A video installation in the National Portrait Gallery has been removed following a dispute about the role Sir Winston Churchill played in the 1943 Bengal famine.
The 40-minute piece, titled Persistence, by 2019 Turner Prize winner Helen Cammock had referred to “the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill”.
The piece prompted Churchill biographer Lord Andrew Roberts to lead an open letter challenging the claims, signed by more than 50 peers including Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, Michael Grade and Zac Goldsmith.
Cammock, who narrated the work, also examined Oliver Cromwell’s 17th century military campaigns in Ireland, and said he had “starved people, en masse”, which was “a little like” Churchill in the Bengal famine.
The Bengal famine of 1943 is estimated to have killed more than three million people in eastern India, with Churchill’s policies at the time being criticised by some for exacerbating the issue.
However, Lord Roberts of Belgravia claimed the installation’s description of Churchill was a “bare-faced lie” and “ideologically motivated rant” that “denigrated” the war-time Prime Minister.
“The Bengal famine was an unimaginable tragedy and disaster, but the accusation that it was deliberately visited upon the Bengalis by Churchill is foul and vile. It is also historically ludicrous, as every serious historian of the period attests,” he said.
Instead, Lord Roberts said that the Bengal famine was caused by a typhoon and that Churchill told his war cabinet every effort must be made to help those affected and asked international leaders to send in grain.
After the work was taken down, Cammock said she made the decision to “withdraw” it from the exhibition. However she said the decision was not “made lightly”.
She said: “There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst. I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society and art is intrinsic to this.
“For me, art is about dialogue, it is about a questioning of existence through the transformation and translation of thoughts and ideas. It asks us to think, to feel, to react – and we must take responsibility for our own reactions to it.”
Cammock said her piece “asks us to think about who is honoured and valorised and who is not; whose stories are told and whose are not”.
“The piece thinks about how histories are created and then maintained and how the portrait is inextricably linked to systems of social and economic power,” she added.
The artist said Persistence was “not a documentary” but asked viewers to “consider the presence of multiple histories and nuanced and complex narratives and their readings”.
“Nina Simone once said, ‘An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times’, and sometimes this means revisiting, enquiry and challenge,” she said.
Speaking about her work, she added: “Persistence will have its own life after this: it won’t hide and it won’t be afraid to speak with those who are prepared to sit with it and listen – not agree or submit to it – but to hear it out, consider its points and make their own minds up.”
Cammock’s piece had been worked on with the National Portrait Gallery since 2023 and had been on temporary display for the past 10 months in an exhibition titled Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives On Portraiture, which is due to end in August.
In a statement, the gallery said: “Helen Cammock has decided to remove her film, Persistence, from display at the National Portrait Gallery. We respect her decision, just as we acknowledge the opinions of those who were offended by what was said in the film.
“The aim of this project was to give artists the opportunity to create works as personal and creative responses to our collection. The work was presented as an artistic piece, not a documentary, and the views expressed in the film do not necessarily reflect those of the NPG.
“The NPG is a museum of both art and history; we recognise the legacy of those portrayed on our walls, just as we respect artistic expression. We remain focused on our mission to reach and inspire audiences nationally and internationally through portraiture and the stories of our shared history.”
Lord Roberts said Cammock “should be commended for doing the honourable thing and putting historical truth over her artistic licence”.
