2 ★ † FT Weekend 22 February/23 February 2020
Life
with dodgy funds — perhaps at an
inflated price for no questions asked, or
perhaps in a geographical region with
less beady eyes — and resell it anony-
mously, or even quite openly and
respectably, for “clean” money.
In the art market, “provenance” (ie
a documented chain of respectable
ownership) is important in the valu-
ation of a work offered for sale, espe-
cially for pictures, but much less so for
precious antique objects. If you offer a
fabulous Chinese jade for sale, a blue-
chip piece that experts will certify,
when you are questioned about prove-
nance, the response could be: “I found
it in my granny’s attic — and she lived
in Kazakhstan.”
Other ways of money-laundering
include using artworks bought with
dubious money as collateral againstlooking players have immediately
spotted business opportunities. Simms
says there is already “quite a number of
art entrepreneurial businesses sparked
by this.” If a collector buys from several
different galleries and auction houses,
for instance, why should each one have
to undertake laborious checks? How
about a centralised information bank,
which each seller can access to check up
on a prospective client?
Well, yes... but how do the clients
feel about the idea of such a cache of
information? Not at all happy, it seems.
So much stored data — passport details,
bank details — sends out warning sig-
nals to even the law-abiding art buyers.
As for the all-important question of the
effect on prices, opinions also vary.
Spokespeople from the auction houses
say they don’t anticipate any significantchanges — a response only to be
expected — and Hicks’s view is that the
impact will be minimal. But other objec-
tive art market experts foresee a differ-
ent logical outcome. The FT’s Melanie
Gerlis suggests that it is “highly likely to
affect prices quite considerably, espe-
cially at the top end — that’s why there’s
such resistance!”
Resistance or not, there’s no doubt
that the art market would be a less excit-
ing place without its aura of risk and
naughty glamour. Putting fabulous
sums of money together with the intan-
gible lure of art and beauty is an explo-
sive combination. Whether or not it
does anything to deter the criminals
remains to be seen, but I doubt a mere
EU directive can dim the lustre.Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editorArt in a spin
shipper talks of sending valuable works
“on a world tour” — meaning that after
their acquisition, often at auction, the
works might be dispatched on a long,
slow voyage through different tax dis-
pensations, across changing destina-
tions and jurisdictions, to end up —
where? Follow it if you can, Mr Taxman.
One famous case involved multiple
works, including Jean-Pierre Basquiat’s
“Hannibal” and Serge Poliakoff ’s
“Abstract Composition”, which were
shuttled about the world to and from
destinations as far apart as the Nether-
lands, New York and Brazil — the $8m
Continuedfrompage1 Basquiat showing a customs value of
$100 — by Brazilian financier Edemar
Cid Ferreira. The former president of
Banco Santos, in 2006 he was sentenced
to 21 years in prison for crimes against
Brazil’s national financial system as well
as money laundering.
In 2018, an expensive Picasso fea-
tured in a fraud case, when US govern-
ment officials charged British art dealer
Matthew Green with using the painting
to help launder more than $9.2m, as
part of a larger $50m securities fraud.
Some schemes are not even particu-
larly complicated. Most simply, you can
buy a painting or a valuable artefact“clean” loans, from any one of the repu-
table finance companies who increas-
ingly offer to lend against art. Once
again, the Kazakh granny might come
in handy for such an arrangement —
since these firms have eagle-eyed com-
pliance officers who surely do their due
diligence — but even with more well-
documented works, a very recent pur-
chase wouldn’t necessarily raise a
warning signal.
Clever evasion tactics will probably
only last so long, and more forward-Mark SmithWhen questioned about an
antique’s provenance, your
response could be: ‘I foundit in my granny’s attic’
To mark the 500th
anniversary of Raphael’s
death, I travelled to Rome
for a preview of the hanging
of all 10 of the artist’s
tapestries in the Sistine
Chapel. The Vatican is home
to these exquisite silk, wool
and gilded silver thread
tapestries, which came from
the Brussels workshop of
Pieter van Aelst; at the
Victoria and Albert Museum
(V&A) in London, we look
after the original designs.
In memory of her beloved
Prince Albert, who revered
Raphael as much as a
designer as an artist, Queen
Victoria lent the Raphael
Cartoons of the Acts of
St Peter and St Paul —
originally acquired by King
Charles I in the early 1600s
— to the V&A. This year we
honour the genius of the
high Renaissance by
repainting and
reinterpreting the vast
gallery in which they hang.
