Divided Opinion

A bronze bust entitled ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ was installed recently on Dovehouse Green—a small London park not far from where Wilde lived in Tite Street, Chelsea,

It is a posthumous work by the Scottish sculptor and graphic artist, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924—2005), made possible by a charitable foundation to mark the centenary of his birth, and its unveiling was also timed appropriately to occur on Oscar Wilde’s birthday.

The physical configuration of the piece renders our man of letters as a fallen and fractured figure. Metaphor this may be—but, absent a meaningful reading, its composition is inclined to suggest itself, ironically, as a symbol of divided opinion.

Time was when memorials erected to honor the dead were representational and sombre; respectful and sculptural. In other words: what we all knew as statues. Nowadays—or let’s say since New Deal art programs in the U.S. and the Festival of Britain—there exists a dichotomy: while statues are still sculpted, not all sculptures are statuesque.

Of course, Wildeans already know this. A maquette of Paolozzi’s head was passed over in the 1990s when shortlisted for a representation of Wilde to be placed in central London. On that artistic occasion the committee adjudged an undead head emerging from a granite sarcophagus bench to be more suitable than sideways segments and building blocks.

That sarcophagus bench, incidentally, is entitled “A Conversation with Oscar Wilde” by Maggi Hambling, and it depicts a decomposing, but still smoking, Oscar sitting up ostensibly for a witty chat; whereas Paolozzi’s head is inert and disturbingly traumatic. I think I like them both.

However, the merit of either piece is moot. The point is that both unlikenesses reaffirm that civic monument has become public art.

And not only that. As ‘art’ is susceptible to Wilde’s dictum that every portrait created with feeling is of the artist not the sitter—it also means, in turn, that public statement yields to personal expression.

This reality was noted by the chief art critic of The Independent who said at the time that Hambling’s sarcophagus bench was ultimately not about Wilde nor the viewing public, but a reflection of Hambling herself.¹

split decision

At the unveiling ceremony of the Paolozzi sculpture there was a generally polite air of appreciation amongst the attendees—which is hardly surprising with the deputy mayor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and Paolozzi’s former secretary on hand overseeing the proceedings.

Nevertheless, the Oscar Wilde Society seemed to like it—ably represented as it was by its president, Gyles Brandreth, who gave an affable speech linking the literary with the locality.

And Sir Christopher Frayling, continuing the ceremony, extolled the “sculptural collage” for its “spatial ambiguity”—thus exalting the primacy of art and distancing the work from tradition. In this vein he invoked Wilde who had said that “marble frock coats bring a new horror to death”—which is slightly disingenuous because Wilde’s remark was intended to criticize modern dress more than to critique statutary.

On the other hand, some observers must have been privately reserved about the work; just as there were those who had already expressed their reservations publicly: the tenor being that successful memorial was instead monumental error.

Leading the contrary opinion was Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, who told The Observer, “it looks absolutely hideous.” This view was presaged back in April by Melanie McDonagh in The Standard who, with supernatural clairvoyance, warned, “Oscar Wilde would hate this hideous sculpture.”

The Wilde scholar, Rob Marland, in noting that the piece was derivative of Paolozzi’s own ‘Head of Invention’, (aka Newton after James Watt) now at the London’s Design Museum, wryly suggested that his “repurposing of an idea” at least means that this edifice has already been “conveniently pre-toppled”.

Marland’s anticipation of perhaps a limited lifespan for this style of work by Paolozzi is not unprecedented. Take his similar 2.5m high self-portrait ‘The Artist as Hephaestus’, for instance.

The sculpture was commissioned by London and Paris Property Group to decorate the façade of its new office building at 34–36 High Holborn in London, and displayed in a purpose-built niche from 1987 to late 2012. It was removed by the building owner when the property was scheduled for refurbishment in 2012. The sculpture failed to sell at an auction at Bonhams in November 2012. [Wikipedia]

Art is quite useful

To be fair to the creative artist, we should recognize work that intends to celebrate its subject by attracting attention to it—even if this means being purposely challenging and unflattering.

For instance, Dublin’s Oscar Wilde Monument in Merrion Square appears smirking and louche, while Maggi Hambling ‘Conversation’ is characteristically grotesque. So if Paolozzi sculpture was designed to be deliberately disagreeable, then a subconscious verdict of “hideous” might be just what he intended.

statues with limitations

It is to avoid such ambiguities of art criticism, that I was drawn instead to an observation by the former Tate curator Simon Wilson who said, “we badly need a really good straightforward, traditional monument to Wilde”—which invites the question why isn’t there one?

Then we recall there are statues of Oscar although, to be frank, the ones I have seen have done little to alter the premise that “we badly need a really good straightforward, traditional monument to Wilde.”

And so, if all we have as memorials to Oscar Wilde are the indulgences of art and commercialism, one is left to wonder why is there not a traditional statue of him?

Why is there not one, for instance, at his alma mater, Trinity College, alongside the noble statues of Goldsmith and Burke—do they not consider him a literary hero? Or could it be that a traditional monument confers upon its subject acceptance by the establishment? And that, for some new historicist reason, memorials of him should still leave us disquieted? More likely it is simply because artists find Wilde’s troubled persona more compelling.

But it would still be gratifying if there were a contemporary tribute to Wilde. Consider the first public memorial to John Donne that was placed in the south garden of St Paul’s Cathedral in 2012; or the one of John Keats unveiled at Moorgate by the Lord Mayor of London in a similar anniversary event as recently as October 31, 2024.

Artists should perhaps compare these images and recall what Ellmann intuited: Oscar was one of us.

© John Cooper, 2024.

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Footnotes:

1. Lubbock, Tom (December 1, 1998). “It’s got to go”. The Independent.
   Photo credit: Marlborough Gallery, London; photographer: Douglas Atfield. ↩︎
2. Ian Visits ↩︎

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