Art must not be censored by cultural puritans
Manchester Art Gallery’s decision to remove a painting with nude girls is both ridiculous and dangerous, says Mark Hudson
Aspirit of terror stalks the land and it leaves no one – or certainly no male, living or dead – free from the possibility of retrospective guilt. Latest in the firing line are the kind of Victorian academic painters who until now have been considered guilty of nothing more heinous than being irredeemably boring and stuffy. On Friday, without warning, Manchester Art Gallery removed John William Waterhouses’s 1896 pre-raphaelite painting, Hylas and the Nymphs, which shows an ancient Greek hero being “abducted” into a lily pond by a collection of rather blank-faced pubescent nymphs. In its place, visitors have been invited to leave their responses to its removal on Post-it notes. As if taking down the painting wasn’t censorious enough, postcards featuring the image have also been removed from the gift shop.
Clare Gannaway, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, says she took the decision to remove the artwork – which used to hang in a room named “In Pursuit of Beauty”, filled with other portraits of the female form by late-19th-century painters – because she felt “a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with [the room] sooner. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”
This may seem like a blatant act of censorship. Yet, in an obfuscatory move that beggars belief, the gallery claims that taking down the Waterhouse is not about “denying the existence of particular artworks”. Instead, Gannaway wants to “prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection” and has cited the #Timesup and #Metoo movements as inspiration.
As if to cover their backs even further, the painting’s removal is being made into an artwork by the artist Sonia Boyce; a video of the act was filmed, and will be presented as part of Boyce’s show at the gallery in March.
So what is it about Waterhouse’s painting that has caused such upset? It’s hard to know. While Gannaway has talked about the room it hangs in, she has said little about the Waterhouse work specifically. We must assume it has something to do with the apparent youth of its subjects: the long-haired nymphs certainly seem to be just below the age of consent, but do we deduce that from the smallness of their breasts or from their simpering, innocent expressions? Were real young women exploited as models in the creation of the painting or are the faces too stereotypical to have required models? Was Waterhouse a dirty old man, an ivory-towered innocent or a cynical professional catering to a market for faintly erotic mythological subjects?
Realistically we can’t reach back into history, examining the biographies and motivations of every artist, measuring breasts and reading expressions in their paintings, to determine which works are “safe” to be shown in our galleries today. And would we want to, even if we could? Of course not. Manchester Art Gallery’s removal of this painting is the latest example of a new puritanism that is infecting our culture in a way that is both dangerous and ridiculous, and threatens our very art history.
Late last year, another example reared its head when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art received calls to remove Thérèse Dreaming by the Polish-french artist Balthus, which features a 12-year-old girl sleeping with her legs open and underwear visible. A petition to remove it because it romanticised “the sexualisation of a child”, started by visitor Mia Merrill, attracted 100,000 signatures. The museum’s response was robust. “Visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present,” it said, and refused to take down the picture.
In an action that is shaming by comparison, Manchester has voluntarily taken down its Waterhouse before a single comment was received from the public. In a blog on the website, the gallery says that paintings such as Nymphs represent “the female body as either a ‘passive decorative form’ or a ‘femme fatale’. Let’s challenge this Victorian fantasy!”
But the irony of this oh-so-right-on institution’s treatment of the stuffy old Victorians is that by eliminating a picture because it shows female flesh, the gallery is returning to precisely the sort of moral values most Victorians would have embraced. Worse, removing a picture because it depicts a naked woman brings to mind the sort of fundamentalism at work in the new Louvre gallery in Abu Dhabi, which, for a leading international art gallery, conspicuously contains few paintings featuring naked women, presumably for religious reasons. Is this the sort of comparison Clare Gannaway really wants?
Reading Gannaway’s remarks, you get a truly scary sense of museum apparatchiks monitoring themselves for infringements of the new popularly endorsed morality – with a view not only to safeguarding their jobs, but to professional advancement. It’s ironic that curators in public galleries, who are paid from the public purse to look after our national art collection and expand our knowledge of the past, are becoming self-appointed aesthetic thought police purveying an antiseptic and self-interested version of art history.
While Waterhouse conceived of his nymphs as mythic beings, rather than real people, there is a degree of insipid flirtatiousness in the faces of these child-women. The insipidness means it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a great painting, but it does provide an interesting perspective on the blandly idealised way in which men of the time viewed women, and for that reason it merits our continued attention.
A painting of the same subject by Waterhouse’s near contemporary, Henrietta Rae, has escaped comment, presumably because the artist was a woman and because her nymphs appear in their early twenties – women rather than girls.
Other great male connoisseurs of the female form have so far escaped the attentions of the new censors. But for how long? Will it soon be decreed we can no longer view Picasso’s reclining nudes or any painting by Lucian Freud depicting a pair of viscerally present breasts?
As for the #Metoo movement that this action is supposedly supporting, not only is Gannaway making the gallery a laughing stock, but by hijacking a cause that is supposed to be engaged in real cultural change with regard to relationships between men and women, she is leaving that open to ridicule, too.
Of course the gallery is asking for conversation and it has got it, so as a publicity stunt it has undoubtedly worked. But, even if this has been intended to create a conversation about censorship, it is a very real, a very stupid censorship nevertheless. And whatever the motivation, removing paintings is censorship.
The real conversation we should be having is this: do we want “safe space” art galleries containing only works that stand no chance of offending anyone on any count? Do we want curators acting as moral guardians?
Censoring our view of the past will only lead to a sanitised and sexless present that nobody has asked for.
‘Do we want “safe space” art galleries containing only works that stand no chance of offending anyone?’