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08/31/2016 07:00 AMJ.M.W. Turner’s The Victory Returning from Trafalgar, in Three Positions, shows the return home of the British naval hero, Lord Admiral Nelson, fatally wounded by a sniper’s bullet that smashed his lower back, following his successful engagement of both the French and Spanish navies during the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson’s brilliant strategies and tactics, along with his rapport and camaraderie with the diverse group of men under his command, allowed him to return home without a single British vessel being lost even though they were outnumbered in the battle.
Turner’s oil painting is included in what the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) is calling the first major exhibit to survey the storytelling tradition of marine painting, opening Thursday, Sept. 15, that helped Britain define itself as a maritime and imperial power. Ellie Hughes, the exhibit’s curator, says it will show not only how Turner created radically different notions of the sea and how it was represented in art, but it will also show how his predecessors’ works influenced him, how he was in competition with them, and how his later works were created at a time of radical artistic experimentation and creativity.
“There’s a moment around the turn of the 19th century when things explode. The exhibition gets very loud at the end. It is an exhibition that crescendos,” she says.
While on HMS The Victory returning home, Nelson is said to have turned to a confidante and implored him to take care of his beloved Emma. That would be his mistress, the notorious Emma, Lady Hamilton, whose claim to fame in her younger years included reports of her dancing naked on tables. Emma initiated her affair with Nelson, who was something of a rock star in Britain, while she was married to a husband who was either indifferent or acquiesced to it. The three of them for a time lived together, apparently happily, while Nelson’s devoted wife, Fanny, continued to take care of his family and politely begged him to come back in letters, some of which were sent back to her marked unread.
The broken-hearted Fanny is the star of a film installation by British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA), whose work in multiple media is the subject of a concurrent display at YCBA. The film stars renowned soprano Nadine Benjamine, wearing a stunning dress made from colorful Dutch wax-printed fabric. Benjamine’s dark black skin is set off by her ornate, stark white hair, and she sings Addio del Passato (Farewell past, happy dreams), the haunting final aria from Verdi’s La Traviata. Shonibare’s work, which also includes Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, made of fiberglass, steel, brass, and his trademark use of Dutch wax-printed cotton textiles as the ship’s sails, will allow museum visitors to explore Britain’s and Nelson’s legacy, the artwork that helped perpetuate that legacy, along with questions relating to identity, authenticity, and who gets to write history.
For some observers in the art world, Shonibare’s work suggests Nelson’s reckless, rapacious, and insatiable appetite is something of a metaphor for Britain’s ugly behavior during its Colonial and empire-building days.
Provoking that type of discussion is “one of the critical points for us doing the display,” says Martina Droth, curator of the Shonibare display, while also emphasizing that Shonibare’s art stands on its own as deeply engaging works. “We have this incredible collection of Britain’s heroic past. And we are finding ways of opening that history in different ways. We are not just an institution that enshrines history, we are looking at it critically with the help of an artist like Yinka.”
Charming, Powerful
Shonibare’s work on display at YCBA through Dec. 11 includes sculpture, installation, film, and photography, all of it focused on his fascination with Nelson as a representative of Britain’s imperial history. Shonibare’s deft and creative use of the colorful fabrics in Fanny’s Dress, in Nelson’s Jacket, and in the sails of Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, is one of his signatures, Droth says.
“The thing about this fabric is the global trade element that informs the fabric,” she says. “He bought them in the Brixton Market in London. This is fabric sold primarily to the African community, and is often associated with Africa...but it is often made in England, or Holland, [and] based on Indonesian patterns. It found success in Africa, but the fabric articulates the complexity of the notion of authenticity, and what we deem to be authentic.”
Much of Shonibare’s work incorporates a reference to these fabrics “in that the clothing we choose to wear is very much a part of perceived identity,” Droth says.
Shonibare creates art that engages with Britain’s imperial and Colonial history. At the same time, his work is visually arresting and often “utterly charming,” Droth says. She points to his 2010 installation at Trafalgar Square in London, where his oversized Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was placed atop the fourth plinth, essentially a column that was left unadorned in the public space dedicated the Battle of Trafalgar.
“That’s the interesting thing about public sculpture, we can become immune it,” Droth says. “We can walk by them without paying any attention to them, and then something happens to spark them alive again.”
This is a particularly pertinent issue right now. In England, some students and scholars at Oxford are clamoring for the removal of a statute of Cecil Rhodes, characterized as a racist mass murderer of Africans. At Princeton, some are pushing for the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, because Wilson had views that were racist. And at Yale, of course, there is the ongoing controversy of Calhoun College’s name and a stained glass window that included an offensive depiction of enslaved Africans carrying bales of cotton. A Yale dishwasher effectively put an end to the window with the end of a broomstick, but the dispute about the college, its name, and the college’s legacy rages on.
