Chunks of Empire go missing at Tate Britain

Chunks of Empire go missing at Tate Britain

The main impression I took from the Tate’s Artists and Empire exhibition is that the visual arts don’t come close to the written arts in reflecting the complexities, the dark corners and the brighter corners of Britain’s chequered Empire.

Perhaps this is the fault of the curators, or the uneven coverage of the works that were available. Still, the dominant themes of the art on display are: upper class imperial hauteur; lavish scenes of success and government (surrenders, durbars and imperialist patronage); and heroic defeat. (One began to see why the evacuation at Dunquerque in 1940is part of a noble tradition of proud failure.)

There are several Last Stands, or Last Man Left Standing, distributed geographically between Asia (Afghanistan, wouldn’t one guess) and Africa (Gordon at Khartoum and Zulu battles among others). To this genre must be added a scene from the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion, wherein Pre-Raphaelite-ish British women and their children await their fate in the course of an atrocity.

These paintings have (as they did at the time) a macabre fascination, the pain they depicted ameliorated for their contemporary viewers by the fact that, in most cases, the Empire struck back with at least as much savage remorselessness as was visited on the Last Standers.

Horrors always have their niche. But one begins to glaze over at the seemingly endless portraits of generals and governor-generals and their like.  A couple of exceptions: a striking portrait of the naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook to the South Seas, and Augustus John’s portrait of TE Lawrence, a Rupert Brook character rendered in oils.

But, where is the ordinary or the low life of Empire? To mention just a few writers: where is the painterly equivalent of Kipling, Conrad, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, Orwell, Paul Scott or JG Farrell?

Orwell’s Burma (an annex, for Imperial purposes, of India) is a place where sottish, bigoted officials of lumber firms have their native mistresses up country in the logging camps; where the White Man’s Club is all the social life, like a run-aground squalid cruise ship booked out by the right wing of UKIP. Conrad’s Empire is a (probably very accurate) mixture of seediness, cynical adventurism and conscientious sweating officials. Farrell and Scott both wrote about Empire at times of war, and/or decline, perceptive about tensions between loyalty, resentment, the thrust for independence and re-emerging sectarianism. Their WW2 novels recount, among other things, the reverberating message sent to the Empire’s subjects about its weakness in the face of the onslaught from Japan.

In Tate’s exhibition the part played by the World Wars in, first, adjusting and even consolidating Empire; but, second, in beginning its demolition is scarcely noted, apart from portraits of Sikh cavalrymen who served on the Western Front (illustrating the manpower contribution of Empire to Britain’s forces).

The broader point is that there is shown no painterly equivalent to the writers. This leaves a vast gap, in the Exhibition’s record, between the heroic overlords and the dead or dying Last Standers. Barely one or two canvasses address life in this gap.

When one turns to the art produced by the subjects of Empire, there is again much unevenness. To be sure, there were Indian artists who subtly took on European styles and transmuted them. These are represented here. But pretty much the only other part of Empire whose works are exhibited is West Africa, where wood carvers produced a nice line in almost-satirical portraits of Imperial officials and their wives.

This scarcity of coverage is indicative of how centred on India the Exhibition is. For example, if you went hoping to find out the fortunes of the Empire and those it ruled in the West Indies, you would leave not much the wiser, apart from a few pictures relating to the slave trade.

Indeed, there is a deep irony here. The Tate's first benefactor, and essential founder, Henry Tate, made his fortune from sugar (Tate & Lyle). Although his business was set up some years after the abolition of slavery in the Empire, the West Indies plantations which supplied the sugar industry were established on the back (literally) of slave labour; and continued, of course, to be a major imperial enterprise during Henry Tate's time. Therefore one artist who was very much enabled by Empire is Sidney Smith, the architect of the Tate Gallery in the 1890s.

One theme that is altogether absent from the Exhibition is the missionary one. Where soldiers, scoundrels, traders and explorers went, there followed missionaries, with greater or less success. The new churches inspired new iconographies all over the Empire. It would have been interesting to see some examples evidencing the way Imperial religious ideology was either imposed on, or adapted by, local sensibilities.

January 2016