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[Pre-order a copy of David Horowitz’s next book, America Betrayed, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on May 7th.]
When you observe renowned landscape artist John Constable’s bucolic painting “Hampstead Heath” above, what feelings does it inspire? Calm? Nostalgia? Spiritual uplift? A surge of white supremacist pride and jingoistic fervor?
For some reason – my guess is a toxic mix of colonialist guilt, multiculturalist self-loathing, and pressure from neo-Marxist donors and administrators determined to “deconstruct” Western civilization – England’s Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, recently overhauled its collections with new signage warning sensitive visitors that landscape paintings of the British countryside can evoke dark “nationalist feelings.”
Paintings at the Fitzwilliam have been reshuffled into new categories that are deemed more “inclusive and representative.” The names alone of these new categories – Men Looking at Women, Identity, Migration and Movement, and Nature – reek of a politically woke perspective.
Signage for the Nature gallery, for example, which includes landscape paintings by such notable English and French artists as Constable, Gainsborough, Renoir, and Cézanne, states,
Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity. The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation. Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland. The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.
Translation: lovely European landscapes = white supremacy. This is the conclusion of a report recently submitted to Parliament by the charity umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link which denounces the British countryside as a “racist colonial” white space. You read that right.
The report claims that “racist colonial legacies” have created a rural Britain “dominated by white people.” For those of you not keeping up with the latest targets on the Social Justice Warrior hit list: anything in which white people predominate must be racist, and that includes the landscape, especially if it is beautiful and makes whites feel a bond with their homeland. Ergo, paintings of said landscapes are also racist. And they inspire an unhealthy patriotism, which threatens the globalist worldview of open-borders elites.
The report complains that Britain’s green spaces were influenced by “white British cultural values” which somehow prevent people of other ethnic backgrounds from enjoying the outdoors. It adds that “the assertion of white, Western values and knowledge” comes “at the expense of other values and knowledges” – the multiculturalist suggestion being that voodoo and shamanism are just as valid “knowledges” as Western rationalism and the scientific method. The report further argues that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of – gasp! – “pride towards a homeland.” One wonders whether the authors of the report would equally condemn the pride inspired in Zimbabweans or Peruvians by pictures of the African veldt or Andean peaks.
In response, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman felt compelled to state the obvious: “No, the countryside is not racist.” This is what defenders of our civilization have been reduced to – defending the landscape against charges of white supremacy.
Other signage at the Fitzwilliam reportedly informs visitors that portraits of uniformed and/or wealthy sitters were “vital tools in reinforcing the social order of a white ruling class, leaving very little room for representations of people of colour, the working classes or other marginalised people.” And predictably, such portraits “were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”
One of the portraits is of Richard Fitzwilliam, who bequeathed £100,000 to fund the Museum. Labeling for the portrait notes that his wealth “came from his grandfather, Sir Matthew Decker, who had amassed it in part through the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people.” Well, let’s just burn down the whole museum, then.
Here’s a suggestion: to be more inclusive and representative, perhaps the Fitzwilliam should also feature portraits of the black Africans who captured and sold their fellow people of color into the slavery that was a universal practice before white Christian Europeans ended it in the West.
Museum Director Luke Syson dismissed concerns that wokeness had infected the museum: “I would love to think that there’s a way of telling these larger, more inclusive histories that doesn’t feel as if it requires a push-back from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called ‘woke’.”
His very use of the term “inclusive histories” is the giveaway and confirmation that wokeness definitely has captured the 200-year-old institution. And indeed, the museum’s “About Us” page is bursting with virtue-signaling reassurances about pledging “to champion equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism and accessibility” and to make visitors and staff of all “lived experiences” feel “safe and respected,” so it’s no wonder that the Fitzwilliam would run its collections through the woke ringer to bleed them dry of anything that celebrates English character, aesthetic excellence, and national pride.
Syson previously told The Guardian, “Being inclusive and representative shouldn’t be controversial; it should be enriching. We should all welcome the opportunities to understand each other better through the eyes of great makers and artists.”
Yes, we should, but that’s not what is happening here. Woke radicals do not want us to understand each other better through art, but to pit us against each other by reducing all human experience, including art appreciation, to power struggles among competing identity groups. Politicizing every meaningful arena of our lives and then deconstructing it out of existence is the Marxist way.
The true concern of the Marxist Progressive (but I repeat myself) about museum spaces is not to ensure inclusion and representation, but to ensure that no one is stirred by beautiful art. It is to ensure that no one experiences that sense of transcendence which draws the human soul toward its origin and destiny in the divine.
This is why Progressives loathe beauty – because magnificent art elevates us to a realm above politics and points us toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the source of which is God. And Progressives reject God. Their religion is politics – or more specifically, the revolution is their religion.
