Art and Empire: 'It must be done and England should do it'

Daniel Nelson

London’s newest blockbuster art exhibition, Artist and Empire, is a bit of a mashup – a heap of ideas and images, none of them thought through satisfactorily – but it’s an eyeful, and worth seeing.

Worth it in the context of the debate that never dies – was the empire a source of shame or of pride? – and because the 200 objects on display include work worth looking at.

But after the looking and enjoying, you’ll have to work hard to research and ponder the questions asked but not answered.

The first of six sections features maps, a reminder that, in the words of co-curator David Blayney Brown, they are not literal and eternal, but contingent and contested. One of the watercolours here, The Siege of Enniskillen Castle 1593, is echoed in the final Legacies of Empire section, by a 1980 work, Shadow of Six Counties. Both carry messages to the viewer (in the case of the former, the dangers of defying the English Crown) and are a reminder ahead of the exhibition’s subsequent paintings, sculptures and photographs that the Empire started in Ireland: it was the first colony.

John Everett Millais seven-foot painting, The North-West Passage, has been restored for the show, and the subtitle, “It might be done, and England should do it”,  also has a contemporary echo (fittingly, from a successor Empire)  – Obama’s “Yes we can.”

Also on show are cotton flags made by people we now call Ghanaians for British military companies but with local touches that subsequently became seen as subversive. The display of such works throughout the exhibition raises another aspect not properly explored, the art of the subjugated peoples and its lack of direct impact on English art (to say nothing of the money brought home by colonial plunder and enterprise that finally found its way into patronage).

This is odd, given Picasso’s revelation about African art at the ethnographic museum in Paris and the way it is influenced his style. Was the lack of similar revelation here simply because there was no English Picasso or because possible revelations were filtered through racist colonial values? (A William Blake portrait of Nelson is “based partly on Indian images of Shiva”, but that’s not so much inspiration as borrowing.)

There were, of course, paintings of colonial exploits and exploiters and, for a time, of Noble Savages, as seen in other sections of the exhibition: Imperial Heroics, Power Dressing (how we loved dressing up in exotic garb), Face to Face and Trophies of Empire. Trophies features the wonderful Stubbs picture, A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants. The cheetah was a gift to the king that failed to hit the mark because the king had no interest in animals and the cheetah ran away from the stag, ending up in a zoo where it became known as Miss Jenny).

These rooms offer pleasures and raise issues, without following them up. A handful of dramatic “last stand” paintings, for example, showing military failures provokes thought about the propaganda role of “glorious defeats” in the myth of empire and politics generally, here and elsewhere (Custer’s Last Stand?), and of the links with sport (England as good losers).

Perhaps the subject is simply too big for such a comparatively small exhibition. It ambitiously tries to cover so many and such varied issues, such as the role art in political propaganda, its contribution to the making of stereotypes, the sharply humorous observations of artists and craftspeople even in work for colonial patrons, a reminder of the widespread use of hostages in colonial struggles, the changing philosophies of the empire builders and of colonial peoples (like the new respect for Charles Goldie’s Maori portraits), the takeover of images by independence movements, the marginalisation of Commonwealth artists in this country as we shifted towards Europe and North America.

As one of the curators commented, “The topics covered in each of the rooms could have been an exhibition in itself.”

The catalogue looks meaty but I haven’t had time to read it yet: what’s needed is something between the catalogue and the wall captions. The exhibition is a potentially wonderful educational tool, but requires more information and guidance – not least in the final sections on Out of Empire and Legacies of Empire.

Overall: interesting, enjoyable and frustrating, with some grand set-pieces and some small pleasures – like the exhibit on Rachel Pringle of Barbados, born in slavery and the property (like her mother) of her Scottish schoolmaster father, who gained her freedom, became the only Afro-Caribbean Barbadian property-owner, and ran a hotel that was trashed by a drunken party (shades of the Bullingdon Club) led by the future King William IV, to whom she presented a bill for damages. The exhibition doesn’t say whether the bill was paid.