Our poor public art. When it isn’t being decried as a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money, it’s being sawn off at the base in the dead of night, loaded into vans and sold for scrap. Of course, both responses fail spectacularly to appreciate the value of having an artwork in your local park, shopping centre, at the bottom of your street or on your way to work. But, as this spirited exhibition by Historic England (formerly English Heritage) reveals, these aren’t the only – or even the worst – fates that can meet our Barbara Hepworths, Henry Moores and their ilk.
‘Out There’ tells the story of England’s public art made between 1945 and 1985 through examples that have been lost, damaged, moved, detroyed or even saved (yes, there are some happy episodes). It’s a gripping tale not only for art lovers – it features some of the biggest names of twentieth-century British art – but for anyone who cares about the fabric of the city around them. It begins at the end of WWII and, as with RIBA’s ‘Creation from Catastrophe’ reveals that marvels are often forged out of necessity.
Shown through models, photographs and documents, the works themselves, such as Siegfried Charoux’s ‘The Neighbours’ (1959) commissioned for the Highbury Quadrant Estate may seem modest. But the ambition behind them, the same ambition that started up the NHS and built masses of public housing, could very well have you choking back tears for its far-sightedness and fair-mindedness.
This spirit manifested itself in private sector commissions like Hepworth’s ‘Winged Figure’ (1961-62) equally loved and ignored on the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street. There were odd private-public partnerships too, such as tobacco company Peter Stuyvesant’s ill-fated 1972 City Sculpture Project to bring site-specific sculpture to cities around the country. But it extended to entire towns. When Frederick Gibberd the chief architect of Harlow new town, which was built to house those blitzed out of London during the war, said he wanted the place to be like Florence, he didn’t mean full of teenagers in identical backpacks. He meant full of contemporary art.
Every good story needs its baddies and ‘Out There’ is blessed with pantomime villains such as the Rev Arthur Phillips who, as reported in the April 15 1972 edition of the Cambridge Evening News, suggested that someone should blow up Barry Flanagan’s inoffensive ‘Vertical Judicial Forms’ (commissioned by Stuyvesant) because ‘It made me feel quite sick when I saw it.’ In fact, the totems were vandalised bit by bit, with some of the bits discovered near the junior common room of Peterhouse college.
But there are heroes, even today. Jacqueline Poncelet’s ‘Wrapper’ design for Edgware Road station, commissioned by the ever-ambitious Art on the Underground, is heralded as a success story of integrated art and design. In fact, the show concludes with a display dedicated to the sculptures that have been listed – including Antony Gormley’s ‘Untitled (Listening)’ (1983-84) in Maygrove Peace Park in West Hampstead and Hepworth’s ‘Winged Figure’. However, adjacent to it, like a lot of ‘lost cat’ posters, are works that, maddeningly, have been binned or flogged, or whose whereabouts are unknown – can there be a more poignant title than ‘Neighbourly Encounter’, now missing in Southwark?
Historic England wants you to help out. Not just by keeping your eyes peeled for what we’ve lost (sheds, breakers’ yards and behind vending machines are good places to start looking). But by enjoying the public art we do have. A measure of this show’s success is how much it makes you want to get outside. And a little indignation will keep you warm.