How long until the New Puritans stop us seeing all these treasures?
As Manchester Art Gallery removes a pre-Raphaelite picture of naked nymphs...
The heavy hand of political correctness has struck at one of the country’s most important art collections in these unsettling times following the harvey Weinstein scandal.
The Manchester Art Gallery has removed from its walls one of its best known and most popular paintings, hylas And The Nymphs, by Victorian artist J. W. Waterhouse, which features naked pubescent girls enticing a handsome young man into a water pool. Postcards of the picture will no longer be sold in the gallery’s shop.
The gallery insists it is not banning the picture, painted in 1896, but simply wants to provoke debate — to ‘prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks’ and how to make them ‘relevant’ in the 21st century.
Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the room where it was hung — entitled In Pursuit Of Beauty — perpetuated ‘ outdated and damaging stories’ that ‘women are either femmes fatale or passive bodies for male consumption’.
So all too predictably in today’s intolerant world, this ‘conversation’ turns out to be dogmatic and onesided. We are being told by earnest New Puritans that we should be ashamed of ourselves for even looking at this picture. You may not know the painting, but as soon as you see it you will recognize it for what it is, a harmless bit of kitsch often reproduced on posters and postcards.
No one has ever supposed it a great work of art. But like many Victorian paintings in the preRaphaelite style — Sir John everett Millais’s painting of hamlet’s drowned Ophelia with her red hair floating in the water behind her, is another example — hylas And The Nymphs feels comfortingly familiar. It is, I would argue, rather charming.
Yet because it depicts naked teenage girls, we will be told in this Manchester gallery’s ‘conversation’ that — far from being a harmless bit of titillation for Victorian businessmen, as was intended — the picture is appalling evidence of how women have been exploited throughout the ages.
For a start, modern feminist taste is almost certain to consider the Greek myth on which the painting is based to be highly offensive.
hylas, a beautiful youth who some believed to be the gay lover of hercules, was a sailor searching for the Golden Fleece which would allow the captain of his ship, the Argo, to be confirmed as king. he was seduced from his life as an Argonaut by the nymphs who drew him into the water for their gratification.
This, the feminists will point out, is every man’s sick fantasy — that women are nymph- omaniacs just waiting to seduce us.
In addition, we will be told, the models used by Waterhouse for the picture were exploited — they were the Victorian equivalents of those skimpily clad waitresses and prostitutes at the Presidents Club, the men-only charity event at the Dorchester hotel in London that shocked so many modern sensibilities after claims they had been pawed and groped.
Many Victorian painters — like painters throughout european history — chose poor, young working-class girls simply for their looks as models. These women were street-wise and commonly worked as actresses or barmaids, but they also found employment in seedier walks of life and were often forced into prostitution.
Waterhouse, so the conversation will go, exploited these women and should be on the #MeToo blacklist, while those men who enjoy his pictures are no better.
Once the gallery’s ‘conversation’ takes hold, why should it stop at hylas And The Nymphs? Next month, Tate Britain will hold a major exhibition of Picasso, arguably the most interesting, certainly one of the most arresting, painters of the 20th century — a giant, whatever you think of him.
ONeof the greatest works of modern art — a painting which changed the entire direction in which 20th-century painting would go — is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It depicts a group of prostitutes, shamelessly disporting themselves rather like the nymphs of classical myth but far more aggressively.
Picasso’s attitude to women was as politically incorrect as that of the Presidents Club, only much, much kinkier. As he got into his stride, his portraits of those he seduced — and there were hundreds — suggest a view of women which was often downright nasty.
Women’s mouths or their genitalia in his pictures are often jagged like the claws of lobsters. he saw women as exploitative, manipulative, destructive, just as many of us today would see his idea of women as depraved. But this does not stop the pictures being great works of art.
I can see the argument leading to the point where the vociferous politically correct minority insist no painting can ‘objectify’ women, let alone depict abuse by men.
Titian’s stupendous depiction of Tarquin And Lucretia on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (one of the greatest works of Western Art) would be banned.
Painted by great Renaissance master in his 80s in 1571, it depicts the violent moment Tarquin, son of the last king of Rome, raped Lucretia after threatening to kill her if she rejected his advances. The next day she exposed him and committed suicide, prompting the Romans to revolt and overthrow Tarquin’s father and establish the Roman Republic.
No longer would we be allowed to see the white-breasted form of Venus in Bronzino’s Allegory With Venus And Cupid in the National Gallery in London, or the naked sculptures of homoerotic (underage) male teenagers depicted in
the stunning Greek sculpture galleries in the British Museum. All because the taste police would tut-tut with disapproval.
You’d have to cover your eyes in Paris in case you had the misfortune to see Edouard Manet’s celebrated Le Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe: what could be more depraved and kinky than a fully clothed young man eating a picnic with a totally naked young woman. Presumably, Manet was a member of the Presidents Club? Almost certainly a friend of Harvey Weinstein.
Gauguin’s paintings of underage Polynesian girls with whom he had slept; Correggio’s erotically charged Leda And The Swan; these would be beyond the pale.
I can see modern puritanism reaching the point where it demands the removal of all naked human forms in our art galleries and museums.
At my Oxford college, we used to smile at the puritanism of our Victorian forebears. In the 18th century, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the greatest painter of his day, executed some wonderful windows for the chapel. A hundred years later, the Victorian Head of College ordered that the naked figure of Adam be clothed like Tarzan in a leopard-skin.
BuTthe truth is that we are now far more puritanical than that Victorian don. Because in our generation, we do not simply object to depictions of nakedness. We take a high moral tone towards our ancestors and think our attitude is always morally superior to theirs.
We should resist this philistinism with every ounce of energy we possess. The history of Western Art began in fifth and fourth- century BC Athens, when sculptors began to depict the naked human form.
The fifth century depiction of Athene by the greatest sculptor of antiquity, Phidias, was much more than just a moment in the history of art. By studying and depicting the human body, the Greeks made humanity itself central to their society. From this sprang the study of philosophy, medicine, and politics — theirs is the cradle of all we believe to be civilised.
Of course there always have been unpleasant artists who exploited women and had perverse sexual tastes. Eric Gill, the great sculptor whose statue of Shakespeare’s Ariel adorns the entry to the BBC, in Portland Place, London, was revealed 30 years ago to be a libidinous sex pest who even slept with two of his own daughters.
But if we ban all works the politically correct brigade consider offensive, we will end up with the equivalent of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans smashing stained glass windows in Westminster Abbey or the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues because they are ‘idolatrous’.
We should recognise that we are in the middle of a desperate cultural clash. On the one hand, there is the civilised majority which looks back, ultimately, to the Ancient Greeks for our view of politics, democracy and intellectual freedom — a story that began with the celebration of the human nude.
On the other hand are the philistine minority, who come in all sorts of politically correct disguises, but who fundamentally wish to restrict freedom of thought, coerce us and rewrite our history.
Yesterday, many expressed their anger at the gallery’s decision. In a post on its website, self-proclaimed feminist Annas Eskander was outraged, saying: ‘Do we not live in a liberal and civilised society where the job of the curator is to enlighten, not to impose their own beliefs on others?’
Our conversation with Manchester Art Gallery should be a short one. ‘Waterhouse was a not very good, but quite charming, painter. His Hylas And The Nymphs has many fans. Please put it back.’