Mum, come pick me up, they’re out here separating art from the artist
Eric Gill and the morality of an artist
In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Eric Gill is described as the ‘greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter cutter and type designer of genius,’ but the only notable accolade I would adorn him with is ranking in my top ten list of artists I’d hit over the head with something hard.
Eric Gill’s statue outside the BBC in 2019. Image: Shutterstock/Willy Barton
One of the most acknowledged architects of modern British design, from his sculptures to his typefaces, which for decades shaped the visual style of publishing houses and imprints including Faber and Penguin, Eric Gill is not an irrelevant or underground name, nor has he ever been.
Born in West Sussex, England, in 1882, Gill’s work is held in permanent collections in museums across the country including Victoria and Albert, Tate and the British Museum, with his typeface one of the most commonly used in the Western world. His grand, burnished sculptures adorn Westminster Cathedral, the United Nations Headquarters, and, most relevant today, BBC’s Broadcasting House.
In short, Eric Gill’s work represents often ecclesiastical craftsmanship, his portfolio is littered with monumental, elegant iconographies, renowned for their precise linear simplicity, most of which preserved meticulously to this day. His lettering projects are nothing short of monumental in their respective field as well, however today it’s the artist, not his sculptures alone, that strikes concern, controversy and debate.
Throughout his lifetime, Gill kept personal diaries, these were first published by biographer Fiona MacCarthy in 1989 and, after being ignored by other biographers (Robert Speaight’s 1966 biography namely), revealed his sexual abuse towards his young daughters, incest with at least one of his sisters, numerous adulteries and sexual acts with his dog. The artists daughter, Petra Tegetmeier, who was alive at the time of the MacCarthy biography, was quoted describing that her father had an "endless curiosity about sex,” of which is made abundantly obvious when viewing his work.
Examples of his most conspicuous and therefore unsettling pieces include two wood engravings on paper, Girl in Bath II, 1923, and its former, Girl in Bath I, 1922, depicting his daughter, Petra, bathing, as the name would suggest. An Art Deco inspired nude sketch of Gill’s daughter, Elizabeth, from 1927 presents the same onerous viewing experience.
His perverted eroticism is demonstrated in his well endowed evangelical figures too. Gill was influenced heavily by simplified forms of early religious sculpture, and furthermore, the sexually explicit Hindu temple carving of India. The latter of which is believed to have inspired his carving, tentatively titled Ecstasy, 1911, in which he fastidiously sculpted his own rendition of copulating gods, using his sister Gladys and her husband Ernest as his models. It’s believed that their long standing incestuous relationship began around this time. A mere couple of years later, with the sculptors reputation ballooning and with no public knowledge of his sexual deviences, Gill was hired to carve the stations of the cross for Westminster Cathedral, a project that cemented his, at the time, recent conversion to Roman Catholicism and helped him express his avid Christian enthusiasm.
Gill’s work presents itself as magnificently unimpeachable, although that’s the antithesis of what it truly is. His nude engravings become poignant and distressing when provided with context, as does his more unobtrusive work, such as Girl Sleeping, 1925, or the wooden doll he carved for his daughter Petra in 1910, which, quite brashly, was quoted by an individual and documented in the Guardian as looking “just like a penis” after a discussion in which the object was described as “potent” and the doll was observed to have no neck.
There is something clean, yet primitive and repugnant about Gill’s work. When stripped of it’s context I find it falling visually alongside Jeff Koon’s balloon animals, if only Koon’s had maybe crafted a flaccid appendage to the stainless steel underbelly of his animals, or had been born a hundred years prior and therefore forced to work with equal materials.
In the same article from the Guardian, Nathaniel Hepburn, director of Ditching Museum of Art and Craft was quoted expressing that he did not wish to “censor which works we show because we don’t have the confidence of language to be able to interpret them properly.” However the work of Eric Gill is not only confined to gallery walls, and the conversation regarding the ethics of memorialising Gill in the preservation of his work is not reserved exclusively for elitist art collectors and highbrow museum curators; it is littered on religious and historic listed buildings stretching across Europe. It is engraved in our history.
The BBC monument, which depicts Prospero and Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is an ideal example of this, and sits looming above the buildings entrance in yet another egregious reminder of the BBC’s historical but likely irrevocable relationship with another one of the UK’s most infamous pedophiles, Saville.
The Prospero and Ariel sculpture was one of five hand carved works created for the BBC in the years 1931 and 1932 by the notable designer and sculptor, and until January of this year sat atop BBC’s Old Broadcasting House untouched. The piece was commissioned by Sir John Reith, who was the news organisation’s director-general at the time, and initially struck public concern regarding the “size of the sprites genitalia,” these concerns, it later emerged, were likely not vexatious. Gill relished in his odes to the unruly.
For years, activists have urged the BBC to take the sculpture down to no avail, and curators still battle with how to balance the artist’s glaring immorality with his enduring impact in England. In hindsight, it is surprising the BBC didn’t do more to preserve and protect the monument, of which is so public, accessible and controversial.
