Artist and Empire at the Tate Britain
Artist and Empire at the Tate Britain
The
Tate’s new exhibition concerns Britain’s past as an Imperialist, colonising
world power. At one point Britain ruled
a quarter of the world’s entire land mass encompassing cultures as diverse as
those of Newfoundland, Canada, the Indian Punjab, Durban in South Africa and
Sydney, Australia. Britain’s relationship with its colonies and subject peoples
but also with the rest of the world generally is a subject of constant
examination and re-examination as the parameters of Nationalism, Imperialism
and Colonialism shift and re-integrate only for the pattern to be altered
again. This is clearly an important
point to re-consider Britain’s post-colonial development since the decline of a
Socialist opponent is apparent but other, more elusive developments continue to
appear.
The
Tate exhibition is divided into six sections and each section depicts a certain
stage in the Imperialist project. The
first room deals with cartography, mapping out areas of newly conquered
territory and re-naming salient places and topographical relief with English
names rather than native ones (although in the end some awkward synthesis
emerges which are apparent and obvious to anyone living in a British colony such
as Northern Ireland.). The first,
colony, Ireland, kick starts the exhibition.
The first map shown depicts the Siege of Enniskillen in 1594 by an
anonymous cartographer called John Thomas.
(Might it indeed be conjectured that the name of the cartographer was a
joke?) The map is a bird’s eye view of
the castle which happens to be on an island lying between two waterways. The map is complete with the English order of
battle, weapon types such as Falcons (light guns) and musketeers (employing
muskets, an early firearm), English siege weapons and English ships patrolling
the waterway. The heads of Irish chiefs
and kern (foot soldiers) are viewed stuck on pike shafts in the extreme left
hand corner of the map in Governor Dowdall’s camp, leader of the Tudor forces. Violence is pushed to the margins of the map
but there is at least some admission of the deeds of the English/British forces
at the Siege. The map is clearly an
advertisement for Tudor power yet it also depicts horrors as potent as those
committed in Africa, for instance, evocative of the later course of Empire.
English involvement in Ireland was complicated by the mutual enmities fostered
by the Gaelic rulers of Ireland. The
English were freed from these enmities after the Wars of the Roses had ended
centuries of internal division.
Afterwards the English were free to concentrate on their Imperial
programme but even more so after the English Civil War of the seventeenth
century established a political settlement that was to be imitated everywhere.
Imperial
Heroics is a bold collection of work contrasting the mobilisation of appealing
images of Empire with the actuality, mostly propagandistic attempts intent on
re-shaping perceptions of events abroad for domestic consumption. One of these paintings is the debacle at
Isandlwana on the 22nd January, 1879. The painting was completed six years after
Isandlwana in 1885 by Charles Edwin Fripp.
The British force was divided in enemy territory, an elementary military
error, yet the chaotic finale is shown to be a determined, disciplined and
coherent defensive action. The defeat
shocked Victorians. A British army had
been defeated by a larger Zulu force but one that was meant to possess the
weapons and tactics of the Neolithic era.
Presumably the Victorians conceived of the Zulus as grass skirted
savages yet it was irrelevant that the Zulus happened to be armed with
knobkerries (stabbing spears) and shields because such massive blunders, the
work of military amateurs, could never work.
Other debacles are re-shaped and re-envisioned for domestic
consumption. Photographs are also used
and these depict the consequences of battle. British casualties are never shown. The backstories of these are persistently
intriguing and it is the tiny details presented by the Tate that often bring
the exhibits to life. For instance, Joseph
Noel Patton’s 1858 painting In Memoriam
depicts the massacre of women and children at the siege of Cawnpore in 1858,
the opening engagement of what came to be known as the Indian Mutiny. Images of Sepoys attacking a store house
filled with terrified women and children had to be replaced with Highland
infantry attempting to rescue them. The
truth would have appalled Victorians, there might have been no future volunteer
colonialists to run the Empire had the original been exhibited. Also such images focus on details that
convert into propagandistic morsels but fail to mention the causes of the
mutiny which were to do with new bullets pragmatically greased with animal fats
but anathema to both Muslim and Hindu Sepoys.
The contrast illustrates the difference between two world views that could
not be reconciled.
