Anna Tolstova about the Art under Attack exhibition in London

You don’t have to go far for examples—in the sense of going all the way to the old Tate. The history of iconoclasm is well represented in Russian museums. It's not just about the pogrom at the "Beware of Religion" exhibition. Traces of this struggle are visible, say, in any department of ancient art, where old-regime “idols” display their injuries: broken bodies, severed heads, broken noses and other organs. Or in the departments of Byzantine and Old Russian art, where they necessarily talk about the battles of iconoclasts with icon painters, their productive influence on the development of iconography and the arguments of John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite in favor of icon veneration. And you don’t need to go to museums - just look at the quadriga crowning the portico of the Bolshoi Theater, with its Apollo, who has fallen into excessive modesty at the will of the restorers. However, that’s why the old Tate and Briton make exhibitions based on British material, and he is very rich in iconoclasm.

John Singer Sargent. "Portrait of Henry James", 1913

Photo: National Portrait Gallery

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"Jesus and Pilate", circa 1400-1425

Photo: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Robert Walker. "Portrait of Oliver Cromwell", 1649

Photo: Highland Council

Statue of the "Dead Christ" from London's Mercers' Chapel, circa 1500-1520

Photo: © Louis Sinclair / Mercers' Company

John Singer Sargent. "Portrait of Henry James", 1913

Photo: National Portrait Gallery

Chronologically, the exhibition "Attacked Art" begins with the 16th century - with the Reformation and the Protestant rejection of images. A categorical refusal, which is narrated in detail not only by the chronicles of the times of Henry VIII and other Tudors and Stuarts, but also by engravings in which spontaneous linguocentrists, supporters of the primacy of the word over the image, break out statues of saints from niches and trample altar paintings. The curators managed to find the only pictorial evidence of Puritan vandalism: Thomas Jones's "Interior of Canterbury Cathedral", painted in 1657, will be exhibited along with its broken stained glass windows. And also together with mutilated Madonnas, desecrated Crucifixions and desecrated books of hours from other churches and monasteries. The early 16th-century statue of the "Dead Christ", a true masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture, survived, like the one it depicts, a brutal execution and a miraculous resurrection: in 1954 it was found buried under the floor of London's Mercers' Chapel during a major renovation of the church - Christ was without arms, feet and a crown of thorns, like a victim of the bombing that caused the repair work.

Carl Andre. "Equivalent VIII", 1966
Photo: Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2002

But in general, it is impossible to reduce iconoclasm to just the struggle of different religions or denominations. Often this is a struggle between different aesthetics, mentalities, eras, a struggle between the past and the future. Here, for example, is an interesting story that Giorgio Vasari tells casually in his Lives. We are talking about the fresco “The Flagellation of Christ” by Andrea del Castagno, which once adorned the wall in the courtyard of the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence: “This painting is such that if, due to the little care shown to it, it had not been scratched and damaged by children and other foolish people who scratched all the faces, hands and almost everything else on the figures of the Jews, as if wishing to take revenge for the insults they had inflicted on our Lord, then it would undoubtedly be the most beautiful of all Andrea’s works.” We can say that in this act of vandalism, the medieval viewer met a Renaissance artist, and they did not understand each other: the Renaissance artist created an image of amazing illusionistic power, and the medieval viewer, seeing instead of an icon Jews mocking the Savior, committed - albeit symbolically - a Jewish pogrom . However, perhaps everything was somewhat more complicated, and who, if not the British, who gave us The Picture of Dorian Gray, knows how strong people’s belief in the magical power of the image is.

Jake and Dinos Chapman. "One day you will stop being loved II (N 6)", 2008
Photo: © Jake and Dinos Chapman/White Cube

Thus, in the dressing room of Prince Frederick Duleep Singh, the youngest son of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, a staunch monarchist, admirer of Queen Victoria, historian, archaeologist and collector, at the beginning of the 20th century, a portrait of Oliver Cromwell hung upside down - this fact, naturally, is considered by the curators as an act of iconoclasm . Rebellious Dublin also made its contribution to the exhibition. Fragments of the equestrian statue of the conqueror of Ireland William III, which the grateful Irish stubbornly smeared with shit for several centuries, covered with offensive inscriptions and deprived of the scepter, until they finally blew it up completely in 1929, and Nelson’s Columns, blown apart by a bomb from IRA militants in 1966, will be presented to the public as proof that iconoclasts can be motivated by purely political motives.

The suffragettes have not been forgotten either. In 1913, they took a beating from Edward Burne-Jones's "Sibyl of Delphi" and other Pre-Raphaelite beauties from the Manchester Art Gallery - not because one cannot be so beautiful, but as a sign of protest against the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst. The action was a success, all the London newspapers wrote about it, so the next year the warriors for women's rights raised the bar of artistic demands: Velazquez's "Venus with a Mirror" was stripped at the National Gallery, and at an exhibition at the Royal Academy - a portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent . This glorious vandal tradition was continued in the modern women's movement: in 1986, at the Tate, feminists poured paint on Allen Jones's "Chair", the support and back of which are a stripper in an interesting pose. Although the provocative pop art of Allen Jones - Stanley Kubrick dreamed of getting him as the artist for A Clockwork Orange - is provocative enough to provoke such reactions. Either by 1986 it was somehow forgotten that “The Chair” came from Jones’s 1969 set, where a woman was presented as a piece of furniture not for the sake of insult, but as a criticism of consumer society, or feminists have a rather poor sense of humor.

Allen Jones. "Chair", 1969
Photo: © Allen Jones/Tate

According to the curators, iconoclasm differs from ordinary vandalism in its ideological savvy and adherence to principles. Consequently, the avant-garde, which causes fundamental rejection among the overwhelming majority of the world's population, most often becomes a victim of precisely the iconoclasts. But he himself was originally a kind of iconoclasm: who, in fact, called for throwing Pushkin from the ship of modernity, flooding museums and burning libraries? In 1966, a symposium on destruction in art (Destruction In Art Symposiusm) was held in London, organized by Gustav Metzger, an expert on the matter, the author of the manifesto of “self-destructive art,” and his like-minded people. “Destructive tendencies in happenings and other forms of contemporary art correspond to destructive tendencies in society,” explained the organizers. Among the participants were Viennese actionists, Wolf Vostel, Yoko Ono and other major specialists in self-destruction - the Tate will exhibit works that have survived from the symposium, which, given the topic, must obviously be considered artistic failures. Among the destructive artistic successes of recent times are the works of the Chapman brothers, who use etchings by Goya and paintings by old masters for their artistic pranks, and the wonderful painting of the witty Mark Wallinger “Via Dolorosa”. Wallinger's "Via Dolorosa" is a cut from Franco Zeffirelli's television film "Jesus of Nazareth", where the screen is almost completely obscured by a black rectangle at all times, elegantly connecting Christian iconoclasts of all stripes with the main subversive of images in the history of 20th century art. Different versions of the latter’s iconic anti-icon, that is, the “Black Square,” can be found not at the Tate, but at the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and the Hermitage.

"Art Under Attack. Stories of British Iconoclasm." Tate Britain, London. Until January 5, 2014

Anna Tolstova

Heroes of Resistance Art