And so to Newington Green, to check out the new controversial Maggi Hambling statue supposedly honouring Mary Wollstonecraft:
It's quite strange: an amorphous silvered bronze shape, with this small nude woman emerging from the top, looking slightly disapproving.
From the Times:
Anybody hoping that the sculpture would actually depict the woman known as the “mother of feminism” was left sorely disappointed. Instead, what Hambling gave them was a tiny, naked “everywoman” no bigger than a doll, with pert breasts, toned abs and an unexpected amount of pubic hair.
It was not a sculpture “of” Mary Wollstonecraft, insisted Hambling; it was “for” her.
The reaction has not been kind. Many people have questioned why the woman who was demanding equality of the sexes 100 years before the suffragettes has been “reduced to a silver naked Barbie?” Others detected a whiff of double standards. “How many of our important male writers are depicted naked in their statues? You never see Charles Dickens with his balls out, do you?” Dr Laura Wood said.
Georgina Lee said: “Because nothing says ‘honouring the mother of feminism’ like a sexy naked lady.”
Some donors said that they had not donated money for an anonymous, idealised, naked figure, but for a memorial that the campaign specifically promised on their website would render Wollstonecraft’s “presence in a physical form”.
Jessi Swift wrote: “Definitely wasn’t what was stated when we donated money for it. It was “her presence in physical form” not an abstract depiction of an Everywoman. This feels really deceptive and people feel betrayed.”
Others simply did not like it. “Wonderful to see Mary Wollstonecraft honoured with a statue after 200 years, but this is a truly terrible work of art,” Anny Shaw, contributing editor to The Art Newspaper, said.
Bee Rowlatt, chairwoman of the Wollstonecraft Society who led the Mary on the Green campaign, said she expected the form to “start a conversation”. She added: “It will definitely promote comment and debate and that’s good, that’s what Mary did all her life. To have finally a public work of art that celebrates human rights . . . is a very public statement at a time of increasing societal division. People haven’t heard of Mary Wollstonecraft and when you discover more about her, that is actually quite astonishing.”
The "starting a conversation" line is a feeble excuse. Put a turd there and you'd be starting a conversation. And yes, we get Maggi Hambling's defence - it's “for” Mary Wollstonecraft, not “of” her. It still doesn't work though: some tired image of everywoman symbolically rising triumphant from the mass of an unformed world; but she looks more grumpy than triumphant or liberated. And the emphatic nudity, with prominent breasts and pubic hair, seems absurdly inappropriate for a monument to a feminist icon.
Shame. I like Maggi Hambling. There was a lovely BBC documentary on her last month. She's interesting and opinionated - a bit like a female David Hockney, with her aggressive determination to keep on smoking and working, though her art, of course, is very different from Hockney's.
Someone should have said something. Just because she's a famous artist doesn't mean she can't be questioned. In fact her well-known contrarianism probably worked against her here, in that any objections would have likely strengthened her belief that she was in the right and her critics just didn't understand. She's not afraid of controversy, as she showed with her Scallop sculpture for Benjamin Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh, which she defended proudly in the face of objections.
This time though she's failed, and someone should have had the courage to tell her.
Update: Susan Harrison:
#MaryWollstonecraft seeing her statue for the first time pic.twitter.com/nsSVUbNG4z
— Susan Harrison (@SueHarrison123) November 11, 2020
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