Mary’s full-frontal assault on nymphs, nudity and art
We are in a new era of censorship. Like jazz under the Nazis and religious sculpture under the Puritans, classical art is increasingly outlawed today.
You can lose your job, like newsreader alastair Stewart, for quoting the wrong bit of Shakespeare. and heaven help you if you’re a bloke and Professor Mary Beard catches you admiring a naked renaissance woman in a gallery.
Shock Of The Nude (BBC2) was her full-frontal assault on the tradition of bare female flesh in Western art. ‘You can’t talk about the nude unless you also talk about male desire,’ she declared, and added between clenched teeth: ‘ For so long men got away with it!’
That’s it, then. rubens, Titian, Botticelli, Velazquez — just pervs with paintbrushes. Picasso was the worst of them, Prof Mary said: he didn’t merely paint naked angry prostitutes, he appropriated the style of african art to do it.
Cultural theft and sexual abuse, all on one canvas. Lucky for Picasso that he’s dead, the dirty racist, or he’d really be in trouble on Twitter.
The painting the Prof dismissed as so problematic was 1907’s Les Demoiselles d’avignon, one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Still, there’s naked boobies in it, so clearly it has to go.
already dumped is J.W. Waterhouse’s
pre-raphaelite masterpiece Hylas and The Nymphs, removed from display at Manchester art Gallery. Its crime? Depicting coy, topless girls, chest deep in water, whose modesty is not fully covered by their waterlilies.
Prof Mary included footage of cheering protesters as the painting was carried off to the vaults. Hurrah for the censors! ‘Why are we giving the impression this is a space where it is normal for breasts to be out?’ fumed a curator.
Quite right — once you start encouraging public nudity, you’ll never hear the end of it. Look at the trouble cricket has with streakers. The Waterhouse is back on show, thanks to public protest. Prof Mary couldn’t resist a sneer at the plebs who thought this scene from roman myth could ever be deemed ‘real art’.
Some had written to defend the painting. She read their pleas in a mocking voice. I’ve never thought her arrogant or snobbish before, but that’s how she seemed now.
One man worried that, if favourite artworks could disappear overnight, the censors might start burning books next. ‘No, we won’t!’ snorted the prof. Somehow, that didn’t feel reassuring.
The prospect of a Channel 4 drama about war in the Middle east wasn’t reassuring either.
The memory of 2017’s abysmal The State, glorifying ISIS and the young British Muslims who joined its death cult, is too recent. But there’s no gauche, Left-wing posturing in Baghdad Central (C4). This is hard-bitten crime noir, where nobody can be trusted and everyone is corruptible.
In the aftermath of the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, former police inspector Khafaji (Waleed Zuaiter) is searching for his missing daughter as the city descends into chaos.
Bertie Carvel plays a British intelligence officer who is going native: you can tell by his bushy moustache.
The production has the look of a French arthouse film, where men mooch in widescreen down dust- swirled streets at dawn with their hands in their pockets. Unlike the Left Bank of the Seine, though, there’s rubble everywhere.
Frightened survivors, unable to flee the city, step over the shattered torso of a child’s doll, and you wonder whether the scene would be much different if it was a real human body.
Despite the fragmented confusion of the first 20 minutes, this promises to be a dark, tense drama.