While I’m on the subject of commemorative statues – a subject which I’m fascinated to find stirring such unbelievably passionate feelings – I have been thinking about the vexed issue as to what should happen to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus which was on display in the Turbine Hall up until lockdown, assuming it has not already been dismantled as was planned after it was due to come off display on April 5th. Is there not a possibility of making it into something more permanent ? I don’t think it belongs in Bristol because it is a satire on the Victoria Memorial. It is currently made out of deliberately ephemeral materials so that it can be recycled. But is there not an opportunity of showing it more permanently somewhere outside either near the Thames on a site outside Tate Modern and opposite St. Paul’s or, equally appropriately but less publicly, outside Tate Britain ?

As the late nineteenth-century and unexpectedly art nouveau civic statue of Edward Colston is fished out of the waters of Bristol’s harbour, awaiting an appropriate place to be displayed in a museum (few people have pointed out that Bristol Museum and Art Gallery already owns a smaller bronze version of it and the two maybe belong and should be shown together), I found the article below by Martin Kettle a thought-provoking discussion of the much bigger issue that the statue raises: that is, why the teaching of British history has tended to be entirely separate from the teaching of Imperial History (or at least it was in my time), how colonial history could and should be taught in schools, and how it is shown in museums. These strike me as being much bigger and more urgent issues than which other statues should be taken down: to change the way history is taught and seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/obsessing-over-statues-obscures-the-real-problem-britains-delusion-about-its-past?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

My informant in the food industry has filled me in on the history of EAT: THE REAL FOOD COMPANY, which I probably should have looked up myself before posting about it. The truth is that EAT only opened in London in 1996, next to Charing Cross (that was why I knew about it when looking for a franchise for the NPG) although a version of it (E*A*T) had existed in New York since 1973, founded by Eli Zabar. So, it wasn’t a pioneer, but more an opportunistic rip-off of Prêt-à-Manger, which was maybe the originator of the idea of the quick, pick-up, reliable lunchtime sandwich in London, founded in Hampstead in 1983 and bought by Julian Metcalfe, just out of college, in 1986. I think it’s a tale of city-based entrepreneurs spotting a gap in the market. Anyway, I’ve discovered why I liked EAT. It was designed by David Collins, the clever, visually inventive Irish architect-designer, who died in 2013 and was responsible, amongst many other projects, for the Wolseley, the Connaught Bar and the National Gallery Dining Rooms. So, EAT brought elements of his aesthetic of modernist haute luxe (he was a friend of Madonna) to the high street.

Many people have already sung the praises of the series of lunchtime concerts broadcast from an eerily empty Wigmore Hall, but few can match the experience of listening to Paul Lewis play the Moonlight Sonata, with his ability to make the familiar like something one has never heard before – is it the astonishing speed of playing or its unpredictability which gives it its special intensity ? – even in spite of having listened to recordings of him having played it often before:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jvw9

Liane Lang, an artist who has spent her entire career thinking about and making work based on public statuary, wanted to post the following Comment on my post, but I think it deserves more than that so am posting it with her permission:-

I have been thinking about these colonial men on display across Britain and lots of people have asked me what I think should be done to/with them. It occurred to me that there is a lot of momentum right now and perhaps it should be used to campaign for a museum of colonial history. It would be a fitting place to line up the great beneficiaries of Empire in the context of well researched and documented displays on slavery, commercial exploitation and the continued prevalence of white supremacist views. It would be an amazing institution for London to have and perhaps could be sold to the conservative section by way of its gainful existence as a major tourist attraction. Think of Budapest’s Memento Park or Terror Haza or the Jewish Museum in Berlin of course, all major projects in aid of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A museum of colonial history might be an alternative to having the ethnographic collection hidden in the basement of the British Museum. If a museum is too ambitious, perhaps we go all the way of Memento Park and bung Colston and co in a muddy field outside Slough playing ‘There’ll always being an England’ on a squeaky tannoy…

Of all the multiple things I have been reading about Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes and what to do about public statuary, the subjects of which were until recently conspicuously ignored, I thought that one of the most sensible comments was from John-Paul Stonard who pointed out that, of course, we are not the only country which has had to grapple with, and come to terms with, monstrous things in our history and that the Germans even have a word for this. I wasn’t familiar with the word and now that I have looked it up I can understand why, but I still think that it’s a very sensible suggestion that we should learn from the ways in which Germany has dealt with its past.

I know it’s a relatively small thing in the great scheme of things with a mass of more important and contentious public issues, but I felt a great twinge of sadness and nostalgia when I read about the closure of EAT, one of several chains of sandwich shops which opened in the 1980s and 1990s and brought good quality and affordable sandwiches to lunchtime eating. EAT was always one of the best (and I always liked its graphics), so much so that I remember investigating whether they might open a franchise in the basement of the renovated NPG. I assume that many other restaurant chains are at risk of going under, but this doesn’t make it any the less dispiriting.

https://eat.co.uk

The excellent radio programme about Anthony Blunt on Saturday has made me think more and re-read Miranda Carter’s biography about his actions in the war. On the one hand, his actions as an art historian were remarkable and entirely laudable. He had been appointed as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in 1937, helped establish the Journal of the Warburg Institute which first appeared in 1938, wrote articles for it on the Hypnertomachia Poliphili and Blake, and completed the research and writing of his book on Artistic Theory in Italy which was published in 1940 with its acknowledgement to Guy Burgess for ‘the stimulus of constant discussion’. Even during the early years of the war, he was able to write and publish a pioneering monograph on the work of François Mansart. And yet, at the same time, and with equal diligence, he was shovelling huge numbers of top secret documents into his briefcase on a weekly basis and handing them over to Boris Kreshin, his contact in the Russian Embassy, so that they could be copied over night, collected by him in the morning and returned to MI5. There are various excuses which are used for this action: that he was motivated by ideology, but he doesn’t seem to have been particularly ideological at this or any other point in his life, except perhaps briefly in 1933; that he was sucked into it by his friendship with Guy Burgess and once involved found it hard to escape, but this doesn’t entirely explain the skill and persistence with which he did it; that he enjoyed it as an intellectual game, demonstrating that he was much cleverer than his colleagues in MI5. Years later, after he had been exposed, he said to his brother Wilfrid, with whom he had remained very close, ‘You must admit I’m a very good actor’, a comment which suggested that he enjoyed the intrigue, irrespective of the consequences.

We have just been listening to the programme about Anthony Blunt, looking back at the moment when he was unmasked as a spy in the House of Commons in 1979, although it was not a particular surprise in art historical circles. Most of it covered ground which is fairly familiar from Miranda Carter’s biography – his time as an Apostle in Cambridge, his friendship with Guy Burgess, his Marxist sympathies in the Spectator, apart from the contribution by Christopher Andrew, who fleshed out in more detail the secrets that Blunt did reveal:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jszt

I’m re-posting Max Anderson’s thoughtful and heartfelt article on how museums should respond to current circumstances in the United States, not least because it contains such a vigorous denunciation of any view that museums might be considered places of contemplation and reflection, but instead should be recognised for what they have become – market-driven and increasingly privatised entities – and that they should ‘collect and present art that is not a mirror of art market fashion’. I look forward to the response.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/expressions-of-empathy-are-not-enough-its-time-for-us-museums-to-act/