Beauty in all its forms threatens the State. It stirs in us passions that cannot be governed by totalitarians fearful of ungovernable citizens – passions for truth, for freedom, for greatness, for spiritual revelation. Beauty frees and enlarges us. Our response to art is simultaneously personal and collective – collective not in the communist sense but in the sense of unifying us through our common humanity. This is not the kind of unity that the State can control, and that is why no art under totalitarianism is acceptable other than propaganda which exalts the State.
The overhaul of the Fitzwilliam Museum is not simply an innocuous, “welcoming” gesture; it is part of the Progressive mission to politicize and subvert the power of art and dismantle the greatness of Western civilization.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
A Prager U video has an art professor hilariously punk his students.
He shows a Steven Pollack “painting” and asks students their opinions.
The gullible idiots say “Bold! “, “Inspired!”, etc.
The professor then pulls the projector back from the painting to reveal that it’s not really a Pollack painting at all . . . it’s his paint shop apron.
Especially modern artists spend way more time thinking up a title and writing a pretentious description than they ever do on creating their “art.”
They always did that. The talentless usually compensate with the ridiculous or accuse their critics of ignorance, discrimination, and the like.
Not “sophisticated” enough to appreciate… garbage.
Progressivists should go live on Bizzaro World where they came from and talk like Bizzaro’s
In “The Abolition of Man” and more especially the novel adaptation “That Horrible Strength,” CS Lewis makes the case that materialists hate God and so also hate His Creation. Also His gift of beauty; given that beauty can only be explained as something discerned by a mind created by God or relativistic nonsense. In the absence of God there is no beauty, nor meaning, just the irrelevant firing of synapses.
The early Christians went on rampages destroying beautiful Greek and Roman statues because they were seen as sinful, heathen, and pagan, an affront to the Christian god and Christianity.
There is a world of difference between medieval Christian art, when Christianity was at its peak of dominion over Europe, and Renaissance art (Renaissance means “rebirth,” rebirth of reason and man’s concern with this world). As Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff writes, during the Renaissance,
“Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America’s founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.”
“An entirely different view of man dominated the medieval Christian civilization. Man, according to Augustine, is “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous.” Medieval mystics regarded man as an evil creature whose body is loathsome because it is material, and whose mind is impotent because it is human. Hating man’s body, they said that pleasure is evil, and virtue consists of renunciation. Hating this earth, they said that it is a prison where man is doomed to pain, misery, calamity. Hating life, they said that death and escape into some other dimension is all that man could—and should—hope for.
Man as a helpless and depraved creature, was the basic theme of medieval sculpture until the Gothic period, whether he was shown being pushed into Hell or accepted into Heaven.
Once again, a naked body was regarded as a sign of humiliation and was reserved for representations of Adam and Eve, and of the damned in Hell. Saints were dressed, their shapeless bodies hidden beneath heavy garments. But, whether man was represented naked and damned or dressed and blessed, hatred for the body permeated every inch of the sculptured stone.” – Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics In Marble”
Whoever wrote this has absolutely no understanding of either art or the history of art. As a matter of fact, Christians took an enormous amount from Greek and Roman art, and imitated it in many ways. Of course they didn’t want the representations of pagan gods, but they did accept the notions of beauty from the classical world, just as they received and integrated Greek philosophical ideas. Christian churches copied Roman designs such as the basilica, and used many elements of Greek architecture as well. As for the Medieval period, the body was not regarded as horrible or ugly, and there are many surviving statues in the Gothic style still adorning buildings from that era. Visual are took many forms at first based on iconography, but later moved to more realistic depictions, a large percentage of which were of religious subjects-think Giotto and Simone Martini, and later Van Eyck (Ghent altarpiece).
The early Christians were themselves persecuted, and in no position to destroy anyone else’s works of art. However, it is certainly conceivable that this may have occurred after Constantine. And, if it did, then such action was faithful to Jewish as well as Christian, practice (think of Rachel hiding her father’s household gods so that Jacob could not destroy them, or of Gideon tearing down the altar to Ba’al and the Asherah pole).
I note that the Protestant Reformation, and the faith of the Pilgrim Fathers, is entirely excised from your account of history.
Not a lot of representational art in Protestant churches in general. Definitely no statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary — or even crucifixes above the altar! Their goal was to have people listen to preachers, not to partake in the sacrifice of the Mass.
Wow, the perfect opportunity to trash Western Art and, of course, you came through with flying colors. Never mind the fact that there has been beautiful art created over the last 2000 years by Western artists. You had to focus on Christian Art from the middle ages.
I wonder, do you get more stupid and narrow minded as you approach your demise. Do you really hate everything that is not Rand approved.
