MAY/JUNE, 2024
Two days shy of the 110th anniversary on March 10th 1914 of Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, a pro-Palestinian supporter cut to ribbons a 1914 painting by society portraitist Philip de Laszlo of A J Balfour in Trinity College Cambridge. Former Prime Minister Balfour was a Trinity graduate and had, in 1917 when Foreign Secretary, written the so-called Balfour Declaration, a short letter to Lord Rothschild in which he confided a recent Cabinet decision agreeing to support “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. 107 years later this has turned Balfour – not the then PM Lloyd George – into another Great Satan. This famous and habitually selective quotation rarely includes the important codicil: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. And so it is Balfour who is identified by Palestine Action, whose stated object is to “bring down Israel” and which organises training sessions around the country for would-be vandals (illustrated, incidentally, by pictures of the Balfour assault), as the direct cause of what they describe as genocide and ethnic cleansing, not to mention the various wars and intifadas since the foundation of Israel in 1948.
The damage was done during College opening hours and police have so far made no arrests. When the perpetrators are found – a co-conspirator filmed the stunt performed by a young woman – they can expect little sympathy. No voice I’m aware of has defended this action. Mary Richardson, by the way, was sentenced to six months in Holloway for her National Gallery stunt.
This is not the first likeness of Balfour to be attacked. A statue in white French limestone, carved by David McFall in 1962, which stands in a House of Commons lobby, was squirted with tomato ketchup last November by the same Palestine Action group. On that occasion the perpetrators also glued themselves to the statue’s plinth. The two young women responsible were charged with criminal damage and then acquitted at Southwark Crown Court.
Since the Suffragettes targeted paintings – in their case works depicting naked women drooled over, they assumed, by men – in order to generate publicity for their cause, hitting art is now commonly accepted as the easiest way to provoke outrage. But the stakes have now been raised with the serious injury inflicted on the unprotected Cambridge picture. We have moved on from the relative moderation of anti-oil demonstrators sticking their mitts to the glass, hurling soup or sponge cake and bellowing slogans. During the recent spate of largely climate-change activism any actual harm caused was minor. The present case is more serious, the means more destructive and the target more specific. Undoubtedly helpful to the cause of those invading museums with malicious intent is that juries seem not to consider criminal damage to art that serious an offence – the four individuals responsible for toppling the Colston statue got off.
Additionally, museums don’t make it difficult for wreckers. Overlooking the frequency with which valuable material in their care is either stolen or ‘goes missing’, museum objects can’t easily be protected – unless, like the Louvre with the Mona Lisa, you bury it in a nuke-proof pill box rendering it more or less invisible except as the blurry nucleus of an installation. So many works of art are hung in places unguarded, from civic buildings and universities to hospitals and schools. Simply by making art visible to large numbers renders it instantly vulnerable. Part of the unwritten contract between any institution and its visitors is that those allowed close to works won’t harm them. And so, unfortunately, museums are places housing precious things which, if you are of an unbalanced mind, are extremely easy to hurt. And so it is that museums have become the main target for anyone with an obsessive grievance. Indeed, at the end of March, Pro-Palestinian and Climate Change demonstrators both descended on the British Museum on the same day causing the place to close. The attraction of museums for activists is perhaps encouraged by their security being a joke. They make a show at the entrance, but it wouldn’t tax an infant to outwit them. Wafting a small torch across the inside of a bag, as is the case at the BM and the National Gallery, is hardly a deterrent to a well-planned team attack.
What has been achieved by the Balfour incident? True, the Palestinian cause received widespread advertisement on the internet, but it gets that anyway with its regular demos and the daily tally of bombings and casualties on news broadcasts. This action will not alter government policy towards the war: history will not be rewritten; Israel will not cede territory to the Palestinians; and there will be no improvement in the foreseeable future to the demolished lives of Gazans, so comprehensive has been the destruction of their homes.
On balance it would appear that such extremes of vandalism as that in Cambridge, have the opposite of the desired effect by galvanising opposition. Except, of course, among anarchists, there can’t be many who condone actions like this. And similar performances will not supply a single scoop of flour or phial of medicine to Gazans. Such tactics merely serve to assuage the anger of young hotheads prone to become impetuous when an obsessive rush of feeling blurs reason. Theirs is the compulsion to strike out at something precious; like an infant’s foot-stomping threats to smash an ornament. It’s easy in youth to become riled by injustice; most of us have been there – it was Nam and CND for my generation. Apart from the inevitable tightening of security at museums, all that has been achieved by this act is notoriety for the perpetrators and damage to a work of art by which looks as though it might be invisibly repaired.
There were, however, mealy-mouthed comments by otherwise diehard supporters of the Palestinian cause. One newspaper columnist implied dangerously that, whilst regrettable, attacking this portrait didn’t matter quite so much because it was only an undistinguished work by someone the writer had clearly never heard of; a perverse case of ignorance fuelling justification. The argument seemed to imply that providing the art attacked is insignificant this makes it kind of OK. Such perversity was also used to defend those who downed John Cassidy’s Colston memorial, which will soon return to display (above) in a museum as a daubed and dented monument to the efficacy of petulant vandalism.
Owing to Balfour having now been identified as Public Enemy No. 1, it is unlikely we’ll see in the near future any of the three portraits of him in the National Portrait Gallery by Alma-Tadema, Sargent and another by de Laszlo. There is also an imposing 1905 statue of Balfour in Liverpool by Albert Bruce-Joy (1842-1924) outside St George’s Hall, opposite Lime Street Station. (Bruce-Joy it was, incidentally, who modelled for Bow Churchyard the imposing bronze of Gladstone whose right hand has been kept permanently painted red by a succession of persons unknown in memory of exploited matchgirls in the local Bryant and May factory – Theodore Bryant, the company’s rapacious proprietor had paid for the statue.)
Some perspective: the IDF invasion of Gaza has destroyed art, archaeological sites, historical archives and architecture, including the Norman Christian church of St. Porphyrius in which 18 civilians were killed when it was bombed, to the extent that evidence of any historical tradition in the Strip has been all but exterminated. Inevitably, museums have been ransacked and looted.
In the face of such ubiquitous and continuing damage, an outsider’s response can only be one of powerless despair.