Books furnish a room, but statues furnish a city. What would London be without Eros, Nelson or (for my money) Boadicea galloping to confront the Roman invaders, at the northern end of Westminster bridge? If Euro-sceptics need a second patroness apart from Lady Thatcher, here she is.
I always find pleasure in statues, when I walk around a city. Richard Oastler, for example, stands doggedly in central Bradford, covered in pigeon muck, hoping against hope that pupils pursuing the national curriculum will remember his part in getting child labour abolished in the textile mills. Oastler (1789-1861) was a Tory radical, hostile to "non-conformist cant" and to philanthropists whose emotions-like those of many contemporary leader writers and television programme makers-were only stirred by what was going wrong overseas. "The very streets," he wrote, "which receive the droppings of the 'Anti-Slavery Society' are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice". You don't get writing like that in today's Bradford Telegraph & Argus.
My passion for statues began, I think, with childhood visits to Blackpool. Everything in Blackpool is provisional, ready to be sacrificed to the next swing in public taste. This is why it flourishes like willow herb, to the horror of the fastidious. It doesn't go in for public statues: too permanent. But the Blackpool branch of Madame Tussaud's used to have a special display of them in its basement.
This was because they were scandalous. When no one else would buy them, Tussaud's bought some of Jacob Epstein's most gargantuan creations. After gawping at the usual waxworks, you went down to see these extraordinary images. They were most notable, to a child's eye, for their huge breasts and even huger penises. Part of Epstein's strength as a sculptor was his wonderful vulgarity. These Tussaud's visits were an early lesson that private art is not at all the same thing as public art.
Statues, on their public plinths, are a special form of publicity. They reinforce what sort of nation we think we are. The lack of any present consensus about this in the UK is one reason why the Royal Society of Arts is having such a terrible time trying to follow through its bright notion of filling the long-empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Who can stand next to these kings, admirals and colonial generals nowadays? Another reason is the lack of modern sculptors who can sculpt without irony-compare Hamo Thornycroft's self-confident 1899 statue of Cromwell outside the House of Commons with Ivor Roberts-Jones's 1973 statue of Churchill hunched and stumbling in Parliament Square.
Many conservationists are worried about the state of our public statues. It is said that traffic fumes are rotting Eros away. The answer, the experts say, is to shift them into museums and put replicas up instead. If you go to the Louvre, you will find that the French have already done this with some of Paris's grandest sculptures. But away from the open sky, the rain, the streets and even the filth, public statues lose much of their power. They belong on their plinths, just as posters belong on their hoardings.
In his introduction to the catalogue of the Hayward Gallery's current exhibition Art and Power, Eric Hobsbawm speaks of the Europe-wide "statuemania" of the years between the Franco-Prussian war and the first world war. It was as if nations were working up in bronze the passions which would later be expressed in machine-gun bullets. The exhibition is devoted to the public arts of the most notorious dictators of the early 20th century: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Franco. Mao, whose writ ran only from 1949, is not included.
The architecture of the Hayward Gallery pays deliberate homage to the design ideas of the Todt organisation, which put up gun emplacements (with slave labour) for Hitler. But, even in this brutalist context, the power has ebbed from these Aryan eagles and muscular Soviet workers. The dictatorships which they advertised have vanished. But, more importantly, the exhibition organisers have held back from displaying such statuary against the full panoply of dictatorial brand-imagery: swastika flags, SS boots, tendentious cinema (Eisenstein on the October coup d'?tat, Riefenstahl on the Nuremberg rally). They were perhaps afraid this might make them seem attractive to visitors. Totalitarianism meant total publicity.
Different dictators had different obsessions. When communism collapsed, the toppling of statues was central to the symbolism of liberation. But Hitler, for all his megalomania, was honoured (i.e. advertised) in paintings and photographs, not in statues ten feet high. Most Nazi statuary was a scaled-up version of Art Deco lampshade nudes. But Soviet art followed Russian Orthodox iconography in shying away from nakedness.
To see how hard it is, in fin de si?cle Britain, to re-establish the rhetoric on which public statuary depends, go to the Centenary Square in Birmingham. This is the city's bold attempt to start a new civic centre from scratch. It has a symphony hall (albeit in a convention centre) and a civic theatre. It has statuary, which varies from the feeble to the merely weak.
He disappeared in the dead of winter/The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted/And snow disfigured the public statues...
Thus Auden, mourning WB Yeats. Statues have their misuses, as witness the current Art and Power exhibition. But without them, a city-even a nation-would lose an important chapter in the story it is constantly telling itself. n
Paul Barker
Social notebook
December 20, 1995