Still racking up those down votes aren’t you. You are truly a miserable P.O.S.
Have you seen the Sistine chapel ceiling you moron? You’re as bad as Muslims with history rewriting.
Well said, thank you.
Wait until the progressives get a hold of the Hudson River School and Thomas Cole. Green pastures, thrilling landscapes, that takes actual talent to put on canvas.
The humanity, oh the humanity!
“the slavery that was a universal practice before white Christian Europeans ended it in the West.”
In the 18th and 19th century the vast majority of Europeans were white and Christian. The vast majority of white Christians did not question the morality of slavery because there is no outright and clear condemnation of slavery in the Bible. Quite the contrary, there are many Bible scriptures that condone and encourage slavery and indentured servitude.
Many Christians defended slavery using Biblical scripture.
Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church; rather they must serve them all the more, since those who benefit by their service are believers and beloved. Teach and urge these duties. (1 Timothy 6:1-5)
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. (Ephesians 6:5-6)
Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. (1 Peter 2:18-29)
The slave should be resigned to his lot, in obeying his master he is obeying God… (St. John Chrysostom)
…slavery is now penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance. (St. Augustine)
The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan, and from the Dominion of Men’s Lusts and Passions and inordinate Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptized, and becoming Christians, makes no manner of Change in it. ( Edmund Gibson, Anglican bishop in London)
Slavery in biblical times was an integral part of the society with many people only able to exist because they were slaves; that included many Christians. It was not God’s intent to kick them to the curb, but for those in authority and for those in slavery to serve each other with respect recognizing that they were all equally created in the image of God. The Abolition Movement would not have existed had it not been for Christians who understood that, and that being made in God’s image, we are to obey the two greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself.
History is littered with a “vast majority” of people who claimed to be Christians who were not and abused and misused Scripture to suit their own fallen dark hearts; Augustine is one of many examples. Satan loves to use them to discredit true believers and the God we worship. I hope you won’t fall for his tricks.
It should be noted that the manumission of slaves was an accepted work of Christian charity (see the Bodmin Manumissions for one example of this in practice). And Paul’s recommendations to slaves that they should submit to their masters should be read in the context (1) of the severe punishments meted out to runaway slaves by their pagan masters and (2) of Paul’s plea to Philemon to manumit Onesimus.
Judaism was the only faith that provided for the welfare of slaves, and made abuse of them a punishable offence. Furthermore, the biggest culprits of all when it came to slave trading were the Ottomans, who enslaved vast numbers of Slavs, far more than the total number of slaves traded in America. https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2023/06/22/muslims-chide-u-s-over-past-slavery-ignore-islams-past-and-present-slavery/ I am not saying that this excuses the American practice – but it also should not be overlooked. Additionally, any history of the American slave trade should take into account the “middle-man” role of the Arabic slave marketers, from whom the slave traders purchased their African slaves.
One of the Israeli hostages who was recently released said that, when she was taken into Gaza, the Palestinians greeted her as a slave. There is only one religion that maintains the legitimacy of slave trading to this day – and it isn’t Christianity or Judaism.
WTF are you talking about, mush brain? The article is about art, not you and your anti-Christian obsession.
Read the Declaration of Independence and read the history of the abolitionist movement leading to the civil war. Are you really this stupid or are you trolling?
Museums and “white supremacist art” are next on the hit list of the radical Left Demshevik class. What is surprising is that it has taken them this long to focus on museums, and the fact that museum administrators are on board with the assaults. There is nothing to prevent a museum from being blown up.
They have been subtly assaulting museums for decades–altering verbiage, adjusting displays to suit an agenda, removing items they deemed offensive, etc. Smithsonian’s been at it for decades.
You are correct. It’s been creeping, creeping, creeping … as has been said often in other situations “slowly at first, and then, all at once”. (a paraphrase of the words of E. Hemmingway, I believe, when asked how he went broke).
What an awful thought! Not sure all museums are on board with this concept, or preparing for its eventuality. But it will be too little too late if such an event takes place and the museum is found wanting.
Beauty itself has always been somewhat hierarchical–there is a limited supply, and it is often fleeting, like a flower blooming. That is one of the reasons it is valued. And anything that relates to hierarchy must, of course, in the drab world of enforced progressive sameness, be suppressed.
Whites in position of power who think this way are actually obligated to kill themselves. Do the world a favour, erase whiteness by erasing yourselves.
The best answer for nihilists and their nihilism is for them to annihilate themselves.
But they never do.
They are too busy enjoying their privilege in their cushy jobs in the museums and other cozy places where they can virtue signal to their hearts content.
Those who want to erase whiteness can start by erasing themselves. Put your money where your mouth is. Just do it.
“Only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.”. YES!
