mother that became the motif of a GDR postage stamp for the 10th FDGB Congress .
Mothers in literature
Mothers are also an important topic in literature, for example in Bertolt Brecht's play The Caucasian Chalk Circle , or already in the biblical narration of Solomon's Judgment and Mary, the Mother of God .
