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Absolutely. “All life originates here.”
One of the things we explore very briefly
in the programme is that, if you try
giving it a different title – ‘Jeanette’s
Pussy’, for instance – it instantly starts to
look a bit different. Even as it is, it’s been
wonderfully controversial.
There’s a wonderful street artist who
came and sat in front of it, and then
lifted up her skirt to reveal her genitals.
The visitors in the room were ver y
amused at this, but the custodians were
told to remove her. So, in other words,
you had a woman – a real woman –
whose genitals you couldn’t see as
clearly as those in the painting, being
removed from the gallery whenbehind her was a really detailed,
super-close-up version.It was very ironic – and the theme
of removal leads me nicely on to my
third artwork. In the series, you feature
John William Waterhouse’s 1896
painting Hylas and the Nymphs (above).
It’s a beautiful pre-Raphaelite painting,
gorgeously done, but in 2018 it was
controversially removed from display
in Manchester Art Gallery. What’s
the thorny issue behind this?
This is a sad story of complete misrep-
resentation. It’s a pre-Raphaelite
painting of a young man who is about
to be lured, we assume to his death, by a
group of bare-breasted, barely pubescent
water nymphs. There was a huge scandal
recently when the artist Sonia Boyce
performed an ‘intervention installation’
in which she removed the painting from
the gallery. All hell broke out among art
critics who should have known better.“Are we going to be burning books
next?” was one of the comments I saw.
Exactly. And actually, Boyce never
intended the removal of this painting to
be permanent: she intended to make an
inter vention that made us look harder at
the painting. There’s something kind ofnicely paradoxical that you think harder
about something if it’s taken down.
And that is, in a way, what happened- but with real fulminations of journal-
istic outrage. I think what she was trying
to say is: “Notice what this picture is
of ”. She wasn’t tr ying to take it down
forever, but instead to make people
notice what the painting shows: a group
of very young women enticing what
we suppose to be an innocent man [the
femme fatale being a common theme
in 19th-century art].
The reaction in the gallery itself
was, actually, much more interesting
than the often stupid reaction of a lot
of the press. Boyce left lots of sticky
notes, on which people could write their
responses to not seeing their painting,
and they were more nuanced than most
of the commentary.
It started a discussion, and that’s
important. Mary, thank you!Janina Ramirez is course director for
the Undergraduate Certificate in History
of Art at the University of OxfordCourbet’s 1866 Origin of the World. “They put
it in the kind of gilded frame reserved for
masterpieces, not pornography,” says BeardJohn William Waterhouse’s 1896
Hylas and the Nymphs was at the
centre of a controversy when it
was removed from a Manchester
gallery as part of an ‘intervention
installation’ in 2018