Today
many of these Imperial episodes are only revisited in the films that illuminate
Imperial triumphs such as Cy Enfield’s Zulu
(1964). This film describes the
skirmish at Rourke’s Drift between some companies of Welsh infantry and English
engineers (this is neatly explained and summarised through the clash of
personalities of Michael Caine as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead and Stanley
Baker as Lieutenant John Chard) and the victorious impis of King Cetshwayo
after Isandlwana. It took more than a
decade for Zulu Dawn (1979) to be
made and an attempt to revise the debacle by creating a sympathetic role for
American superstar Burt Lancaster.
Lancaster’s more pragmatic approach to the chaos contrasts neatly with
the arrogant stupidity of the British command represented by British actors
such as Peter O’Toole as Lord Chelmsford and John Mills as Sir Henry Bartle
Frere who convey the superior stiff upper lip but also their capacity to be
morons. A further film Khartoum (1966) starring another
American superstar, Charlton Heston as General Gordon, ties in with George
William Joy’s painting of the death of Gordon at the hands of the followers of
the Mahdi. The Sudanese “rebels” are
depicted as religious fanatics hurling themselves upon the Maxim guns of the
British army at the Battle of Omdurman and finding their utter rout incomprehensible. Hillaire Belloc’s pithy saying comes to mind
when explaining the superiority of British forces facing native armies: “we had
the Maxim gun and they had not.” No
mention of these films is made in the exhibition which seems to have failed to
catch up with film art. This would have
offered a further dimension, Hollywood’s attempt to incorporate the legacy of
British Imperialism as a plausibly American narrative.
Power
Dressing really speaks for itself, consisting of portraits of cross dressing
Britons in native garb. The first
painting is of Captain Thomas Lee in Elizabethan dress but bare legged like an
Irish Kern (an alternate explanation for Lee’s exhibitionism is that Lee had
recently been widowed and was now back on the marriage market. Since he was by this stage in his life 43
years old he was hardly a young man, his bare legs may have been an
advertisement of potency.). The painting
was completed in 1594 by Marcus Gheeraerts II.
The portrait has clearly been influenced by classical works such as the
Apollo Belvedere. The image is carefully
constructed and meant to send a clear message to both colonialist and
colonised. But a bolder human presence
is imagined that subtly insists on the ability of colonialists to replace or
even combine with the natives.
Although
most of the portraits are male Englishmen in drag as natives an exception is
the transformation of Pocahontas into an Elizabethan. Pocahontas arrived in England in 1616. In the work by the Dutch engraver Simon de
Passe completed in 1616 she seems unhappy in fact it is hard to believe that
this is a woman who was only 21 at the time the painting was made. Pocahontas was not abducted and came to
England of her own accord, leaving behind a husband and a young child. In England she married and then became known
as Rebecca Rolfe. She died at Gravesend
aged only 22 when attempting to depart by ship back to Virginia. Unlike the portraits in the previous room
the image of Pocahontas is a miniature.
She is dressed in sophisticated Elizabethan garb which seems to be
masculine garb. This contributes to the
overall discomfiting feeling generated by the image. The unhappiness of Pocahontas may also be as
a consequence of her wearing male garb but there is clearly some discourse of
cross-dressing embedded in these portraits, of people unhappily occupying an
identity which could be gender, sexuality or nationality that they wish to
throw off. One way to do this was to
surrender to a different culture. This
encounter, which we witness in the lives of diverse Imperialist characters and
putative heroes, such as Richard Dadd or T.E.Lawrence, is fraught with the
nightmarish possibility of being an outsider rejected by both cultures.
The
importance of native art, particularly the Benin bronzes which shocked the
Victorians since they conceived of Africans as primitives and brutes removed
from the fruits of so-called western civilisation, is also depicted. The Victorians wondered how Africans could
create complex works of art just as they were shocked and horrified by their
army’s defeat at Isandlwana. But the
casting methods and techniques demonstrate that some Africans were just as
developed as Europeans and far from being unevolved Neolithic throw backs. The power of Imperialist propaganda is a key
theme of this exhibition, how it functioned to persuade and depict disasters as
triumphs. It depicts openly and honestly
the legacy of Imperialism which is still unfolding. Imperials reverses and counter intuitive
revelations such as the Benin bronzes constitute the subtly delineated dialogue
between colonist and colonised that is presented in this exhibition which is
recommended as a starting point for those wishing to understand the why and
wherefore of modern Britain.
Paul
Murphy, Tate Britain, February 2016
Comments