In January, Police were called to the central London address after a man had climbed onto the statue and began chiseling at the figures with a hammer. He attempted to detach the towering ten foot sculpture from its anchor to the historic offices, while infrequently shouting ‘pedophile,’ leaving little to be questioned regarding his motivation. On the pavement, another man was seen to livestream the event as the crowds of BBC officials and members of the public grew.
Katie Razzall, culture editor for BBC News noted that “with every loud smash, there'd be a moan or a shout of ‘stop’ from someone in the gathering crowd below. It felt brutal; an assault on beauty.” The word assault feels appropriate, however beauty not so much.
The damage to the Old Broadcasting House came mere weeks after a jury cleared four individuals of criminal damage after they removed a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth in Bristol and dumped it in the city harbour amid 2020’s George Floyd protests. They successfully argued that they had been making a sincere protest against the Colston statue in wake of the Black Lives matter movement, were exercising their right to free speech, and insisted it was a criminal offence to keep the statue up given its barbaric and offensive history. The result of this however was that the government has pledged to pass new laws to protect existing statues in public spaces from what Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, called “baying mobs,” arguing that it’s better to provide context, or in his words, to “retain and explain.”
The culture secretary’s narrative appears to me as ineffective and belittling. The Prospero and Ariel sculpture ornaments a historic, central national building. I fail to see, as with the Edward Colston statue, what inscription would reconcile a statue’s critics with the object of their understandable revulsion, or ultimately what justifies continued public memorialisation of such individuals? It’s no secret that monuments and statues have become increasingly contentious in this country and across the Western world, however Gill’s work happens to be unusual in this debate because the objection is to the artist rather than the person it depicts.
Alongside the latter mentioned, numerous other statues have been targeted and subsequently removed in recent years, and while I celebrate the removal of these iconographies, the defacing of Eric Gill’s work makes way to a wider question within the art world: what can we define as justifiable censorship within art and, maybe more importantly, can we ever truly separate art from the artist?
The latter falls under the same umbrella as what makes an artwork complex, and how necessary is this criterion to make an interesting work? Where is the value of art to be found: in the artist’s passion or in the eye of the public? The answer to this I of course do not hold, and furthermore is subjective; just as there is no universal morality, there is no universal standard as to what makes great art.
What I can be sure of however is that art does not transcend any human biography. Eric Gill was a depraved pedophile who abused, amongst others, his own teenage daughters. He spent his career lurching between extremes, merging his perversion and anecdotal experiences with sex into his religious works and beliefs.
The debate regarding whether we can separate art from the artist seems unfortunately resolved in various art circles, with the belief that to separate the two is to misrepresent the art, and to miss a vital aspect of its meaning, impact, and understanding. MacCarthy commented that after the initial shock of Gill’s sexual deviances and abuse, the sculptor “emerged as one of the twentieth century's strangest and most original controversialists, a sometimes infuriating, always arresting spokesman for man's continuing need of God in an increasingly materialistic civilisation, and for intellectual vigour in an age of encroaching triviality.”
There is a valid and imperative discussion to be had on the censorship of art, however in regards to Eric Gill, long dead and widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential British artists of the 20th century, there is no central concept or inspiration for his work that can be separated from his criminal sexual proclivities and abuse.
Gill was meticulous, a trait commonly expected from sculptors and artists, and, also, of pedophiles. The sculptor throughout his career had extensively noted the measurements of various parts of his daughters bodies. Adjacent to those he recorded his own measurements, including that of his penis size, flaccid and erect. There is no work that we can be assured stands separate from Gill’s perversion, no sculpted genitalia we can presume is not crafted after his own. No polished stone torso’s or breasts we can conclude were crafted without his daughters or siblings measurements in mind.
One defender of the sculptor was quoted writing to the Irish Sunday Tribune stating “what he believed in, how he tried to do his work and how he tried to live his life were, I think, far closer to the teachings of Christ than is shown” and I could not disagree more. He did such a meticulous and fastidious job at weaving a veil across his works, polishing and burnishing the pornographic and perverted to look saintly and controlled. Just as Saville did with his abuse, cloaked with charity work and with a deeply human character. Eric Gill did it all on paper.
There is no work of Eric Gill’s that doesn’t remind me of his historic abuse. His work will join the statues of slave traders littered across this country in city centres and public parks, and that of Egon Schiele, who its believed fashioned his nude figures with the life models of vulnerable underage girls, as integral reminders of what must be preserved for museums as historic relics. The Colston statue should have found its home in a museum dedicated to crimes against humanity long before it ended up at the bottom of Bristol Harbour, and the work’s of Gill and Schiele deserve preservation for a similar historic fate.
To respond once more to Robert Jenrick’s quote, to “retain and explain,” there is no moral obligation to assign context to a piece of art hung solemnly on a gallery wall. There is however an obligation to apprise the public when they are to view a representation or monument to criminal behaviour or abuse.
Context does not belong in art collections, it belongs in history museums, and I hope within my lifetime I get to witness Eric Gill’s work being displaced and his legacy and impact on our country frowned upon by the same highbrow figures that have lauded and misrepresented his work for decades.
I struggle to think of an artist more deserving of a swift and scrupulous fall from grace.
