A new exhibition with works by the likes of LUCIAN FREUD and BARBARA HEPWORTH explores the complexity of family and aims to make audiences reconsider what ‘normal’ means, finds Martha Alexander
WHAT DOES A FAMILY LOOK LIKE? Is it easily-conceived, rosy-cheeked children and devoted parents living in a detached suburban house? This was, in the West at least, the goal. But today, thanks to advances in science, law and social attitudes ‘family’ means a myriad of things.
These are explored by some 120 artworks in the forthcoming Real Families exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge including works by the likes of Tracey Emin, Joshua Reynolds, Grayson Perry and Lucian Freud.
These paintings, drawings and sculptures show that there are countless ways a family can look, something the show’s curator Professor Susan Golombok knows only too well.
“I’m not a usual curator; I’m not an art historian, I’m a psychologist,” she says, explaining that she is the director of the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University, with which the show has collaborated. “I’ve been studying families all my working life.”
The idea of staging a show that explored the psychological complexity of familial relationships and dynamics through the eyes of artists had lived quietly in the back of Golombok’s mind for years. “Art is ideally placed to represent family relationships to the outside world in ways that scientists are less able to,” she notes.
Then one day in 2015, what had just been a little seed began to take root when Golombok saw a Cathy Wilkes exhibition at Tate Liverpool.
“She does these wonderful installations and one really struck me as being quintessentially about the family,” recalls Golombok. “A father hunched over a beer bottle and two fragile vulnerable children behind him and it got to me. It summed up a lot of our research about social deprivation and how that can be passed on through the generations. It was a moving piece so it made me think a bit harder about the exhibition.”
Ironically, it was a family connection that turned Golombok’s concept into reality. Her husband’s great great great aunt was the artist Georgiana Houghton, whose work was shown in an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery in 2021.
“Because of that I got to know [The Courtauld’s deputy director] Barnaby Wright and I plucked up the courage to tell him about my idea,” she recalls. “I thought he might laugh but he’s nice so it wouldn’t be too embarrassing.” Needless to say, Wright l
