Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. That article you guys posted about James Randi a while ago was pretty bad too. I’d argue sculpture is harder than writing but that’s just my opinion. Maybe try not to judge so harshly?
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I imagined 100 like a centipede
EtA: still a better statue than this Wollstonecraft monstrosity
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Ok, my mistake, it was the website of the group that raised the funds for that particular sculpture, which stated their intent to create a sculpture of Mary Wollstonecraft and eventually hired Maggi Hambling for that purpose.
Sure, not always. It is, however, in this context. That’s the context they were using it - they specifically were talking about memorial statues of particular historic figures, how they were mostly of men, and wanted to balance things by having one of a woman, specifically Mary Wollstonecraft. That was the intent.
The artist is now saying it wasn’t intended to be her, which may be deflecting because, after taking the commission to do a sculpture of her, it didn’t end up looking much like her, but that was rather the original point. That’s a whole controversy as well - that, taking the artist at her word, the sculpture doesn’t depict her.
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I think that picture is a computer generated rendering. It’s a scaled down version of a larger picture, so I can’t be sure, but pictures of the real object have leaves on the ground. It is not high summer in the UK!
Here’s what it looks like now:
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I think she was hired to make a statue that was supposed to look like her and when it didn’t she came up with a new story.
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one of the rules is you get more $$$ for the art if it comes with an elaborate story full of words
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And the final designs survey is still up.
Hambling’s proposal reads
Maggi Hambling says: “I’m really excited at the prospect of making real my sculpture, inspired by the trail-blazing Mary Wollstonecraft, which acts as a metaphor for the challenges we women continue to face as we confront the world.’
This 10-foot sculpture is cast in silvered bronze and set on a black granite plinth. It is inscribed with a quotation from A Vindication, “I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves”. The sculpture is designed to encourage a visual conversation with the obstacles Wollstonecraft overcame, the ideals she strived for, and what she made happen. In this sculpture female forms commingle, rising inseparably into one another, transmuting and culminating in the figure of a woman standing free, her own person, ready to confront the world. The figure embodies all women."
I don’t think this was meant to be a surprise.
The alternative design strikes me as somewhat staid. Perhaps something that can be ignored.
Wollstonecroft did have a theory of aesthetics. It might have been interesting to see Hambling and Jennings defend their designs on the basis of their subjects’s aesthetic values.
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You can, of course, think what you like - even on the basis of zero evidence and in the face of contrary evidence - but I strongly suspect you have no idea who Maggi Hambling is, or what sort of art she is known for. There was almost zero chance she was ever going to produce a figurative likeness.
It was never the intent that this statue would depict her, as you keep claiming, as @jerwin has provided sufficient evidence of
“a memorial to her” (not “of her”)
“inspired by” (not “of”)
“acts as a metaphor”
The thing is you have two potential sets of intentions. The committee organising the statue and the artist.
The committee may well have started with the intention of having a statue created that looks like Wollstonecraft. The artist who submits their proposal may well take that brief and throw it out of the window. That’s basically why one hires artists.
Otherwise you just do the sketches yourself and hire a fabricator to make the thing.
As others have pointed out the committee here had two shortlisted proposals and chose the less straightforwardly representational one.
If you want a nice classical statue depicting the actual physical form of the subject, you don’t ask Maggi Hambling to do it. That’s really not something she’s interested in.
Her paintings are about as “portraity” as it gets.
Here’s one of Trump for example:
Or a self portrait:
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/maggi-hambling-self-portrait
Or this one:
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/maggi-hambling-self-portrait-1
Or this rather nice polar bear:
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/maggi-hambling-polar-bear
It may still be a bad statue. But not because it doesn’t look like Wollstonecraft.
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Thanks for presenting this information about the artist. I stand corrected. It looks like the council got what the artist promised. I’m glad they are pleased with the result!
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Strange, I would have thought that any female form would qualify for representing feminism.
The new Mary Wollstonecraft statue is bad
How can a work of art be “good” or “bad”, when everyone perceives art differently (and even individual perception can change over time)?
I fully support being transparent about what is happening here: you don’t like it, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t make it “bad”.
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Just heads up that Mary Shelley’s correct name is actually Mary Wollstonecraft’s monster.
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But the entire way it was framed by the group raising the money (rather than by the artist, granted) was of creating a representational statue of Wollstonecraft. Yes, you can look at individual phrasing and take it out of context, but collectively it’s pretty clear they’re talking about making a sculpture of Mary - from the name to a drawing of a proposed statue of her. Something changed after handing the project over to the artist, obviously, and the funders may have been fine with that, but the results took viewers by surprise.
That does seem to be what happened, which is the basis for much of the criticism (especially in light of the group’s intentions when raising the money). The expectation created was that it was going to be a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, what it turned out to be was a vaguely Mary-esque tiny naked woman coming out of a pile of candyfloss.
Those may be somewhat abstract, but they’re fundamentally representational, especially compared to the few paintings of hers I’ve seen.
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off-topic but I had to look, totally not what I was expecting
No. Just no. Maggi Hambling is an incredibly well-known artist and anybody even vaguely familiar with her work (and let’s assume the committee knew who she was and selected her for a reason!) would never have expected her to sculpt a likeness.
So no, not “obviously” at all.
No. It isn’t. Where does it say that so clearly? Where is the drawing of a proposed statue of her? (If you are referring to the line drawing of her used to illustrate the fundraising progress, I fear you have completely misinterpreted it.)
And it is not ‘candyfloss’ - “It shows a silvery naked everywoman figure emerging free and defiantly from a swirling mingle of female forms”
Viewers - the general public - may have been taken by surprise, but I am sure the committee and campaign organisers were not.
Even Mark now sees he was in error. If you continue to insist you know what was planned and intended and what happened in the process despite all evidence to the contrary then there is no point discussing it further.
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That was kinda my point. I picked ones that do mostly look like something. Most of her work is more abstract. Her statue commemorating Britten was a giant scallop shell. I don’t recall Britten being a giant scallop but what do I know, I never met the man.
The nit that people are picking is that regardless of what the people commissioning the statue may have said they wanted or what people looking at the statue may have expected, the artist produced what she intended to. A statue providing her impression of Wollstonecraft rather than a straightforward depiction of her.
You can complain that her submission didn’t meet the brief but that clearly didn’t bother the people who commissioned the piece.
As for it having been intended to look like her but not turning out that way, you’ve been pointed to the information on the commissioning process which shows that she submitted her proposal which is what she produced.
Oddly enough most people don’t knock up 10ft bronze statues on spec.
One can argue that the committee should have chosen a statue that does ‘look like’ Wollstonecraft but one can’t legitimately complain that this statue doesn’t look like her. It wasn’t intended to and no amount of insinuating that it was will make it so.
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