Tate to wrestle with our ‘messy’ colonial past
Exhibition ‘won’t be a celebration of the golden age of Empire’, but a starting point for debate
THEY are masterpieces that were banished from view for more than half a decade because they were considered an embarrassing reminder that Britain was no longer a great imperial power.
But now Tate Britain is preparing to dust off works of art that shine a light on this country’s “difficult” colonial past and put them on show in a new exhibition devoted to the British Empire.
The 200 works on display include paintings that have not been in national collections since the 1950s and 1960s. The show will also include a series of contemporary works that will offer “fresh interpretations of colonial imagery and confront the problematic legacies of Empire in the present day”.
Artist and Empire, which opens on Nov 25, has been four years in the planning – partly due to the Tate’s wariness over the sensitive subject matter.
“It has been the most difficult project I’ve worked on,” said Alison Smith, the lead curator.
“This is such a vast, messy subject. There are certain subjects our audience will expect us to address – for example, Britain’s involvement in the slave trade – and it’s about how we balance that with other areas, of commercial activity or military conquest. The challenge was selecting material to make a wonderful show without being seen to be celebratory, so people won’t come in and say, ‘Oh, this is all about nostalgia, looking back to the golden age of Empire’.”
Explanatory text with each work and introductory panels on the wall in each gallery will explain the historical context, viewed from a 21st-century per- spective. Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, said the exhibition was designed “to open up debate”, adding: “It’s not simply a collection of very beautiful objects – it will be an exhibition that opens up some quite difficult issues.”
He acknowledged that the gallery had associations with Empire as Sir Henry Tate made his fortune as a sugar magnate, although Tate & Lyle has said the business had no links to slavery. One highlight of the show is Cheetah
and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs, painted in 1765. It was commissioned by Sir George Pigot, the governor-general of Madras, who brought the cheetah to Britain as a gift for George III. The Stubbs painting is “a metaphor for the Empire, showing the spoils of India brought to Britain and presented to the King”, the Tate said. Later works were more critical of Britain’s role in international affairs, although they were not perceived as such in their day. Lady Elizabeth Butler’s 1879 painting, The Remnants of an
Army, shows a soldier thought to be the only survivor of the 1842 retreat from Kabul during the First Afghan War.
She produced the painting at the time of the Second Afghan War, and was pointing out that history was repeating itself.
One historian warned the Tate not to be politically correct. Andrew Roberts added: “I hope the Tate will not forget that it was the British Empire that ended the slave trade. So criticism of the empire needs to be balanced by the fact that it was a great force for good for 200 years. ”