Beyond the nuclear family

The exhibition’s curator, Susan Golombok, is not an art historian but a psychologist. Professor Emerita of Family Research and former Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research, Golombok’s research has examined the impact that new family forms have had on parenting and child development since the mid-1970s.

Golombok’s work has focused on families created by different kinds of assisted reproduction including egg and sperm donation, IVF and surrogacy, and families with LGBTQ+ parents. These families have only come to light, or become possible, over the course of Golombok’s career. Many human stories stick in her memory, highlighting the profound shifts in family structures and societal reactions that have taken place over the past 50 years.  

“In my very first study, I met a 5-year-old boy who was extremely hyperactive. He was from a lesbian mother family, and I remember wondering how his mothers coped as he was constantly on the go.

“We followed up the families when the children were in their 20s and I remember him then as very calm and composed, not at all what I expected from my memory of him. Growing up in a lesbian mother family had been difficult. He’d been stigmatised and bullied at school but now he was at art school, and it was considered really cool to have lesbian parents.”

One of the paintings Golombok selected for the exhibition is Aliza Nisenbaum’s, Susan, Aarti, Keerthana and Princess, Sunday in Brooklyn. Painted in 2018, it depicts a lesbian mother family and their two children.

Golombok expects the exhibition to generate powerful emotions and, for particular artworks, perhaps to divide opinion.

“I would like visitors to open up their minds more to different kinds of families and be more accepting of families that they might have either felt outright prejudice against, or just thought, ‘Hmm, I can't imagine that kind of family is great for children’.

“I also hope that the show will allow visitors to reflect on their own families. I expect that the artworks will resonate differently with different people, depending on their own experiences of family.”

The exhibition opens with the 1976 cover of Spare Rib, a feminist magazine. The cover bears testimony to an era when lesbian women had their children removed from them when they fought their ex-husbands for custody.

“That's when I first became involved in this whole field,” Golombok recalls. “I was a master’s student studying child development and I was interested in the women's movement. The article asked for someone to carry out objective research on the children and I volunteered. The findings showed that the assumptions that led to these children being removed from their mothers in child custody cases were false.”

“Then, in 1978, IVF arrived, again raising concerns about the children. In the media, there was talk of ‘Frankenstein children’. Some articles even suggested that these children might be born without a soul.”

The exhibition showcases a glass jar in which some of the first IVF babies were conceived in the late 1970s. This became possible through the work of Nobel-Prize-winning scientist, Dr Robert Edwards, at Cambridge, and the obstetrician, Patrick Steptoe.

Nearby, visitors are reminded that while IVF brings joy to some, the treatment can be agonising for others. Elina Brotherus’ Annonciation 7, Jour de l’ Annonciation (2011) relates to the artist’s five years of unsuccessful IVF treatment. Brotherus references the Christian Annunciation but describes her own experience as ‘waiting for an angel who never shows up’.

The exhibition does not shy away from addressing the broader question of what defines a family. Miriam Schaer’s work, which displays baby clothes embroidered with some of the insensitive comments people make to women who don’t have children, such as “Children are what makes a real family”, challenges deep-seated societal norms.

The exhibition is dominated by paintings, photography and sculpture created in the last fifty years, but features paintings going back to the early seventeenth century. Dirck van Baburen’s Roman Charity, Cimon and Pero (1618–24), which Professor Mary Beard urged Golombok to include, will challenge visitors as much as any of the 21^st-century exhibits.

The exhibition opens with the Fitzwilliam’s very own Joshua Reynolds portrait of The Braddyll Family (1789). It projects traditional notions of family and lineage, excluding all three Braddyll daughters in the process. Unable to inherit or pass on their father’s name, they had no place in this image of family.

Golombok is particularly intrigued by Joseph-Marie Vien’s painting Sarah Presents Hagar to Abraham (1749). Abraham needs an heir and because his wife Sarah is unable to conceive, he impregnates Hagar, their Egyptian slave.

“Looking at this painting through a contemporary lens, this to me is suggestive of surrogacy, which is interesting because surrogacy is seen today as something very new.”

In addition to representing new, and not so new, non-traditional family forms, the exhibition considers dynamics found in all families, some positive, some negative.

Another section explores how families change over time, including the experiences of children growing up and caring for ageing parents.

Celia Paul’s painting My Mother with a Rose (2006) “reflects the altered nature of her relationship with her mother,” says Golombok. “It depicts an initially reluctant elderly sitter who became dedicated to the project”. The artist says: “It came to mean everything to her. It became her vocation.”

The exhibition closes with ten paintings by Chantal Joffe, including Mother and Child II (2005). Golombok explains why:

“At the Centre, much of our research is longitudinal – we follow up families, often from infancy and even from pregnancy, sometimes up to adulthood. Chantal Joffe does the same with her art.

“But I especially love her work because it’s deeply psychological. It's all about the nuances in family relationships: the affection but also the tensions, and the transformations that families undergo over time.”