@laprovence_

“Bonnes Mères” : l’exposition qui questionne la maternité au Mucem

♬ son original - La Provence

🌙 Under the Moon, Another Kind of Motherhood

In the soft, circling tenderness of “La Lune” by Christophe Maé, there’s a quiet echo of what Good Mothers seeks to illuminate: the way care, presence, and vulnerability move in tides rather than straight lines. The song’s gentle orbit — its rhythm of return, distance, and gravitational pull — mirrors the exhibition’s journey through maternal figures who guide, protect, falter, and rise again. Like Maé’s moon, the exhibition casts a light that is never blinding but always revealing, illuminating the hidden contours of motherhood across centuries and across the Mediterranean.

🎶 🌞 ✨ 🏛️ 🌊 🔥 🌅 🖼️ 🧿 🕊️ 🪶 🎨 🔊 La lune - CHRISTOPHE MAÉ

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Before diving into its spring–summer season, the Mucem turns its gaze toward one of humanity’s oldest and most universal narratives: motherhood.

With “Good Mothers,” the museum invites visitors to explore how this figure has been imagined, idealized, challenged, and redefined across the Mediterranean world.

🏛️ A Major Exhibition at the Heart of the J4

For its flagship spring–summer 2026 exhibition, the Mucem turns to a theme both universal and deeply Mediterranean: motherhood. Titled “Good Mothers”, the show runs from March 18 to August 31, 2026, in the J4 galleries, bringing together 350 to 400 works — paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, films — in an immersive journey spanning four millennia of history.

🌊 Diving into Maternal Imaginaries

The exhibition opens with the great traditional figures: ancient mother‑goddesses, Madonnas and Child, protective icons, and of course Marseille’s own “Bonne Mère,” Notre‑Dame de la Garde. These often idealized images reveal how motherhood has long been shaped by collective narratives, social expectations, and cultural projections. A solar, enveloping scenography guides visitors through a continuous dialogue between past and present.

🌑 Revealing the Invisible Realities

The second part of the exhibition breaks away from polished representations. It highlights intimate, complex, and often unspoken experiences: perinatal grief, pregnancy termination, fatigue, solitude, exile, bodies in transformation. The exhibition refuses to aestheticize pain, yet chooses not to erase it, revealing the plurality of maternal experiences and the shadow zones long ignored by art history.

🔥 Contemporary Creation in Friction

Curators Caroline Chenu and Anne‑Cécile Mailfert orchestrate a visual dialogue where works respond to one another rather than follow a strict chronology. Alongside Botticelli, Fragonard, or Cignani, contemporary women artists deconstruct the injunctions placed upon mothers, question maternal performativity in the digital age, and reinvent the codes of representation. The Mucem draws on prestigious loans from the Musée d’Orsay, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

🌅 An Exhibition Deeply Rooted in Marseille

In Marseille — a city watched over by the “Bonne Mère” — this exhibition resonates with particular intensity. It reminds us that motherhood is not a fixed myth but a living territory, crossed by contradictions, strengths, and vulnerabilities. By approaching the subject from a Mediterranean perspective, the Mucem affirms a vision in which the mother is not only a symbolic figure but a social, political, and cultural actor at the heart of Southern societies.

#Motherhood 🌞 #Mediterranean 🌊 #ArtHistory 🏛️ #Contemporary 🔥 #Marseille 🌅