Greg Bales

Art & Infertility

In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb

Laura Cummings reveals how art was her refuge during years of infertility, and in the process she exposes the fact that infertility itself is not much of a subject of art:

Fertility in art is generalised, if I may so generalise. It is an attribute in search of a body. It is a ripe bosom and child-bearing hips, or a healthy young nude with an inviting smile, or a woman in some frieze bearing a basket of apples or corn. It is plentiful Ceres, Roman goddess of harvest and motherly love (a concept, you notice, not a human being) or her Greek counterpart Demeter, scattering seeds, her name apparently meaning distribution-mother. It is, I am sorry to say, the figure made 25,000 years age by an anonymous man in Austria, who picked up a piece of limestone and carved it into a nude woman with outsize breasts and Zeppelin thighs (but no face of course), that posterity has laughably dubbed the Venus of Willendorf.

Fertility in art is availability plus abundance, with an optional lusty wink. It is, in short, total embarrassment. And an embarrassment not even restricted to the depiction of women, let it be freely said. Who, coming across it in the National Gallery, hasn’t squirmed in front of David Tenier’s rude personification of Spring as a gardener carrying an upright young tree in a pot before him: fertility as a huge comedy phallus.

And its opposite: infertility? No sight gags there; no sights at all. I can hardly summon even one image to mind. Barren land, seeds cast on stony ground, the empty vessel, the drought—Biblical metaphors, all, that speak irrefutably for themselves without need of further illustration.

Non sequitur: How far will the category puns stretch?