It is a painting that shows pubescent, naked nymphs tempting a handsome young man to his doom, but is it an erotic Victorian fantasy too far, and one which, in the current climate, is unsuitable and offensive to modern audiences?
Manchester Art Gallery has asked the question after removing John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, one of the most recognisable of the pre-Raphaelite paintings, from its walls. Postcards of the painting will be removed from sale in the shop.
The painting was taken down on Friday and replaced with a notice explaining that a temporary space had been left “to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection”. Members of the public have stuck Post-it notes around the notice giving their reaction.
Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the aim of the removal was to provoke debate, not to censor. “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.”
Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.
“For me personally, there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner. Our attention has been elsewhere ... we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”
The removal itself is an artistic act and will feature in a solo show by the artist Sonia Boyce which opens in March. People can tweet their opinion using #MAGSoniaBoyce.
“++I don’t like the replacement and removal of art and being told ‘that’s wrong and this is right’.__ They are using their power to veto art in a public collection. We don’t know how long the painting will be off the wall – it could be days, weeks, months. Unless there are protests it might never come back.”
“I know there are other works in the basement that are probably going to be deemed offensive for the same reasons and they are not going to see the light of day.”
“We think it probably will return, yes, but hopefully contextualised quite differently. It is not just about that one painting, it is the whole context of the gallery.”
Waterhouse is one of the best-known pre-Raphaelites, whose Lady of Shalott is one of Tate Britain’s bestselling postcards, but some of his paintings leave people uncomfortable and he has been accused of being one step away from a pornographer.
Reviewing the 2009 Royal Academy of Arts show devoted to Waterhouse, the critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote of a painting showing the death of St Eulalia, a 12-year-old girl: “I did not know whether to laugh, cry or call the police.”
Manchester Art Gallery says it has removed JW Waterhouse’s 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs from its displays “to prompt conversation”. Yet the conversation can only really be about one thing: should museums censor works of art on political grounds?
My, what a utopia these new puritans have in mind – a world that backtracks 60 years or more into an era of repression and hypocrisy.The great freedoms of modernity include, like it or not, freedom of sexual expression. Even a kinky old Victorian perv has his right to paint soft-porn nymphs.
Hylas and the Nymphs is no masterpiece. Its mildly erotic vision of a Greek myth is very silly, if you ask me, and if we were in front of it now I’d be poking fun. Yet we’d be looking, talking, perhaps arguing. Remove it and the conversation is killed stone dead. Culture falls silent as the grave.
The Rokeby Venus by Velázquez clearly needs to return to the National Gallery stores, where this silken nude can lie on her sensual sheets without causing offence.
And there is just enough time for Tate Modern to cancel its forthcoming Picasso show, which is guaranteed to contain a jaw-dropping quantity of salivating sexist visions.
Not so long ago, __in the 90s, art was deliberately shocking and some were duly shocked to visit galleries and be shown Myra Hindley, unmade beds and toy Nazis.
Now the tables have turned, and it’s cool to be appalled by – in this case – art made over a century ago. I can’t pretend to respect such authoritarianism. It is the just the spectre of an oppressive past wearing new clothes – and if we fall for the disguise we sign away every liberal value.
【曼徹斯特藝術畫廊】呈現女體：對維多利亞時期幻想提出一個挑戰
幹嘛移除？所以下一個是畢卡索嗎？ - 衛報評論
大概找不到吧，又或是人家不想出借，or其他。要找的話，裸男塑像超多的。不過我想用裸男像包圍畫作會被說男性凝視說不定這家美術館真的會說是男性凝視滿滿的大肌肌不好嗎, 服務女性跟彩虹族群