Well, I didn’t break it, maybe only lightly bruised it. What was there to bruise though? A set of ideologies that at the core are so fragile. A religion, that can’t deal with dissent. The National Portrait Gallery was so immersed in proving their particular theme that they could not be questioned, especially by the likes of me.
An email reply was sent to reassure me they were professionals. After all they worked with the “National Gallery, Queen Mary University, and NYU to produce this film, which explores how enslaved labor paid for art collections and artworks ‘employing’ Colonial and Empire Histories Advisory Group, the sector-leading Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester (RCMG) and a tone of voice specialist to help us address such histories in, appropriate, sensitive and nuanced ways”.
They were manning the helm of the Titanic, and I need not be concerned about the looming iceberg ahead. While the band played on, I remained unconvinced.
The story of Kings New Clothes came to mind. The moment when the impostor weavers claimed the fine clothes were invisible to those who were either incompetent or stupid. I could see the King, plain as day, was butt naked.
The curatorial team realizing I wasn’t about to be fobbed off, allocated a ‘handler’, who tried to lose me in a bureaucratic maze with a Freedom of Information request, giving them time to sort out a strategy. The FOI was a redacted Christie’s Private Sales brochure and an article by a Tissot expert in the Burlington Magazine. I attempted to contact the expert to confirm the info. I was thwarted, they had already been briefed. Whoever researched this debacle, conflated the two stories, making a tasty meal fit to serve the hungry Institution. The problem with all Institutions is that they rely on collective thought and operate via group thinking. It was the same during COVID-19, this is about race. Each person lives in fear that they may be accused of not towing the ‘party line’, each knows any lack of loyalty and they could be seen as a traitor, ultimately out of a job.
So there was no chance a public retraction was on the cards. They had dug in their heels, whether right or wrong they would not concede. More stone-walling, “the curator was away on unexpected leave'“ which is the office version of the dog ate my homework. They have “flagged my email to be addressed as soon as they are back".” Finally, after giving them 13 days to circle their wagons with a reply, I wrote again to see if they had located the missing curator and again stated my position.
“It’s time we resolved this.” I wrote. Eventually, they replied having accepted that they would need to revise the caption, one more time. This is with the caveat that they had ‘insufficient direct evidence’. Maintaining the guilt of a (non) crime they can’t prove…..yet. Not a mention of a public retraction.
Well, I figured, if they weren’t going to go public, I should. I contacted a couple of other newspapers before sending a letter to the ultra-conservative Daily Telegraph. This Institution also has an agenda like NPG and signals all the time. Their interest also has to do with race. My issue has always been with accuracy.
The caption beside the portrait could have read “The 19th century London docks were a hive of crime, gin taverns, and prostitution, its streets packed with brawling, drunken sailors on leave. It is believed that Edward Fox-White established and sustained his art business on monies working as a part-time, male sex worker in the area.”
That would be equally inaccurate.
They had used their professional clout wrapped around an agenda to bat me away, then doubled down on the claim, delayed answering my claims directly by leading me down a FOI rabbit hole, not conceding, and not retracting when caught with their pants down. Why?
To quote Groucho Marx, the Gallery’s position was, "Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” In short, to use contemporary relational language; I was ‘gaslighted’, ‘jilted’, ‘cold shouldered’, then eventually ‘ghosted’. Should I not ‘call it out’?
I chose me.
"Call the court physician! Call an intermission!
His majesty is wide open to ridicule and scorn."
"The King is in the altogether
But altogether, the altogether
He's all together, as naked as
The day that he was born”
We live in charged, racially fractured times, and constantly seek evidence to support our bias. Why was Moses Gomes Silva, a Sephardic Jewish trader and slave owner, even part of the story? It wasn’t a painting of him.
Becoming this week’s poster boy for the Conservative press, allowed a critique of the museum behind my mixed-race front, ