Royal Academy’s ‘whiteness’ under scrutiny
‘Artists of the Windrush generation faced a lack of representation in museums and visual culture’
THE Royal Academy of Arts has criticised its past “institutional whiteness” in a new slavery exhibition.
According to the new show Entangled Pasts, Britain’s artistic history is linked to slavery and colonialism, and the RA has used the exhibit to acknowledge its own colonial history.
The artwork used to illustrate this is a canvas depicting an all-white group of academicians in a boardroom, from the late 1930s.
The new exhibition was first devised following “the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter moment, and toppling to the Colston statue in Bristol in 2020”, according to lead curator Dorothy Price.
The show at Burlington House in London examines the connections of various artists and artworks to slavery, British rule in India, and racism.
In a section titled Constructing Whiteness, the exhibition acknowledges its past “whiteness” with a sign which states that in the 20th century there was a “growing conservatism within the Royal Academy towards avant-garde movements that led some Academicians to resign”.
It adds: “Frederick Elwell’s painting The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee 1938 points to an institutional whiteness that persisted post-war.”
Visitors are told that “artists of the Windrush generation” faced a “lack of representation in museums and visual culture”.
The painting by one-time royal portraitist Elwell pointing toward “institutional whiteness” depicts a room full of Academicians in the 1930s, who happen to be white. The exhibition contains a number of works, from pieces by Turner and Reynolds to a large sculpture in the courtyard of Burlington House titled First Supper by the contemporary artist Tavares Strachan that shows historical black figures seated around a table in the manner of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
Landscapes painted by William Hodges, who accompanied Captain Cook, are claimed in the exhibition to typify the “colonial gaze” of Western observers.
Elsewhere the exhibition critiques a sculpture of an enslaved black woman by John Bell, whose work was considered to be an abolitionist statement in the 19th century, because the subject was implied to be an equal in the work’s title, A Daughter of Eve. An explanatory panel in the work states that there is “commodification and eroticism at play” which “disturbingly replicate”
A Benjamin West painting depicting the death of the conqueror of Quebec, General Wolfe, is said by – its inclusion of a Delaware Native American tribesman – to show the “often-overlooked entanglements of British colonialism and Indigenous communities in North America”.
Other “entanglements” explored in the show include scenes of British rule in India, and portraits of leaders in the Haitian Revolution, who were celebrated by abolitionists.
The exhibition runs from Feb 3 to April 28.