A huge sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head lying on its side, his face sliced into segments, has been condemned as “absolutely hideous” by the playwright’s grandson.
Merlin Holland, an expert on Wilde’s life and works, has criticised a 2 metre-high black bronze sculpture by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi that is to be unveiled in a public garden in Chelsea, south-west London, near Wilde’s former home.
He told the Observer: “I’m all for any sort of innovations in modern art. But this does seem to me to be unacceptable. It looks absolutely hideous.”
Holland said it looks nothing like Wilde and fails to convey anything of the wit and brilliance of one of the greatest playwrights in the English language, who wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Instead, Holland said, the sculpture is so gloomy that anyone who encounters it is more likely to think of Wilde’s tragic end than the joy of his writing. It is expected to be installed on Dovehouse Green within the next few weeks.
Paolozzi, the British sculptor who died in 2005, is best known for his 1986 mosaics at Tottenham Court Road tube station and his 1995 bronze of Sir Isaac Newton outside the British Library. He had a studio in Dovehouse Street and the erection of the Wilde sculpture commemorates the centenary of his birth this year.
Wilde died in poverty in 1900, aged 46, after one of the most famous trials in British history and his imprisonment for homosexuality. He was ruined by his decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry, who accused him of being a “sodomite” after discovering that his son, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, was Wilde’s lover. Wilde’s wife, Constance, fled with their two sons to Europe, changing their surname to Holland.
Wilde’s grandson said of the sculpture: “It seems to say ‘here is a monument to a man whom society decapitated’. How do we want to remember him? Amusing, entertaining, engaging or carved up and beheaded for breaking the law of the time? I know which I prefer.”
Paolozzi submitted a design for the statue to a committee in 1995, chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, and including the actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, and the poet Seamus Heaney, as well as Holland. It invited 12 artists to submit designs, and Paolozzi was among six shortlisted candidates asked to create maquettes or scale models.
His argument was that a sculpture of Wilde should be conceptual, rather than being representational. But the committee rejected it. His design was “too brutalist”, Holland recalled: “He had been a great artist of modern times, but we just didn’t feel that a segmented head of Oscar would represent what we wanted the public to enjoy and admire about him.”
Instead, the committee chose Maggi Hambling’s “witty and amusing” sculpture, in which a bust of Wilde emerges from a bench-like granite sarcophagus, inscribed with a quotation from Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” It was installed in London near Charing Cross station in 1998.
Holland said: “A monument or statue does need to ‘say’ something to the public. Hambling’s says ‘it doesn’t matter who you are, come and sit down and have a talk with a great conversationalist and playwright. It’s also a very good representation, a sketch in bronze.”
Simon Wilson, a former Tate curator, also criticised the Paolozzi sculpture. He said: “Why is the head all chopped up? Why is it lying on its side? As an art historian, I can construct a reading – that the cuts in the head are symbolic of Wilde’s suffering and that it’s toppled on its side is a symbol of his fall from grace. But will a non-specialist viewer see that?
“What you’re getting is a sculpture by Paolozzi that just happens to refer to Oscar Wilde. We badly need a really good straightforward, traditional monument to Wilde.”
The Paolozzi Foundation said: “The foundation takes the view that everyone is entitled to their opinion, including Oscar Wilde’s grandson. We also note that the Oscar Wilde Society is fully supportive.” Wilde would no doubt have had something to say about it. He once observed of sculpture in England: “In looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one could almost wish that we had killed the noble art completely: to see the statues of our departed statesmen in marble frock-coats and bronze, double-breasted waistcoats adds a new horror to death.”
• This article was amended on 22 September 2024 to correct the height of the sculpture, which is approximately 2 metres, not 2ft as an earlier version inadvertently said.
