The Domestic and Domesticity
Home life, housework and care in art, from tender 19th-century interiors to feminist works that question who keeps house.
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Home and housework have been both idealised and questioned in art. Berthe Morisot's The Cradle (1872) shows her sister watching over a sleeping baby through a gauzy veil, and Mary Cassatt's The Child's Bath (1893) looks down from above on a mother washing a child's feet, a pattern of stripes and flowers. Both painters, steered by convention toward domestic subjects, made them searching.
From the late 1960s artists turned the home into a critique. Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) declared cleaning and care to be art, and she later scrubbed museum steps in public. In 1972 Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and their students transformed a Hollywood house into Womanhouse, including a kitchen covered in fried eggs that turn into breasts. Laurie Simmons photographed dolls in dollhouse rooms in the late 1970s, and Rachel Whiteread's House (1993) cast the interior of an east London terraced house in concrete.
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