Shows trials of an Old Master
“Hogarth and Europe” is the flag of Marxism fluttering over the conquered territory of the British art establishment, now wrested from the oversight of connoisseurs, savants and lovers of art.
By the time you read this, I shall be on my way to London to participate in a discussion about the current exhibition “Hogarth and Europe”. The discussion will be behind closed doors at Tate Britain, between curators and historians. Although recorded, it will not be released on a public platform. Here are my initial impressions of the catalogue.
The foreword of the catalogue to the exhibition at least sets out the curatorial agenda in unabashed terms. According to Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, Hogarth (“as the ‘true Brit’ and, for some, ‘father’ of English painting”) (Alex Farquharson, p. 6) parallels Dutch portraiture and French still-lifes; the breed of his dog is “also potentially […] originating in China” (Ibid.). It is just another line from the playbook of “everything you think is British is actually foreign”, that one finds from the BBC to school curricula. The author misses a trick by not mentioning that Hogarth’s pigments come from India and Afghanistan. How better to put down the Hogarth-as-patriotic-satirist position than to make his achievements the result of unacknowledged foreignness. However, as anti-patriotism is a high-status position, we would expect nothing less than a fierce debunking and belittling of a national icon by the status-anxious bourgeois in the art-administration clerisy.
This is in paragraph two of the foreword; by paragraph two of the preface, the curators are already slighting the Conservative government, the Brexit process and the UK’s unpreparedness for a flu pandemic. By paragraph three we have laudatory comments about Jewish émigré historians of Marxist inclination. Paragraph four introduces post-colonial studies and black historiography. Before the preface is over, the co-curators lament that they “are White, educated within British art history and occupy institutional roles in the London art world. Almost all the artworks on display in the exhibition are made by western European, conspicuously all male, artists.” (Alice Insley, Martin Myrone (eds.), Hogarth and Europe, Tate, 2021). Personally, I am disappointed they did not hand over the task of curating to someone who could fill minority quotas better. This is followed by an essay dwelling on the complicity of “White” British people in the enslavement and exploitation of overseas colonies.
Elsewhere, “the territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas [were] being colonised, terrorised and exploited to support this urban growth.” (Ibid., p. 71). Every prostitute is now a “sex worker”, both sanitised by euphemism and ennobled by association with labour. “The Hogarthian relish in themes of sexual violence, violation and exploitation, his use of anti-Semitic and racist tropes, and his moralising approach to social change are all far from straightforward.” (Ibid., p. 113). Not at all. They could hardly be more straightforward. Hogarth and his audience (historical and contemporary) found such incidents amusing and truthful to human nature. By the time the footballer Marcus Rashford comes up as a black social reformer facing dismissal, I had lost track of the number of times “racist” and “racism" had been used in this exhibition catalogue.
The curators strain so hard to display their virtue that Hogarth could have made a wonderful painting of them: “Curators Performing Racial Virtue to a Crowd”, with assembled gentry applauding the curators’ performance as tragedians, perhaps with black gallery staff in the background. One painting includes persons “entertained with singing and music played by a Black servant boy, positioned in the margins of the picture frame.” (Ibid., p. 115). How close can one get to saying “marginalised person” (or should that have been updated to “person of marginalisation”?) without actually saying it? As for the inference of demeaning the servant by placing him to the side, find a painting of servant and master in a conversation piece that centres the servant rather than the master.
Clearly, the curators of an exhibition of British historical art would rather have the British gallery of national art filled with anything other than British historical art. The fact that the exhibition is a political diatribe against xenophobic little Englanders and the unwashed Brexit-supporting masses is – at least – undisguised. There is no pretence that Tate does not have a political bias and seeks to engage in show trials of historical figures, in which the accused’s guilt is already determined. Turner’s painting of a slave ship unloading its human cargo into stormy seas has already elicited a body of post-colonial exegesis. Expect “Constable and Empire” and “Gainsborough and the North Atlantic Slave Trade” in a gallery near you soon, ticket prices adjusted according to the visitor’s race.
Sadly, the catalogue’s factual summaries of the artistic milieux of Europe in Hogarth’s time will be overshadowed by the performative lamentations of Insley and Myrone. There are glimmers of novel connections and analysis, especially in Josephina de Fouw’s comparison between the self-portraits of Hogarth and Cornelis Troost, and Lars Tharp on Hogarth scenes painted by others on porcelain. However, overall, the exhibition catalogue is a miserable and dispiriting affair, lacking in the Hogarthian attributes of humanity, wit and liveliness. That it is such a dour humourless experience is entirely intentional.
“Hogarth and Europe” is the flag of Marxism fluttering over the conquered territory of the British art establishment, now wrested from the oversight of connoisseurs, savants and lovers of art.
