This remarkable book begins dramatically and truthfully: ‘A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head. It eats the hours, this child, leaving me only crumbs.’ Motherhood can be overwhelming, however longed for. It is never a small thing, even if the rest of the world chooses to ignore it or view it as a block to professionalism. Cyril Connolly’s remark in Enemies of Promise (1938), ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, was, of course, a reference to male creativity. But women have routinely been brainwashed into concurring with this dismissive observation – made, admittedly, before Connolly had children. In the 1950s, respected male tutors in colleges of art would dismiss female making as ‘frustrated maternity’. The sculptor Reg Butler asked Slade School of Fine Art students in 1962, ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for the purposes of a census?’ 

The 20th century proved a surprisingly bleak period for the recognition of women’s artistic activity. The flood of books on women artists which had appeared in the 19th century dwindled. And the women’s movement of the 1970s grappled with a peculiarly limited art world, characterised by exclusionary boundaries and plenty of straightforward misogyny. Art that celebrated or commented on motherhood was regarded as beyond the pale, even if presented in the dispassionate form of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–9) or Susan Hiller’s Ten Months (1977–9). Of this record of her pregnancy, Hiller noted that few could ‘accept the right of a woman to be both the artist and the sexed subject of a work’. 

Over the extraordinary phase of modern history that Judah charts, the move away from the rich traditions of figuration had the effect of shutting personal experience out of the work of ambitious male and female artists. As for motherhood as a subject, the image of mother and child, as Judah observes, was a freighted one – associated in the West with the image of the Virgin holding her curiously adult infant, anticipating self-sacrifice and loss. Offering a new feminist vision of maternity demanded bravery. Take Monica Sjöö’s God Giving Birth (1968). Sjöö’s explicit picture, inspired by the home birth of her son, was subjected to a barrage of censorship: it was judged blasphemous by the mayor of St Ives and Sjöö was threatened with obscenity charges when the work was shown in the feminist show ‘Images of Womanpower’ in 1973. The painting’s power to shock, even now, reminds us of the tasteful nature of much abstract and minimalist art, which Sjöö herself dismissed as ‘games with the surface of reality’ played by ‘contented and successful male artists’.

Kelly’s and Hiller’s commentaries on motherhood are, of course, included in Judah’s fascinating survey. But Acts of Creation also focuses on an array of figurative artworks and documentary photographs that passionately and directly confront every aspect of the joy and torment of motherhood – from Marlene Dumas’s majestic The Painter (1994), a portrait of her five-year-old child, to Chantal Joffe’s three-metre-high Self-Portrait with Esme (2008), a celebration of the bond of care between mother and daughter, to Paula Rego’s harrowing Abortion pastel series (1998–9), made in anger after voters in a referendum in Portugal rejected the decriminalisation of abortion. An image from Barbara Walker’s Louder Than Words series (2006–9) charts the ongoing anxieties of being a mother. Walker used the ‘stop and search’ dockets regularly issued by the police to her black teenage son to create tender portraits of the boy – a modest chronicle of love and a repudiation of the everyday racism that he was facing. 

Although the picture captions offer no measurements, in Judah’s book monumental works of art jostle with smaller creations. Some of the most striking are the work of the almost unknown poet and artist Heather Spears. The Wellcome Collection holds folders of the multiple drawings she made on the spot in maternity wards. These honour the processes of what is rightly called ‘labour’, forming in effect one majestic artwork, a unique record of all aspects of modern birth. Poignantly, Spears initially sold her drawings to make a living as a single parent in Denmark. 

There is much that is new and much to explore afresh in this book. The deeply moving penultimate section of Acts of Creation, on loss, examines the Finnish artist Elina Brotherus’s Annunciation (2008–13), which charts the loneliness of IVF treatment, reminding us that infertility is often an off-limits subject. Brotherus wrote of her attempts to conceive: ‘This is a series of false annunciations. It is about waiting for an angel who never shows up.’ The final chapter, ‘Mothering: the family reborn’, covers every kind of family configuration – beginning with same-sex parenting, cruelly described in the minatory Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act as ‘a pretended family relationship’. Judah’s book ends with a big, delicate drawing by Kiki Smith, Pietà (1999), a seated self-portrait in which Smith re-creates Michelangelo’s Vatican sculpture. She holds in her arms no dead son but her late cat Ginzer, reminding us that maternal love can take many forms.

It seems extraordinary to have to write this in 2024, but the art world has only recently opened up to women artists, as well as to artists of colour and to artistic activities, such as textile-making, often identified with women. #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have undoubtedly had an effect on art world gatekeepers. We appear to be in a more fluid and open arena for both making and looking. This should be a golden moment for Judah’s mind-shifting book. It cannot fail to interest those of us who have first-hand experience of what is recorded in Acts of Creation – which is to say, half the human race, including women who have never wanted children, celebrated by the artist Miriam Schaer in her series Babies (Not) On Board: The Last Prejudice? (2013). And let us hope that its insights reach beyond womankind. Acts of Creation is linked to an Arts Council touring exhibition of the same name curated by the author. It is currently at the Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham, where it will remain until 29 September. It will then move on to the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield and end in 2025 at Dundee Contemporary Arts. It provides powerful testimony to the scale and ambition of Judah’s project.