Another statue, another dance of media and culture. Last week, on what would have been her 60th birthday, Princes William and Harry unveiled a bronze likeness of their mother Princess Diana by the sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley. Located in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, it includes three unnamed children standing about her.
The occasion combined respectful expressions of sympathy for the princess and her sons with frantic readings of the runes – who wasn’t there (Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cambridge) and what did that mean? What could you learn from the princes’ body language about their relationship to each other?
And there was a pile-on of scorn for the sculpture itself. Piers Morgan called it “not … great”. It is, according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, an “uncontrolled wail of artistically absurd pathos”. “Kitsch and archaic”, said the Daily Telegraph. The alleged awfulness of the art made unlikely allies.
We have been here before, and often. Late last year Maggi Hambling’s nude Mary Wollstonecraft, on Newington Green in London, stirred up a row. The simultaneous erecting and bashing of statues is a ritual that persists over decades. Hambling herself had previous experience of this, with her 1998 Oscar Wilde near Charing Cross station, which the Independent called “a wilfully tacky, silly, Tussaudian tragedy”.
And, often, the critics are right. This is not a golden age of figurative sculpture. There are sculptors proficient enough to shape bronze into something that looks reasonably similar to a human form. Some sort of likeness to the subject might be achieved in the figure and face. But there is no zest in the interpretation, no liveliness to the pose.
In the absence of these qualities, the works tend to fall back on laboured or banal explanations. The Diana statue comes with children, we are told, because she liked children. Well, gosh, but so do a lot of people. It might possibly have been more interesting to refer to her work with victims of landmines and Aids. Perhaps not, on the other hand: if done badly, this would have been excruciating.
There is a simple reason for the mediocrity of modern statues. Once sculpture was as vivid a form of representation as you could get. If you wanted to invoke the presence of a human being there was no more effective way to do it than in bronze or marble, life-size or more-than-life-size.
The art accordingly attracted exceptional talents. Skills and techniques developed, each generation building on those of the last one. Resources were poured into what were expensive objects. They were as good as they could possibly be. Now that we have had photographs for a long time, and videos are ever more ubiquitous and available, energy and purpose have drained out of the art form.
This is especially striking with someone as much photographed as Princess Diana. You can stand in front of her new statue and scroll through images on your phone that give a much stronger recollection of her than a piece of cold metal. With the latter you have to work a bit to see the likeness, on a screen you get it at once.
What is left is the visible effort that goes into sculpture and the inherited aura of respect that goes with it. The best reason for the Diana statue is as an expression of the princes’ feelings about their mother, and those of her fans. The point is the seeming pointlessness of the action, like a grander version of giving flowers.
It meant something, thanks to the prestige of a sculpture, when a 9ft Nelson Mandela was put up in Parliament Square in 2007, in Westminster’s zone of colonial leaders and generals, if only because he was the first black man there. There’s still a colossal imbalance between the numbers of men and women honoured in public places, which the Wollstonecraft and the Diana statues do something to redress.
But such redress is less effective if the modern statues are less competent and convincing than the splendid and proficient works accorded to dead white males. Wouldn’t it be better to find other forms of representation from the many now available? Diana is already remembered by a playground and a fountain, in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, which more joyfully and eloquently honour her than the statue. These are convincing models of commemoration.
Statues also mean something, of course, when they are demolished. In the same week the Diana statue went up, images of her in-laws Victoria and Elizabeth II were attacked in Canada, in protests over the recently discovered graves of Indigenous children at old residential schools. Statues, it seems, cause a fuss when they go up and when they come down. In the decades in between they live in barely noticed obscurity.
