ART UNDER ATTACK
Iconoclasm in England
Tate Britain
Runs until January 5 2014
It is highly unusual for a major gallery to hold an exhibition which is about the destruction, rather than the creation of art.
Iconoclasm, and the powerful motives which drive people to mutilate or destroy artworks, is a huge subject with a very long history, and this exhibition is necessarily highly selective.
Power of visual images
Iconoclasm is also an acknowledgement of the power of visual images. Art works can easily be personified — we know that the image or object is not alive but we project onto it a sense of animism associated with the person or idea it represents. Moses makes the same point when he warns the Israelites not to make images for worship or even to look at aspects of nature with a wrong attitude, ‘lest you feel driven to worship them and serve them’ (Deuteronomy 4.15-19). Today, advertisers are experts at manipulating us with emotive visual images.
The exhibition looks at iconoclasm under three broad categories: religion, politics and aesthetics. The first of these covers the period from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry V111 and Thomas Cromwell to the Parliamentary edicts on ‘cleansing’ churches over a century later in the 1640s. Everyone is familiar with the sight of mutilated figures in our church interiors — or empty spaces where sculptures of saints once stood. Interestingly, it was often writers with explicitly Anglican or royalist sympathies who encouraged the popular idea of the Puritans as boorish vandals, completely insensitive to the beauty of holy things.
However, this was not always the case. One of the most striking pieces on show is a magnificent life-sized limestone sculpture of the Dead Christ, dating from about 1500, possibly the work of a Netherlandish artist working in England. It was rediscovered in 1954, buried beneath the Mercers’ Hall in London. The feet, the arms and the crown of thorns have been hacked away, but the attackers did no more damage to the face, which still has the power to move us with a sense of Christ’s suffering.
Reformers’ destruction
Reformers often related their destruction of art to Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple. No memory of any superstitious image was to remain as a source of temptation. During the Civil War, we know of two individuals who kept careful records of what had been destroyed for Parliament’s Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry. When Richard Culmer described his ‘cleansing’ of Canterbury cathedral in December 1643, he was keen to show that his reforming work was not indiscriminate, but efficient and systematic. Among the cathedral ‘idols’, he listed altars, altar rails, ‘greasie’ service books, surplices, organs and tempting images As well as sculptures of Christ, the apostles and bishops (that fell on their heads and broke their necks), Canterbury’s stained glass windows were a particular target. Culmer (never a popular figure, known as ‘odious for his zeal and fury’) gives a description of himself up a ladder wielding a pike.
William ‘Basher’ Dowsing
Another journal, recently re-published, was kept by William (‘Basher’) Dowsing, whose commission was to ensure the eradication of superstitious images in churches throughout East Anglia — including even the Cambridge colleges. The sheer number of artefacts in these rural churches is extraordinary. At Haverhill, Suffolk, in January 1644: ‘We broke down about a hundred superstitious Pictures; and seven Fryars hugging a Nunn; and the Picture of God and Christ; and divers others very superstitious; and 200 had been broke down before I came. We took away two popish Inscriptions with Ora pro nobis and we beat down a great stoneing Cross on the top of the Church’.
Cheapside Cross
The exhibition omits some famous cases, such as that of the destruction London’s Cheapside Cross. One of the ‘Eleanor Crosses’ built for Edward 1, it represented the embodiment of royal Catholic tradition. Though less well known today than Charing Cross (which is a Victorian replica), the downfall of the Cheapside Cross was seen by many as one of the tipping points of the Civil War.
The cross — which had elaborate niches containing statues of the virgin and child, saints, apostles, kings,and bishops — became the focus of bitter controversy, and had been attacked on several occasions since Elizabethan times. In February 1642, a major riot took place when a band of apprentices intent on its destruction encountered crowds of opponents. After it was finally razed to the ground in 1647, one writer described how soldiers reacted by ‘Sounding their Trumpets, and shooting off their peeces, as well as shouting-out …. their joy-full acclamations at the happie downfall of Antichrist in England’.
Destroyed with explosives
The exhibition also has powerful reminders of political iconoclasm in public spaces, from images of Charles 1 to politicians such as William Pitt, and the much-hated equestrian statue of William III in Dublin, erected in 1701 — persistently damaged, and finally destroyed with explosives in 1928. The actions of pressure groups such as the Suffragettes are also explored — particularly Emily Richardson’s attack on Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, which the movement felt would add to its value, ‘because it has been honoured by the attention of a militant’.
At this point the show tends to lose its meaning, as the focus suddenly changes to destruction as an act of creation in 20th century art — taking apart and re-working a pre-existing art work into something new, as in Jake & Dinos Chapman’s reinterpretation of Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’. These works do not sit easily with the earlier sections of the show, and have none of the intensity of icon-oclasm which is the expression of deeply-felt ideals or beliefs.
Nevertheless this is a very worthwhile and unbiased exhibition, with an excellent informative catalogue — and great scope for discussion groups.