You can have a white society or you can have White Guilt. You cannot have both.
Interesting how this view gets reversed when it comes to Israel – the claim is that it is the Palestinians who have the historical tie to the land, and that therefore the Jewish people should leave them to peacefully enjoy their rightful heritage. Now, leaving aside the question of whether this understanding of history has any basis at all in fact – how is this not exactly the same view that woke museum curators are seeking to abolish?
Their hatred of beauty is a sideshow in their battle against happiness. A happy, content populace is extremely unlikely to revolt against the norms that being them satisfaction, obviating the progressive narrative.
Least we forget about the Virgin Mary done in Elephant Poo Piss Christ and the rest of it all
There is only one solution to this crap. But cannot be published here.
The comment section on this article misses the point completely. The entire concept of this art being racist has nothing to do with artists or art lovers. IT IS A JOBS PROGRAM! These social “science” majors do not wish to be baristas. Therefore another stream of babble must be created. This is it. Good Day.
Does Japanese art, with all those beautiful waves and trees and mountains, encourage nationalistic feelings? There are very few “people of color” in European art because in Constable’s England, Vermeer’s Holland, or Renoir’s France, there were very few “people of color.” How many Europeans are there in traditional Chinese or Japanese art?
Artists paint what’s around. That’s why Rosa Bonheur painted horses, not elephants, and Andrew Wyeth painted New England barns, not African huts.
The reason so many portraits are of rich people is because rich people were the ones who could afford to have their portraits painted. I think there’s a rather sad reasion why wealthy ladies were often painted with their lapdogs. For a wealthy, 17th centiry Spanish or Italian lady, her marriage was often a marriage of convenience, and her dog was her only source of non-judgemental love.
Thank you for your comments.
Ýou’re welcome. Not only ladies were painted with dogs. Everybody from Titian to Norman Rockwell paintef CHILDRED with dogs. “Appealing” is not a word art hisorians use often, but Titian’s “Clarise Strozzi” is the most appealing painting in art history.
I contend that most leftists have no sense of aesthetics. Such awareness is above and beyond their rigid, fixed ideas. When they see art, they don’t see a snapshot of humanity. They can only see propaganda. It’s that kind of narrow-mindedness that’s given us the twisted thinking of activists who try do deface art in the name of revolution. And that is a genuine crime against humanity.
The useful idiots are entitled to their opinion; and may I suggest if they abhor the works in the Fitzwilliam, very likely they would appreciate the videos of bulldozers pushing dead Jews into mass graves following the defeat of Hitler and the liberation of the death camps.
there are so may advantages to being GODLSSS- YOU CAN WORSHIP MONEY- YOU CAN GAIN POWER- YOU CAN ENJOY ALL THE PLEASURE OF THE FLESH- YOU ARE IMMUNE TO THE LAW AND TO THE RULES OF GOD- however- YOU HAVE BEEN RULED BY LIES FROM THE VERY BEGINNING- YOU ONLY KNOW HATE- YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND LOVE- YOU WORSHIP DEATH— you live in a world of misery- all the sex in the world cannot give you LOVE- everything you know is a lie- you cannot even begin to understand the beauty of GOD- music- art- families- children- life- WE raise our arms UP TO THE LORD AND GIVE HIM OUR PRAISE- THEY grovel in the dirt and only see hate and death when they see anything “beautiful” or hear beautiful music — it is like holding a cross up to a Vampire- throwing Holy Water on a dead thing- or SHING THE LIGHT ON THEM- they shout- scream- and throw their arms into the air in agony.
One thing I find really sad about these time is how many people are living their lives in a state of being permanently offended and angry. They are constantly searching for things that offend them and then making the fact that they are offended everyone else’s problem.
Of course, the list of things they find offensive is constantly growing, So their complaints never end.
If people can find racism in a painting of a landscape then they are living very sad, pathetic lonely lives. They have to literally be looking for things that offend them.
That is their problem. That is not the problem of everyone else.
To succeed, totalitarians have to wipe out all pleasant memories of real life in former times, retroactively and proactively.
These people are obviously mental. Why don’t these museums tell them to piss off and , if they don’t like it, they could go establish their own museums. But that would take effort, so much more than it takes to endlessly complain and deconstruct.
I agree, if the founder of the museum was a slaver, then burn the place down.
An excellent article, Mr. Tapson. Thank you.
In 1776 an American political philosopher wrote, “We hold these truths to be self evident,” two generations later a British poet wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” 150 years later the postmodernists denied the existence of truth or beauty and it went downhill from there.
Yep, my first impulse when I see that landscape painting is to go out and harass an immigrant. /s
The Denver Museum closed down its Native American Hall last year solely because it was curated by white people. So evidently museum workers must be segregated by race.