British embassies around the world are earnestly provided with reproductions of a
British embassies around the world are earnestly provided with reproductions of a Gerald Kelly portrait of the Queen, complete with curtain and column, a sad little emanation from the tomb of classicism and the grave of Reynolds. I mean, old boy, it looks about right, doesn’t it? No, it does not.Perhaps it is unfair to blame Britain or modernity for the crisis in the public realm. This week Christie’s sold a Trumbull portrait of George Washington at the Battle of Trenton from the Marquis of Bute’s collection. The Barbican attempts to add symbolic weight to its mannerist-brutalist arts centre by adorning it with distasteful gold statues.
Only in Trafalgar Square where the last plinth remains gloriously empty does a certain tact and honesty prevail – if you’ve nothing to say, don’t say it.In respectable official circles, vain attempts are made to cling to the pathetic fragments of past grandeur. Town planning becomes street daubing, royal portraits become glib cartoons. In Hyde Park appalling new gates honouring the Queen Mother assault the eye. His latest, apparently, shows Diana again, this time eating with her two sons in Pizza Express.
The link between the two is the way the public realm here has become a serious embarrassment. Nobody knows what to do with it, so noble traditions are abandoned to be abused by tinkering fools. One showed Prince Charles on a rearing horse with William and Harry wearing baseball caps.
Another showed an almost naked Diana tip-toeing through the waves on a glass globe. Meanwhile, there is the superficially unrelated matter of Andre Durand who paints really bad pictures of the Royal Family. Harrogate had it coming. The idiot councillors of that distinguished old spa town painted a street red, beige and green in order, as they usually put it, “to brighten the place up a bit”. It rained; the new, high-tech, French paint failed to dry and shoppers left sticky, tutti-frutti footprints all over the place Good. What had gone wrong? “In Chechnya,” explained the manager, “the wolf is a sacred animal, wild and free The most unclean animal is the swine. I did not realise your puppet show would be The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.”.
“You must get away,” he said, “At the interval, gather all your stuff and get in my van. Otherwise they will shoot you in the second act.” The puppeteers did as they were told, drove hell for leather, heard some wild rifle shots and escaped with only a few bullet holes in the screen. Nobody, unfortunately, advised her about the hard men of the soon- to-break-away republic. The puppeteers drove into town, hired a theatre, advertised their performance and set up the show.