Obviously, this project
required what members of
parliament like to call a
“fact-finding mission” to
Rome to see all 10 tapestries
reunited for the first time
since the days of Pope Leo X.
At 7.30am, before the
arrival of the face-masked
tourist tribes, we gathered
in privileged seclusion in
the Sistine Chapel. With
the February sunlight
slowly surfacing, it was
the sumptuous colour of
Raphael’s and van Aelst’s
work that astounded.
The “Miraculous Draught
of the Fishes” was, indeed,
miraculous. After the
unnecessary drama and
machismo of last year’s
Leonardo anniversary
(with France and Italy at
loggerheads over his
“nationality”), this year’s
Raphael commemorations,
appropriately, seem so much
more serene.
I caught a little of the
Labour party leadership
hustings on the BBC’s
Newsnight. Keir Starmer
will probably win, then
moderate Labour politicians
of the centre-left will return
to its front bench. Yet amid
the many unanswered
questions over anti-
Semitism and the scale of
2019’s election defeat, the
absence of any debate over
cultural policy is noticeable.
The very first intake of
Labour MPs cited John
Ruskin as one of their most
important political
influences, and the Labour
movement has since
regarded art and culture as
a vital component of social
democracy. From the
postwar creation of the Arts
Council to Tony Crosland’s
call for “more local
repertory theatres... more
riverside cafés, more
pleasure gardens on the
Battersea model, more
murals and pictures in
public places”, to Chris
Smith’s plan for free entry
to museums, Labour’s
leadership has long taken a
clear stance on the creative
agenda.
Thus far we have heard
little, especially as there is so
much to discuss: the collapse
of creativity in secondary
education; the 2022 “Festival
of Brexit”; the role of
museums and galleries in
the growing “decolonisation”
debate. And no one has yet
adopted my favourite policy
wheeze: stamp duty on
professional footballer
transfer fees to fund a new
generation of youth centres
— infrastructure that is
sorely needed this wet,
windy half-term.How many FT readers let
their children play this
half-term? And I mean
reallyplay— fun, socially
interactive, meaningful play
with zero extrinsic goals.
Did you ease up on the
tennis lessons and Grade 5
cello, and allow make-
believe to take over? It’s the
right thing to do in and of
itself — but what more and
more research shows is that
childhood play enhances
what the FT might call
executive functions: coping
skills, communication and
hypothesis testing.
That’s the rationale
behind this week’s V&A
announcement that we will
be transforming our BethnalGreen Museum of
Childhood into a new centre
for nurturing creativity.
Opened in 1872 — with a
historic ironwork structure
that once formed part of the
V&A in South Ken — the
museum has long been a
favourite destination for
families at half-term. Yet
while parents and
grandparents enjoy
reminiscing about old
rocking horses and 1980s
Playmobil characters, the
kids are left cold by rows
of old toys trapped in
Victorian vitrines.
So our ambition is to shift
it to a more energetic space
that encourages
imagination, haptic play and
design when creative
education is under pressure
in our schools. At its heart
remain the 2,000 objects —
from dolls’ houses toStar
Warsfigurines — telling the
story of childhood play over
the past 300 years. We are
bringing over some
Hockneys, Hokusais and
other design classics from
the V&A to inspire the next
generation of East End
artists and architects. Our
gallery co-creators from
local primary schools tell us
they want to build a new,
“joyful” museum that gives
them a break from iPad
screens and Year 6 Sats.
“Half-term all term” could
be our motto.Tristram Hunt is director
of the V&A and a former
Labour MPFrom Raphael to
a renaissance in play
Mantel in 1994— Jane Bown/Camera PressROME DIARY
TRISTRAM
HUNTI
f you find yourself at the
British Library in London,
look for a side-staircase
leading up to the Manu-
scripts Reading Room. As
you ascend, the novelist Hilary
Mantel arrests your attention.
The image by Nick Lord shows
her, pen in hand, the shadows of
her imagination behind her. With
22 major awards, Dame Hilary
Mantel is perhaps sufficiently
decorated without also needing
to serve as the nation’s literary
decor. But this painting matters.
Mantel is the only living writer to
be the subject of a portrait in our
national library.
