Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, UK
6 October to 7 January 2024
IN YOUR mind, conjure up a picture of a family. What do you see? A holiday photo with mum, dad and children grinning in the sunshine, perhaps, or a more formal image of relatives gathered at a wedding?
But do such mental images reflect the reality of many families today? This question is at the heart of a groundbreaking exhibition, Real Families: Stories of change, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. Its more than 120 works of art, including paintings, photographs and sculptures by artists such as Alice Neel, Paula Rego, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin and Chantal Joffe, explore the intricacies of modern family relationships.
Advertisement
The exhibition has its roots in the pioneering work of its curator, Susan Golombok, based at the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, who studies the new family set-ups made possible through scientific advances.
Since Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in 1978 following IVF, there has been a revolution in the ways families are created and structured. But these new family types prompted new concerns, with press reports about “Frankenstein” babies and fears that children would be harmed by being conceived from donor eggs or sperm, or by having gay parents.
“If it’s something new, then there’s a tendency to think that it’s going be a problem,” says Golombok, who became involved in family research in response to the forced removal of children from their lesbian mothers in the UK in the 1970s. At that time, says Golombok, there was no empirical research and custody cases were decided on assumptions and prejudices.
Her research showed that it is the quality of the relationships between a child and their caregivers that matters, not the family structure. She has since shown that this is also true for children who result from different methods of conception, whether they involve surrogacy or donated eggs, sperm or embryos – and even if there is no genetic link to the parents. “The absence of a genetic relationship to their parents generally doesn’t seem to interfere with positive child-parent relationships,” she says. In fact, it is secrecy about a child’s origins that can cause difficulties.
The idea to create an exhibition based on these findings, as well as wider research by the , originated in 2015, when Golombok saw the sculpture installation Untitled (Possil, At Last) by artist Cathy Wilkes, which depicts a dejected-looking man – possibly a father – with his back to two children. “It was really emotional and it struck me that it summed up a lot of our research about the ways families influence children,” she says. This installation now forms part of the Real Families exhibition.
The show starts conventionally, with a 1789 painting representing the traditional notion of family and lineage by Joshua Reynolds of the well-to-do Braddyll family, with mother, father and son against the backdrop of the family estate. But the boy’s three sisters are missing: they won’t inherit the family name or property, so have no place in this kind of status-setting portrait.
Most of the other artworks, however, are from recent decades, and highlight artists who portray new forms of family, as well as family dynamics and transitions. There are the colourful yet eerie Halfboy paintings by Stuart Pearson Wright, who was conceived by anonymous sperm donation. He felt like an anomaly in his family, and depicts himself standing awkwardly with his stepfather or by his half-sister. “A lot of his art is about how unhappy he was not knowing his biological father, feeling out of place in his family,” says Golombok.
Most heartbreaking are the drawings Mary Husted made of her newborn son in the 10 days before she was forced by her family to give him up for adoption when she was 17, in the 1960s, and the collage she made in her 40s, which helped reunite them.
Equally poignant is the portrait by Li Tianbing (an only child as a result of China’s one-child policy) showing him as a child with an imaginary brother. And there is Lucian Freud’s tender painting of his mother in old age, resting.
Real Families delightfully challenges the stereotype of the nuclear family comprising husband, wife and their kids – now in the minority in the UK and US. As it shows, what matters for children is love and truth about their origins, and the exhibition is a colourful, thought-provoking and poignant celebration of this.
