Femme Maison, 1946
Limited edition of 100
Its title roughly translated to ‘housewife,” this is one from a series of four Femme Maison paintings Bourgeois made in the late 1940s. Her depiction of a female figure’s naked body with a house for a head became an iconic image, embraced in the late 1960s by the feminist art movement as a symbol of the domestic restraints on women’s identity. However, as with all of Bourgeois’s work, meaning resides in the tension between opposites: the house is both refuge and trap, shelter and prison.
