CITY GRUMP
The world famous work of art by John Constable, The Hay Wain, is to be rehung in a new exhibition at our National Gallery. Dr Mary McMahon, a curator there, explains what’s going on . She declares:
“We want to talk about everything that has not been included in this painting. The British landscape was a contested space. We have the Corn Laws, we are coming out of the Napoleonic Wars, people are losing their land to enclosure.”
Ms McMahon and her fellow conspirators, sorry curators, will seek to explain why Constable may have omitted the social ills suffered by lower classes at the time, in light of his “privileged” position as a son of a corn merchant, and a holder of “conservative” attitudes.
Clearly, the time has come to spread the McMahon treatment to other iconic works of art. Here are some suggestions:
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Vermeer’s depiction of a wealthy young girl wearing a turban is of course offensive cultural appropriation. Furthermore, the fact that Vermeer came from a comfortable middle class background shows that he chose not to reference the suffering inflicted on indigenous populations conquered by the Dutch in their widespread colonial activities at the time this painting was completed.
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Vincent’s depiction of sunflowers misses out on the probability that they were cultivated and harvested by agricultural labourers living on no more than subsistence wages. The viewer of this painting needs to be cognisant that Van Gogh, for most of his life was self-obsessed, which is why he cut off his ear, so sadly would have not have been interested in the plight of field workers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed. Turner has neglected to include any railway workers here in his homage to the new age of steam locomotion. It can be said with certainty that hundreds of people died in the making of this painting. Railway construction was a notoriously dangerous activity and the resultant sacrifice of those who worked there was clearly not something that Turner chose to acknowledge.
Picasso’s Guernica. Although, perhaps, the most famous of anti-war paintings, Picasso makes no attempt to explain why the Republican side was fighting for a just cause. It does depict innocent bystanders caught up in the slaughter at Guernica but leaves out the fact that thousands of brave, innocent, people from many other countries had joined the Republican armies and died all over Spain.
Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Hockney is often seen as a no-nonsense Yorkshireman but this portrait shows that in the 1970s he succumbed to the decadence of the Californian lifestyle. The depiction of a pool and swimmer set against a background of beautiful countryside and sunny sky may have been idyllic for some but takes no account that, even then, thousands of poor migrants were crossing California’s border with Mexico, so those depicted here can be fed fresh orange juice and other daily delights.
I hope none of the above descriptions ever come to pass as we continue to marvel at these great paintings, but, what Mary McMahon is up to with her Hay Wain commentary is a blatant mental hijack. There is a serious point. She wants to bend us to her way of thinking. It is cultural appropriation at its very worst. Her musings have nothing to do with great art and if the National Gallery trustees still possess even a shred of common sense, she and her coterie should be dismissed from their posts.
The City Grump has spent some 40 years in the City of London. He started as a stockbroker’s analyst but after some years he decided he was too grumpy to continue with the sell side of things so he moved to the buy side and became a fund manager for the next 20 years, selling his own business in the 1990s. Post the millennium, he found himself in turn chairing a stockbroker, a financial PR company, and an Exchange. He still keeps his hand in, chairing a brace of VCTs and investing personally in start-ups. The City Grump’s publications are available here.