“Sometimes public sculpture can seem innocent and innocuous and invisible to some,” Droth says. “But what Yinka did was to think about that space in the middle of London, and its context in the imperial movement, and cut through it with that piece.”
And the public loved it.
“The incredible irony there was that his work was so charming, and it has such a serious meaning,” she says.
Shonibare comes from a privileged, elite Nigerian family and has “always found himself looking at the image of Africans and Nigerians as impoverished, and so his own experience is that of a double outsider,” Droth says. Shonibare’s work pokes holes in the notion that “the Britain of the past” particularly as it is sometimes displayed in history books or, even, traditional maritime art work, “was better or somehow closer to the image” of what Britain should be.
“That’s kind of a nonsense romantic cliché,” Droth says.
Still, with the recent vote of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, Shonibare’s work raises vital questions about identity and who is authentically British. Even Nelson’s loyal and reliable crew during his ultimate victory was made up of men black, white, and brown from many nations and cultures, every man charged with doing his duty.
“We need artists like Yinka, who is very much a part of Britain and its culture, bringing into consciousness the richness and complexity of that culture,” Droth says. “It’s more important now than ever.”
Work that Shapes, Reflects
Ellie Hughes, the curator of Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, says that traditional British maritime paintings are often considered a “recording” of what happened.
“But art historians are used to the idea that these paintings and drawings actually helped shape what happened, that they did not just reflect what happened,” says Hughes, who used to work at YCBA and is now with the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Hughes has been thinking deeply about the issues raised in this exhibit for years, and some were the subject of her dissertation, filed in 2001. She says that many of these images, of the type that often get used in history books, were created by artists not only observing the action of the day, but who were also working on behalf of the subjects of the paintings, and in competition with other artists also trying to make a living.
“They are highly constructed. The client is saying ‘at that point we lost our mast,’” and giving other specific directions and counsel. “There is a wonderful example of the patron commissioning the work saying, ‘Can you make me standing up in front of the boat? I want to amplify my role,’” she says.
Some of the works are more like public relations, or even, in some ways, closer to a self-aggrandizing Facebook post.
“These were not just illustrations, but they actually shaped the way people viewed the empire and the imperial project,” says Matthew Hargraves, the chief curator of art collections at YCBA, and organizing curator for this exhibit. “Marine painting and marine art was not some small marginal niche, but they were actually right at the heart of public life. These images were displayed publicly like television news, newspapers, or Facebook.”
Hughes says the exhibit will explore the milieu in which Turner developed his aesthetic.
“So the interesting thing is that when you look at some surveys of marine painting...you get the sense that Turner sprung fully formed from Dutch 17th century marine painters,” she says. “But, in fact, Turner was in competition with his predecessors and contemporaries. This show unpacks that a bit.”
Turner with his work eventually sets up the notion of the sea as a force in and of itself, a subject worth examination. Some of his later works give viewers the experience of being at sea, of the roiling turmoil, the salt spray exploding in the air.
“It’s all about the sensate experience,” Hughes says.
Turner’s revolutionary work didn’t occur in a vacuum, however. In the 1790s, other artists were also playing with new forms of representation and exhibition, including panoramic displays and exhibitions solely dedicated to one huge work of art.
Turner put his all into an exhibition following Admiral Lord Nelson’s legendary Battle of the Nile in 1798.
“Everybody’s doing the Battle of the Nile, and Turner’s paintings get panned,” Hughes says. “So he doesn’t do another painting of a naval battle until the Battle of Trafalgar.”
In addition to the painting displayed in this exhibit, Turner also did one showing the battle from the riggings of a ship. There will be a photograph of this painting in the YCBA exhibit. “He is looking down at the deck, the battle is happening beyond, it is a vertiginous view,” Hughes says. “It is a completely ground-breaking painting. No one has ever done a battle from that perspective.”
In addition to the maritime paintings, there will be maps, letters, models, and other materials that inform the overall discussion, says Hargraves. “These images are telling a story about Britain and British identity, and the sense of Britain’s mission in the world, to conquer, and ever expand its empire,” he says.
Shonibare’s work will extend the discussion as well, she says. “There is a bigger picture here about recovering the degree to which Britain thought of itself as a maritime nation,” she says. “Yinka is going back to that as well, and inflecting that story with the issues he is good at engaging with...you can recover the importance the sea had, but in a way that is more mindful of the narratives that were suppressed at the time.”