You must see the Edward Burne-Jones exhibition at Tate Britain in London, especially if you love myths and legends, heroes and monsters. Jones was a 19th-century, Protestant, Pre-Raphaelite artist with a background in theology: not quite “one of us” but with a foot in a medieval past that gave his painting a Catholic sensibility, much the same way that the upbringing of one-or-two modern artists occasionally betrays itself, like a regional accent.
Damien Hirst, for instance, is not a believing Catholic but was raised one, and has credited the Church as an inspiration for his images of pain, death and life. He recently unveiled 14 whopping great bronze structures outside a hospital in Qatar that depict the development of a baby from conception to birth, called The Miraculous Journey. It’s a potential terror target – nude imagery of any sort doesn’t go down well in Muslim countries – and catalyst to debate about representations of pregnancy in art.
