Off the Wall

For me, visiting Tate Britain used to be one of the unalloyed pleasures of London life – but that was some while ago, before the once great gallery began its headlong descent into wraparound ultrawokeness. I can't remember when they last held an exhibition that I felt any strong urge to visit, and the sermonising captions telling us what to think about individual works of art – e.g. this – are enough to put anyone off the whole idea of going to art galleries. There's an interesting piece in the current Spectator about the parlous state Tate Britain now finds itself in, with a huge financial deficit and visitor numbers dangerously low. The author, J.J. Charlesworth, is surely right in identifying the Tate's relentless wokery and deeply unattractive exhibition programme as the main cause of this dire situation, and one wonders what will be done about it, if anything. The supertanker of wokery – at the Tate and elsewhere – will not be easy to turn around, even if anyone wants to, and at present they probably don't.
Anyway, in the course of this article I was startled to learn that one of the most important paintings in Tate Britain's collection – Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham – has been removed from display and put in storage. I'm not a huge fan of Spencer, but I recognise a masterpiece when I see one, and this strange resurrection scene is surely one of the great English paintings of its time – and of course it belongs on the walls of our major gallery of British art. But perhaps we should have seen this coming: when it was still on display, The Resurrection was saddled with a caption explaining that 'Most of the white people are local friends or specific biblical figures. By contrast, Spencer represents the group of Black people at the centre of the painting in a generalising way. They are not based on people he knew, but on images he saw in National Geographic magazine. Spencer intended to show that all humanity would be included in the resurrection, but in trying to make this point he reinforced racist stereotypes and divisions accepted at the time by most white British people.'
Poor old Spencer. If only he'd taken the trouble to befriend some leading members of 1920s Cookham's vibrant Afro-Caribbean community, his work might still be hanging in its proper place.