Mantel became public property
late in life. After years as a well-
regarded name in literary circles,
she went global in 2009 withWolf
Hall, a novel based on the career
of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas
Cromwell. Her Cromwell is a Ren-
aissance man of practical talents
— “He can draft a contract, train a
falcon, draw a map, stop a street
fight, furnish a house and fix a
jury.” He is also a subtler figure
than the one familiar to viewers of
Robert Bolt’s 1960 playA Man for
All Seasons.Wolf Hallsold 2m cop-
ies. It also won Mantel the Booker
— as, remarkably, did the second
in the trilogy,Bring Up the Bodies,
published three years later.
So the release next month of
the last in the trilogy,The Mirror
and the Light, will be one of the
publishing events of the decade.
Bookshops will open early to
allow devotees to grab their pre-
ordered copy before their com-
mute. Yet the Wolf Hall books are
unusual bestsellers. They are
written in a third person that
a l l o w s u s t o h o v e r o v e r
Cromwell’s shoulder, privy to the
inner monologue of a man who
hasn’t quite let us inside. How did
this allusive, complicated Refor-
mation history become such a
phenomenon?
It helped that, where other his-
torical novelists often attract
sneers from academics, scholars
fall over themselves to praise her
research. Diarmaid MacCulloch,
professor of the history of the
Church at Oxford, tells me that
what distinguishes Mantel from
other historical novelists is “her
combination of deep immersion
in the period, with a striking abil-
ity to create believable personae
from her knowledge”.
Where lesser writers take pains
to remind us we’re taking a tourist
trip into the past, Mantel’s gift is
to make us forget. As Suzannah
Lipscomb, professor of history at
Roehampton University, tells me,
“she recognises the difference of
the past: that it hears and meas-
ures differently. But she tells us
what the past looks like without
‘othering it’. She never conde-
scends to describe how clothing
laces or what a jerkin is. We only
learn what people are wearing
when it is unusual.”
In a modern era defined by
righteous polarisation, Mantel’s
trilogy also offers a plea for com-
plex thought and a distaste for
political certainties. Her
Cromwell thinks like a post-
Enlightenment sceptic. Reflecting
on his orthodox nemesis Thomas
More, this Cromwell asks, “Why
does everything you know, and
everything you’ve learned, con-
firm you in what you believed
before? Whereas in my case, what
I grew up with, and what I thought
I believed, is chipped away a little
and a little, a fragment then a
piece and then a piece more.”
Diane Purkiss, professor of
English at Keble College, Oxford,
points out that this vision of
Cromwell is thoroughly anachro-
nistic. Evangelical Protestants,
Cromwell among them, were
every bit as dogmatic as their
Roman Catholic foes. For Purkiss,
the “total excision of Cromwell’s
religious beliefs” is “analogous to
having him drive a car” in its his-
torical untruthfulness. But for
many readers looking for a post-
modern hero in a story of kings
and cardinals, it doesn’t matter.In July 2018, Mantel sat down at
the Southbank Centre for a public
conversation with fellow author
Pat Barker. Their talk took in
Barker’s novelThe Silence of the
Girls, which fills in the unspoken
narratives of women in the Trojan
War, and her Booker-winningThe
Ghost Road, set in the first world
war. Mantel ventured that “it
might be observed... that it was
easier for us to win a Booker Prize
writing about men than writing
about women’s experience”.
Certainly, beforeWolf Hall,
Mantel was known best as a wit-
ness to the female experience.
Her 1988 novelEight Months on
Ghazzah Streetcaptures life as an
expat wife in Saudi Arabia,
observing a society that finds the
sight of her inconvenient at best.
Even inA Place of Greater Safety
(1992), which did for the French
Revolution whatWolf Halldid for
the English Reformation, the ten-
sion between motherhood and
female freedom is a constant
presence, a paradox of liberty as
stark as any theorised in the
National Assembly. Here, the pio-
neering female novelist Louise de
Kéralio endures her marriage and
lies “awake in the darkness, her
nose cold above the sheets, pray-
ing for infertility”.
Mantel knows about fertility
and female autonomy. In Decem-
ber 1979, at the age of 27, she woke
up in hospital to learn that she
had undergone a hysterectomy.
As she writes in her extraordinary
memoirGiving Up the Ghost,“I
was missing a few bits of me,
beside my womb and ovaries, my
reproductive apparatus. A few
lengths of bowel: but you’ve
plenty to spare.”
For nearly a decade, the young
Mantel had visited doctors to
demand an explanation for thedebilitating pain that once a
month seemed to flower across
her body. A series of doctors
attributed psychosomatic causes:
one psychiatrist she names only
as Mr G “diagnosed stress, caused
by overambition”. Wouldn’t she
be happier — healthier — aban-
doning her law degree and work-
ing in a dress shop, he asked?
