Iconoclasm

London

by SIMON WATNEY

There seems little rhyme or reason to Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, the sadly disjointed and confusing exhibition at Tate Britain (to 5th January). Its five overlapping sections are welded together by the curatorial insistence outlined in the Introduction to the accompanying catalogue that the notion of iconoclasm may be applied to any change to the appearance and hence the meaning of images; and furthermore that deliberate damage to works of art may also be considered ‘subversive and playful’ and ‘exploratory and inquisitive in nature’.1 The show begins with a wide selection of variously gouged, scraped and hammered objects, which were mutilated by sixteenth-century fanatics in accordance with their genuinely iconoclastic hatred of supposed ‘superstition’. These include such well-known works as four of the superb late medieval sculptural fragments from the screen of Winchester Cathedral (cat. fig. nos.38–40), and the early sixteenth-century life-size recumbent effigy of the dead Christ, which was discovered in 1954 buried underneath the bombed ruins of the Mercers’ Company Hall in the City of London (no.49; Fig.39). This almost certainly comes from the earlier chapel of the Order of St Thomas of Acon which the Mercers had purchased from the Crown after the Dissolution. There are also many less familiar objects such as the particularly forbidding verbal triptych from Preston St Mary’s church in Suffolk, with texts denouncing all religious art, and insisting that ‘Idolatry is to worship false Gods or the true God in an idole’ (no.34).

One’s confidence in the historical scholarship informing this section is hardly bolstered by Susan Harrison’s claim in the catalogue that British monasticism had its origins in the twelfth century, or Tabitha Barber’s belief that the bones of Edward the Confessor somehow ended up in Winchester Cathedral rather than in the already centuries’ old monastic foundation that he began to rebuild at Westminster shortly before the Norman conquest, and where they happily remain. In his contribution on the Reformation, Richard Williams wants us to follow Bruno Latour in regarding iconoclasm as a ‘resource’, and is seemingly unaware of the contradiction between his tone of regret at the wholesale destruction of earlier Christian art and his celebration of anti-Catholic Puritan zeal. He also faithfully repeats the familiar philistine pieties of fashionable contemporary Cultural Studies, denying the very existence of artists as people of ‘exceptional talent’, and informing us that ‘this notion did not exist in sixteenth-century England’. Unfortunately there is no trace in these pages of the sen­sitivity to questions of popular piety and the liturgy that one finds in the writings of Richard Marks or Eamon Duffy. Instead one simply finds a lofty dismissal of the entire cult of relics and what Barber terms ‘the erroneous act of pilgrimage’.

The second section takes up the theme of seventeenth-century Puritan iconoclasm, although here the materials on show are far less well selected, and one would scarcely guess at the scale of actual destruction. One suspects that the types of Laudian fittings introduced into the wrecked interiors of so many churches in full accordance with the Elizabethan Settlement (1558–59) are themselves unsympathetic to the curators, who comment disapprovingly in the catalogue of such ‘innovations’, in much the same way that they sneer at the ‘ostentatious display of mat­erial wealth’ on the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, entirely oblivious to the spiritual significance of precious mat­erials in medieval devotional art. Barber approvingly quotes Milton’s chilling description of Laudian furnishings as ‘the gaudy allurements of a whore’, seemingly unaware of the links between Puritan iconoclasm and misogyny, or the related significance of the particular loathing felt by Calvinist iconoclasts for objects of Marian devotion. In this context the painted glass Deposition by one of the Van Linge family, originally from the chapel of Hampton Court in Herefordshire and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is all the more moving, with its poignantly defensive accompanying text: ‘The truth hereof is historicall devine and not superstissious’ (no.52).

The exhibition then changes gear dramat­ically in order to consider iconoclasm in the strictly political register, focusing mainly on the destruction of secular public statuary caught up in the cross-fire of political controversy. Here we have the now decapitated heads from Sir Henry and John Cheere’s former statue of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the notorious ‘Butcher of Culloden’, which was set up in London’s Cavendish Square in 1770, and of John Smith’s 1836 lead figure of William III from Dublin (nos.66 and 74). This is indeed an important and fascinating subject, but it has little to do with the earlier work on display, and only serves to demonstrate that such politically motivated destruction is universally human as dynasties and empires rise and fall. Yet, although such destruction may coincide with theologically inspired iconoclasm, it is not strictly speaking the same thing, and the term quickly loses any kind of useful art-historical purchase when used so broadly as a metaphor for all anti-establishment attitudes. Putting this another way, I remain unconvinced that attacks on political symbols in public spaces are substantially the same as the theologically motivated destruction of religious art which is rooted in deep anxieties about representation as such, especially within the three great monotheistic ‘religions of the Word’.

