Motherhood, Creation, and the Woman’s Story in Art: Marina Fedorova for Hia

March has always belonged to women.
It carries both International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, a moment when we celebrate not one role, but many.
Strength and tenderness. Ambition and care. Creation in all its forms.
For centuries, women were told that these worlds could not coexist. That to be an artist meant to renounce motherhood, and to be a mother meant to disappear from professional life. Yet art history tells a quieter, truer story, one written not in manifestos, but in lived experience.

Three women artists, from three European cultures, reveal how a woman can be whole.

In Russia, Zinaida Serebriakova, artist and mother of four, painted luminous scenes of everyday life even as her world collapsed around her. Her work shows that presence , not withdrawal ,is the source of beauty.
Her famous self-portrait “At the Dressing Table” does not present an artist separated from life, but one deeply inside it , alive, present, radiant. Her portraits of children, domestic interiors, rural labor, and quiet moments carry dignity without drama.
Serebriakova shows us something essential: art does not require withdrawal from life, it requires attention to it.

In Germany, Paula Modersohn-Becker was asking a radical question: Can a woman belong entirely to herself ,and still love, still give life, still create?
Working between the rural artists’ colony of Worpswede and Paris, she painted mothers, children, and female bodies with unprecedented honesty. Her late self-portraits, some created while pregnant, that are not romantic or idealized. They are calm, grounded, and deeply human.

MARINA FEDOROVA