Eventually, Mr G sent Mantel
to a residential clinic. They
pumped her full of antipsychotic
drugs. Her true complaint —
endometriosis — went undiag-
nosed until crisis hit.
Unborn children haunt Man-
tel’s writing. An imagined daugh-ter, Catriona, givesGiving Up the
Ghostits title. (“What’s to be done
with the lost, the dead, but write
them into being?”)
Ghost children also hauntWolf
Hall. Thomas Cromwell’s two
daughters die young but persist in
their presence, testament to their
father’s lost innocence. His imagi-
nation fixes on the miscarriages
of the king’s wives. (“If there is
anything to bury, the women
keep it a secret between them-
selves.”) In its world of whispered
news networks,Wolf Hallrelies on
women’s gossip.
Mantel’s Cromwell finds in the
world of women an empathetic
network that is absent from the
male-dominated machinations of
politics. His wife Liz warns him
how Henry’s plan to divorce a bar-
ren wife will be received. “Half
the people in the world will beagainst it... All women every-
where in England. All women
who have a daughter but no son.
All women who have lost a child.
All women who have lost any
hope of having a child. All women
who are over forty.” Cromwell is
surprised by this.In a nasty twist, when Mantel
finally became a household
name, she was cast as a woman
who hates women. In a now noto-
rious 2013 lecture, she discussed
the public tendency to reduce
royal women to commodity,
from Anne Boleyn, “in the end
valued for her body parts, not
her intellect or her soul”, to the
Duchess of Cambridge, whose
public image at the time of her
wedding had been crafted so that
she “appeared to have been
designed by a committee and
built by craftsmen, with the per-
fect plastic smile, and the spin-
dles of her limbs hand-turned
and gloss-varnished”.
The tabloid press went wild; the
then prime minister, David Cam-
eron, condemned Mantel’s
speech as “completely misguided
and completely wrong”. Had he
read all 5,600 words, one won-dered? Mantel is shrewd on the
constricting transition of royal
women from person to icon: Kate
Middleton, Meghan Markle,
Anne Boleyn. Queens are end-
lessly spoken about inWolf Hall,
but only ever glanced side-on, as
if out of the corner of an eye.
In any case, the right never for-
gave Mantel. A year later, she pub-
lished a collection of short stories,
of which the titular “The Assassi-
nation of Margaret Thatcher” fea-
tured a Mantel-esque character
held hostage by an IRA gunman,
who uses her well-positioned
home to aim a shot at the prime
minister. (With typical Mantel
delicacy, the story ends before the
trigger can be pulled.) No matter
that the Mantel figure, who comes
to sympathise with the killer, is
exposed as a liberal hypocrite
whose dislike for Thatcher’s “fake
femininity and counterfeit voice”
is cheap and superficial. The Tele-
graph swiftly cancelled a serialisa-
tion deal. Lord Bell, Thatcher’s
former PR adviser, demanded
that the police investigate.Readers will soon be able to
judge whether Mantel’s brushes
with the culture wars of contem-
porary media have left their mark
onThe Mirror and the Light. Now a
celebrity in the modern panopti-
con, Mantel has passed from an
early career on the margins, free
to observe the rest of the world, to
the centre of the stage. Her first
two Cromwell books were pub-
lished before the Brexit referen-
dum; the third arrives into a very
different Britain. Her polyglot
Cromwell is firmly European. So
too is the Reformation he over-
sees, an intellectual import by
way of the books “smuggled
through the Channel ports and
the little East Anglian inlets” from
his youthful haunts in Antwerp,
Germany and Florence.
This is the last act of a Faustian
narrative. So far, as the bodies
have piled up, we have seen a
sympathetic Cromwell become
ever more corrupt, ever more
rigid in his thinking. In the world
of Hilary Mantel, it does not bode
well for anyone to be too sure of
themselves.Over Cromwell’s shoulder
AsHilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall trilogy reaches its
conclusion with ‘The Mirror and the Light’,Kate Maltbyexplores
how the two-time Booker winner redefined historical fiction
Mantel’s trilogy offers
a plea for complex
thought and a distastefor political certainties
The‘Miraculous
Draught of the
Fishes’ was, indeed,miraculous
FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 20/2/2020 - 19: 10 User: matthew.brayman Page Name: WKD2, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 2 , 1