From here the exhibition lurches to the subject of attacks made by early twentieth-century British suffragettes on works of art in public collections. This includes two of the unfortunate paintings by Burne-Jones and Watts attacked in 1913 in Manchester City Art Gallery, as well as one of the five pictures in the National Gallery, London, to which Freda Graham angrily took her cane the following year, as well as a grim black-and-white photograph of the maimed torso of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in ribbons after Mary Richardson had slashed it with a meat cleaver hidden up her sleeve. In the catalogue Lena Mohamed writes about how museums supposedly echo ‘the power of the state’, and the central role that she imagines they play in shaping national identity. With friends like these, our unfortunate public museums and galleries hardly need enemies. For Mohamed, such violence is not a question of destructive vandalism but rather of ‘adding socio-political value’. To underline this point she insists that Richardson’s ripping of the Rokeby Venus was in fact a ‘vital contribution to the freedoms now perceived as inherent to British national identities’, and furthermore that, as framed and glazed works of art, the pictures in Manchester were ‘aligned with the power and authority of the state’, not failing to note that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures involved are celebrated for their ‘overt sexualisation of the female body’. She dourly observes that the pictures in the National Gallery were ‘revered by many for their beauty and religious subject matter’, commenting with barely concealed contempt on ‘the adulation accorded such inanimate objects’. Here indeed one senses the timeless puritanical hatred of all forms of representational art that motivates all authentic iconoclasts. ‘Rather than iconoclasm being about destruction’, she triumphantly concludes, ‘it was a creative process’. It is precisely because of the sympathy one feels for the political aims of the suffragette cause that one should not regard such actions as anything other than criminal vandalism. If damaging works of art in 1914 indeed played a signif­icant role in achieving women’s rights, as is claimed here, then why would that not still be the case today?

Stacy Boldrick, who curated the exhibition with Tabitha Barber, goes even further in her insistence that ‘even the word “attack” is questionable’ and approvingly quotes Jake and Dinos Chapman’s immodest view that they have lately been ‘improving’ the work of Goya and Hogarth. In this context it is frankly very difficult to understand why in the next room one finds Carl Andre’s 1966 Equivalent VIII (no.103) and Allen Jones’s 1969 Chair (no.105; Fig.38), both in pristine condition, the former long since cleansed of the subversively ‘improving’ paint flung over it in 1976, and the second extensively restored following a celebrated ‘intervention’ involving acid in 1986. The last few rooms bring together an arbitrary collection of relentlessly minor contemporary work including Kate Davies’s pointless scribbles on top of four framed reproductions of drawings by Modigliani (no.120). In this sorry context Mark Wallinger’s moving Via Dolorosa seems all too poignantly out of place (no.125). The show stutters to a halt with three minor late Georgian oil portraits ‘rectified’, as they put it, by the Chapmans (Fig.40), work which the adjacent caption helpfully informs us questions ‘the pretensions of historic painted portraits made to immortalise the elite, who still die like everyone else’.

It is all the more distressing to find Tate Britain’s Director adding her own approving imprimatur to this unfortunate show in her Foreword to its dismal catalogue, where she repeats the party line that iconoclasm ‘is as much about changing the meaning of an image as destroying it completely’ and insisting on ‘its creative as well as its destructive dimensions’. Come to think of it, maybe the late Lady Churchill should be honoured with a posthumous retrospective award of the Turner Prize for her ‘creative’ destruction of Graham Sutherland’s hatefully ‘elitist’ portrait of her husband? The day is surely not far off when museum visitors are helpfully supplied on arrival with hammers and Stanley knives in order to encourage them to playfully ‘improve’ the works of their choice. Mary Richardson, the fourth plinth awaits you!

1    Catalogue: Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm. By Tabitha Barber and Stacy Boldrick. 192 pp. incl. 126 col. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2013), £24.99 (PB). ISBN 978–1–84976–030–0. There are no catalogue entries; the numbers in this review refer to figure numbers.