It made for unsettling reading last week to find that a pro-Palestinian activist had slashed a portrait of Lord Balfour and sprayed red paint all over it, as a “protest”. The portrait, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, was by Philip de Lázsló (1869-1937) a Hungarian-born artist known for his paintings of aristocrats and socialites. De László was a big deal in his day but is now sufficiently obscure to be hardly mentioned in reports on the vandalism.
Nonetheless, one cn only be disgusted when a protester takes it upon him or her or theyself or destroy a painting in a public museum. It’s one of those “great deeds against the dead” that Goya savaged in his Disasters of War, but instead of despoiling corpses the vandal has attacked a defenceless image of a politician known for his support for the Zionist cause that led to the establishment of Israel.
And so, Balfour, a career politician and sometime philosopher, is reduced to a single act of support for a cause the vandal detests. A lifetime in the public realm is boiled down to one moment, and a portrait is made to pay the ultimate price. It’s a supreme feat of historical reductionism and a completely cowardly stunt. Attacking a minor work of art in the Fitzwilliam is a whole lot easier than waving a spray can at the Israeli embassy. No-one is going to shoot at you in an art museum.
Is this supposed to win waverers over to the Palestinian cause? There is already widespread indignation over the violence in Gaza, that has chipped away at the moral advantage the Israelis held after the horrors of 7 October. How many new atrocities are required to pay back such an atrocity?
Taking the fight into the galleries of the Fitzwilliam is pathetic, and Balfour (1848-1930) is a ludicrously soft symbol of Israeli aggression. Destroying a painting is a great way of alienating all those liberal types who may feel a natural sympathy for what the Palestinians are going through in Gaza. It reveals your own agression, your own negative, insensitive, destructive mentality. I’d much rather see works of art championing the Palestinians, as I did at Art Dubai recently, in two commercial galleries from Ramallah. Art should be viewed as a weapon of opinion, not a soft target.
It’s an unhappy echo of those sanctimonious nitwits who think they’re raising awareness of global warming by gluing their hands to the glass that protects famous paintings, throwing food or sticking pictures to these surfaces.
The idea seems to be that the planet – or the Palestinian cause – is more important than a frivolous work of art. It’s not just a false comparison, it’s a complete denigration of cutural heritage. If we think priceless paintings are fair game, it’s a very small step to the destruction of anything or anyone that has some vague association the self-righteous protestor dislikes. It’s a new form of iconoclasm, done in the name of political piety, not religious conviction.
The vandals believe their actions show how deeply they care about their cause, and by implication, how lazy and uncaring everyone else is, especially those who spend their time swanning around art museums. Would-be heroes, mundane narcissicists. The arrogance is stupefying.
Iconoclasm is on my mind this week, after finally seeing MoNA’s exhibition of icons, Heavenly Beings. I should have got down to Hobart months ago, but I’m so glad I finally made it, because this was a fantastic display. To see 400 years’ worth of icons was to realise how powerful and precious images can be. It’s a testimony to such power that Byzantium survived two phases of icon-breaking from those who had decided it was blasphemous to make images of the un-knowable God. I’m publishing the piece straight away, because the Herald, in its mystical wisdom, chose not to run it on-line this week.
The film being reviewed is Io Capitano, Matteo Garrone’s gruelling story of two boys from Senegal who set out to reach Europe and realise their dreams. Inevitably, it’s a horror show, but also the kind of tale that should bring it home to everyone what the ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘queue jumpers’ actually endure in trying to find a better life, which is an aspiration we all share. By letting us see everything from the boys’ point-of-view, Garrone avoids moralistic messages. It’s so much more effective to take a constructive role, rather than to simply condemn those who don’t share your own ideological fixations. Io Capitano should touch our political consciences more directly than any number of addled, middle-class activists directing their anger towards long-dead artists.