Britain is in the midst of a Victorian-style statue mania - The Economist

SHE ARRIVED by road, in pieces, on two low-loaders. She was welded together on a dock at Devonport naval base—the only nearby place that could accommodate her bulk. Then she was lifted onto a barge and pulled across Plymouth Sound. On March 22nd she was to be unveiled at her permanent home, in front of the Theatre Royal. She is a statue of an actress in a hooded top, rehearsing a part in “Othello”. At seven metres high, she is among the largest bronze sculptures in Britain.

Later this year Plymouth will get another bronze statue. It will be smaller in size, although the woman it commemorates was a towering historical figure—Nancy Astor, the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons. She will stand on a plinth in the Hoe, a spectacular lump of rock overlooking the harbour. The Hoe already has a Victorian statue of the explorer Francis Drake and several memorials to the men and women who died in Britain’s wars. But Astor’s effigy will be the first to be placed in that glorious location for three decades.

As American cities pull down statues, usually of Confederate leaders, British cities are quickly putting them up. The past seven months have seen new statues of Emily Wilding Davison, Emmeline Pankhurst (pictured) and Annie Kenney (all suffragettes); Rudyard Kipling, a poet and novelist; and a boy standing on a tree, representing the trauma of war. Two statues of Wilfred Owen, the war poet, have been erected in north-west England. Bronzes of the politician Margaret Thatcher and the comedian Victoria Wood will go up soon. “In the past two or three years we’ve been very busy,” says Chris Jones of Castle Fine Arts Foundry, which cast Plymouth’s giant actress and both of the Wilfred Owens.

The Victorians suffered from statue mania. They filled central London with them: “London’s Immortals”, a book published in 1989, estimated that a dozen were unveiled per decade in the second half of the 19th century, up from one per decade in the 18th century. Many memorials were built after the first world war. Then came a long slump. Although lots of sculptures went up in British towns after the second world war, they were often abstract (the artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore were especially popular) or depicted animals. Many second-world-war memorials are simply first-world-war memorials with added names.

Although nobody is keeping a precise tally, the contemporary craze for bronze statues seems to at least equal the Victorian one numerically. It is also close to an artistic match. Today, as in the late 19th century, many of the new sculptures are detailed and realistic, depicting people in the clothes they actually wore. Hayley Gibbs, the artist chosen to create the statue of Astor, will portray the MP in her “Parliamentary uniform” of long skirt, jacket, wide-collared shirt and fabulous hat. A statue of the suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, unveiled in London last year, faithfully reproduces one of her brooches and the crow’s feet around her eyes.

The bronze lady

Why is this old art form so in demand? One answer is that the British are rushing to redress an imbalance. “There’s an appetite for rectifying the lack of women,” observes Hazel Reeves, who created the statue of Pankhurst in Manchester. Ms Reeves has also been commissioned to make one of Mary Anning, a palaeontologist denied her due by Victorian men, to go near her home in Dorset. Last year was the centenary of the 1918 Parliament Act, which gave some women the right to vote—hence all the statues of suffragettes and suffragists.

Yet neither the sex imbalance nor the anniversary of women’s suffrage quite explains the bronze mania. The lack of statues of women has been obvious for years: “London’s Immortals” complains bitterly about it. Julie Gottlieb, a historian at Sheffield University, notes that the 21st and 50th anniversaries of women’s suffrage were widely commemorated in speeches, academic seminars and postage stamps. No statues arose, however.

One reason for the rash of statues is that technology has made it easier to petition and raise money for them. The campaign for a statue of Astor in Plymouth was run largely by Alexis Bowater, a media consultant. She lobbied on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and collected donations on Crowdfunder, an online platform. Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist campaigner, created an online petition for a suffragette statue on her phone, while out running with her dog.

Technology can help the sculptors, too. The process of creating bronzes begins with a life-size model. Some artists, including Ms Gibbs and Ms Reeves, make those the traditional way, by creating a kind of metal stick figure which they wrap in wire and modelling clay. (This clay model is then turned into a wax image, from which a ceramic mould is made for the bronze.) But parts of the model for the statue of Fawcett were 3D printed. The sculptor of Plymouth’s giant actress sent digital files of the shape to a workshop hundreds of miles away. The workshop, Bakers Patterns, then instructed a machine to carve the model out of foam.

Another explanation for the boom has to do with where the statues are going up. Erecting one near the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace—the most prestigious locations in England—has become almost impossible. Westminster council has declared those places to be “monument saturation zones” in which proposed statues are rejected by default. Last year it decided that there was not even room for a likeness of Thatcher.

With space scarce in central London, statues are being pushed out to smaller cities and towns. Local politicians and officials, whose budgets have not recovered from the financial crisis, seize on them as an economical way of (they hope) attracting attention and tourists. “It sends a powerful message for not a lot of money,” reckons Mr Jones. Thatcher’s statue, rejected by Westminster, will go up in Grantham, the town where she was born. Victorian Britons built monuments to national heroes. Today all heroes are local.

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https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/03/23/britain-is-in-the-midst-of-a-victorian-style-statue-mania

2019-03-21 15:41:00Z
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