The Comfort of the First Born

In this work an aged father supports himself with a cane and the back of a chair constituting his son. As the second son in a tightly knit family in which his father and elder brother enjoyed a particularly close relationship, Richard may have been projecting aspects of his own world. But the formality of the father’s and son’s sailorlike outfits, together with the prevalence of stripes that seem to describe and imprison them, suggests the possibility that the sculpture takes issue with generations of ensconced bureaucratic paternalism.