Art & Design Sub-Editor RUBY LANGAN-HUGHES untangles the complex threads running through the Freud Museum’s latest exhibition.
Sigmund Freud and feminists don’t exactly get on like a house on fire. At least, a pally relationship between the beloved Viennese psychoanalyst and women would certainly not be my first guess. You’re more likely to envisage the pair squabbling over penis envy or feminine subjectivity, than walking hand in hand. He’s been getting stick from the feminist movement ever since his early theories on femininity, female sexuality, and hysteria; but can you really blame them when his closest confidants were an entirely male posse of “disciples”? Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists, an exhibition held at his former home in Hampstead, brings the curious foes into conversation and tries to conclusively resolve their differences. Although you may still beg the question: how did the likes of Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, and many more contemporary female artists’ works end up in this old analyst’s home?
Other than a post-box plastered with heaps of peeling Freud stickers, you would have no clue that you were approaching his museum and the parts he used to roam. Just off from the main street, 20 Maresfield Gardens is unassuming, tucked away among its neighbouring red brick, mock Tudor homes. The museum entrance is even less obvious—you enter from the back garden, brushing past Sigmund’s trimmed shrubs and roses, as if by private invitation. I briefly skirted around the gift shop full of Freudian trinkets, charmingly located in the conservatory, only to be disturbed by Paula Rego’s Puppets in the dining room.
The giant guest sat atop of Alice’s Oversized Chair (1999) is unmissable. Although out of your eyeline as you enter the room, the uncanny model somehow creeps into view. It’s a stuffed pair of tights masquerading as a woman—a stylish one at that. Bulging and wrapped in an orange velvet gown, she has a commanding and unsettling presence. The dolled-up puppet would have figured as one of Rego’s muses in her studio, but here, out of usual residence, she resembles some sort of sinister mother figure. Faceless, her arm reluctantly wraps around a disgruntled child-like doll. It’s Rego’s typical visual narrative: a twisted play on fairy tales, fables, and folklore, to enact a troubling psychological scene. In Freud’s home the arresting mother-daughter figuration takes on new depth. The interior appears to have the mundane bourgeois frills—family portraits, plants, clunky austrian furniture, and drapes. Yet, the peculiar pair are far from ordinary; they invade on any kind of peaceful domesticity and pay tribute to Freud’s conception of dysfunctional, illicit familial relations
Into the hallway now, the curators reveal their intentions on the wall— “Psychoanalysis and Feminism are bedfellows”, urging us to see “Women and Freud” in dialogue and as positively affected by one another. If you’re still not sold on the idea from Rego’s puppets, the curators have crowded the rest of his house with enough manuscripts, visuals, sculptures, and film footage to fill multiple cabinets of curiosities and make you think twice.
The wall text has a gentle glow from Tracey Emin’s garish neon, hanging above the door frame. Her diary-entry-like tone, I Whisper to My Past, Do I Have Another Choice (2010), mimics the confessions of the many women who passed through Freud’s study. Gusty and intimate, Emin’s handwritten notes give insight to modern femininity and its evolution beyond Freud. As you wander away from the neon glare, Freud’s Lost Lecture (2019), a film piece by Jane Thorburn and Deborah Levy, is projected on the staircase. The unsettling sequence presents an imagined thank you note from Freud to his female patients, expressing gratitude for granting access to otherwise restricted childhood memories and for giving away their secrets. A plastic ballerina twirls over and over, a clock ticks incessantly, and an uneasy feeling stirs—a sense that Freud’s women were less so his empowered accomplices and rather conquests in the advancement of his scientific theories.
Walking into the study, dutiful figurines and delicate antiquites cover every surface. Preserved by his daughter Anna, the space is just as Freud would have staged it. His spacious desk is rendered cramped by the Greco-Roman artefacts, Etruscan vases, bronze deities, all rallied up in miniature military lines, staring back at you; while conceiving psychoanalytic theories, these pagan idols watched over him. This is where art and psychoanalysis converge. Though he was committed to cutting-edge science, Freud was clearly obsessed with objects. And although it seems Freud’s private exhibition is curated to a hoarder’s taste, his clear aesthetic inspiration helps us bring art and psychoanalysis into conversation. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help thinking that, while he was obviously interested in artefacts, he was completely dispassionate about collecting contemporary art. Surrealism irritated our analyst, too avant-garde for his taste. So, with Emin’s hyper modern neon signs and Bourgeois’ sculptural bronze breasts scattered around his home, it felt like some sort of feminine vindication.
Rachael Kneebone’s porcelain white sculpture Oracle (2013) is a stranger sitting on top of Freud’s rich oriental rugs. In this study, busy with intricate geometric patterns and aged wood under heaps of every shade of burgundy and brown, Kneebone’s stripped down work is quiet among all the visual noise. Oracle whispers, speaking hushed counsel, just like Freud. The porcelain gently flows, bunching up in places, crumpled like fabric. Movement, inherent in the unpredictable medium, reflects Kneebone’s central intention to explore the ever changing human condition.
Women & Freud doesn’t try to insinuate that Freud was some sort of proto-feminist, just that his work offers much to feminist history. Even if women artists, writers, and thinkers have long been at odds with his ideas, that would not be an entirely honest picture—there are many women who have been inspired by, and inspirational to, Freud. The two are wrapped up whether they like it or not. Peaceful 20 Maresfield Gardens has been positively shaken up by curious artistic intervention, and themes of family, of love, of mourning, of sex attest to it.
Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists is on show at the Freud Museum London until the 5th of May, 2025.
