Louise Bourgeois was very open about her negative relationship with her father, as he was a large inspiration for most of her more disturbing works. This animosity came not only from his domineering and hyper-masculine personality, but his longtime and not-so-secret affair with Louise’s nanny. As a result, themes of sex and violence become intertwined in Bourgeois’ work, and duality became her medium. In Destruction of the Father, the artist simultaneously creates a “dining table where your parents make you suffer” and the marriage bed desecrated by man and mistress. Upon this surface, she places several fleshy mounds representing both her father’s lust and dismemberment, as she had dreamt of dismembering him in her youth. Finally, a red light bathes the entire scene with feelings of both carnality and bloodshed.

A photo of Louise Bourgeois, her mother, and her father. Her mother was sickly and often could not leave the home, while her father was an unabashed philanderer and a generally harsh man.