The McMaster Museum of Art is pleased to present Mother and Child, a new exhibition of works from McMaster’s Art Collection.

For centuries mother and child has been one of the most persistent subject matters in Western Art. The selection of works from the McMaster Museum of Art collection offers an ambulatory view through time, cultural perspectives and the complex “nodes” between the domestic, expressions of intimacy and sentiment, and society. The foundational and earliest work is Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s triptych of the Biblical Holy Family c. 1530, with Madonna and Child in the centre panel.

In the early 20^th century, the aftermath of WWI brought a radicalism to the subject matter. Georges Roualt’s (French, 1871-1958) 1927 lithograph is titled War, which all mothers hate. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), represented by two works in the exhibition, lost a son in WWI. American critic Lucy Lippard wrote, “[Kollwitz’s] views on war, and her pacifism, were embedded in her motherhood…always underplay[ing] the ‘instinctual’ aspects of the motherhood theme and placed her subjects ‘firmly into the bitterly concrete context of class and history’.”

Among the twenty-five works in the exhibition are selections from the inter-war period by European artists Karl Caspar, Lovis Corinth, Otto Herbig and Bernard Kretzschmar, and the first public view of a recent acquisition, Hannah Höch’s (German, 1889-1978) c.1931 self-portrait “dream” with child; works on paper and carvings by Inuit artists Peter Pitseolak and Pitaloosie Saila; a painting by First Nations artist Daphne Odig; early 1960s works by street photographer Lutz Dille (German, 1922-2008); and a recent photo-based print acquisition by Australian Aboriginal artist Michael Cook (a new body of his work is included in the current Biennale of Sydney), also a first public view for the Museum.