Would the destruction or removal of Eric Gill’s sculpture Prospero and Ariel on the facade of the BBC’s Broadcasting House end incestuous abuse? This is the question for anyone who thinks works of art by evil people can be evil in themselves.
In January 2022 the early 1930s sculpture that symbolises the spirits of the air was attacked by protesters as a “paedophile” artwork. Now, a bit belatedly, the BBC is going to restore and preserve it. It’s right to do so. For the answer to the opening question is obvious: it would make no difference to human suffering at all if instead of mending Gill’s art, the Beeb smashed it and threw the chunks in a skip. No child would be saved. No abuser would act any differently.
In fact it is the only moral thing the BBC can do. The statue is part of the history and fabric of a noble building where George Orwell broadcasted during the second world war. Trashing art is no part of a public broadcaster’s brief. By restoring this damaged work of art, the BBC is standing up for the ideals of culture it exists to uphold. It’s actually a good way to show those values in its centenary year.
The “protesters” who spent four hours pounding Gill’s public artwork with a hammer singled it out because this modernist sculptor who died in 1940 is now seen as a paedophile. That may be too restrictive a term for his crimes, which only came to light when biographer Fiona MacCarthy published his diary confessions. Gill wrote about abusing his daughters, interfering with his dog and having sex with at least one of his sisters. Horribly, but perhaps predictably, these secret acts went along with a Catholic socialist idealism and a belief in art as a messianic instrument. Gill may have thought his monstrous behaviour was in some sense radical.
Prospero and Ariel portrays a tall, robed, patriarchal Prospero with his arms enfolding a smaller, naked Ariel. The spirit from Shakespeare’s Tempest is conceivably depicted here as a child, with the magician who controls him portrayed as a godlike father-figure. Given what we now know about Gill, it’s possible he’s expressing his own fantasies. But that may be a stretch. Who would see it like that without making an effort and what relevance does it have to the reality of abuse today?
I am as prone as anyone to read the artist’s life into the work. But our cult of the real within the fictional has to be tempered. Biography enlivens art, yet it is not art. And art, however lifelike, isn’t life. The abstracted stone figures Gill carved are not actual people, adult or child, but symbolic, estranged entities. Their connection with the confused mind of a long-dead man is remote and transformed.
It seems like a strange waste of time to be picking on works of art instead of trying to change social reality. I don’t love Gill’s sculpture – I find it chilly and pretentious – but it literally has never done anybody any harm. It’s inert stone. Either you enjoy seeing it or you don’t.
To argue for the cancellation of art and artists is a pretentious distraction from real life: in the real world, we know the difference between an actual crime and a phantom image in a painting or film. How privileged and complacent are we that we can play these games of pretending it is a moral test which artist you choose to admire, and condemning works of art by association?
Gill was a wicked man but also perhaps a sick one. How can child abuse be stopped? How can the vulnerable be protected? These are dreadful challenges. To pretend such nightmares can be cured by trashing a work of art is dishonest and trivialising. Perhaps as an art critic I need to admit the one thing that’s hardest to say: art is unimportant compared with life. If we want to change the world we should face that world and stop fighting shadows.
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
