Broadcasting House, the global headquarters of the BBC in central London, has a new architectural feature – one that wouldn’t look out of place in a seaside arcade.
Above its main entrance, Prospero and Ariel, Eric Gill’s 1931 sculpture, has now been encased in a transparent box, meaning that it looks like something you put 20p in to see some puppets dancing. On such a landmark building – built from Portland stone, its beautiful art deco curves reminiscent of an ocean liner – it immediately draws the eye.
The sculpture’s restoration has cost the BBC half a million pounds, the equivalent of 2,865 TV licences, much of which has gone on the protective casing and its mounting on the side of a Grade II listed building. The reason for the protection is something the corporation isn’t keen to draw attention to.
This is because Gill – an artist feted in his day for his public works and influential typography, notably Gill Sans – was revealed in a 1989 biography to have sexually abused his two daughters and had an incestuous relationship with his sister. He also committed bestiality with the family dog.
Not the sort of man whose work any of us would be proud to have over our front door. Little wonder that the piece – and, indeed, all of Gill’s work on public display – have been seen in a different light since these appalling revelations. Prospero and Ariel depicts the spirit boy as half-naked with his arms open wide. It has become a target for vandals with a good head for heights as well as a sense of righteous anger on behalf of Gill’s victims.
There has long been a debate whether the work should be removed altogether, yet the BBC has accepted that Prospero and Ariel – which was carved on site – is part of its heritage. While the restoration is attention-grabbing, I hope that passers-by will also scan an accompanying QR code, whose text explains why the restoration work took place, but also adds that the Corporation “in no way condones Gill's abusive behaviour”, and that it “draws a line between his life and his artistic creations”.
Quite right. Gill’s appalling behaviour can never be excused, but covering up, or smashing his pieces to smithereens, will never work. Contextualising it is the key to the display of such contentious pieces.
The most successful example of this is the statue of Edward Colston, the 17th century slave-trader whose bronze statue was knocked off its plinth, defaced and dumped into Bristol harbour by Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020.
The statue had been the subject of controversy for many years, with arguments over whether a plaque about how Colston made his fortune should be placed on his statue’s plinth. With their direct action, the protestors who brought the statue down cut through any polite discussion; it is now kept in Bristol’s M Shed museum, still covered in graffiti, in an exhibition that puts Colston’s life and the reasons his statue was toppled into context.
Rather than quietly shuffling Colston into a back room or having his slave-trading past put on a brass plaque on a plinth, his resting place now shows how we can remember the past and do our best to change the future.
So many artists would find themselves cancelled today. Caravaggio? Killed a man in the act of trying to castrate him. Gauguin? Left his family for Tahiti, where he took three child brides and infected them all (plus his mistresses there) with syphilis. Schiele? Sailing pretty close to the wind by using teenage prostitutes as models.
We can clutch our pearls as much as we like about these reprobates, but they were undoubtedly brilliant artists who happened to live in different times. But it’s not that these things don’t happen today. Art, put properly in context, can not only help us understand the past but consider, and change, the things wrong in our society today.
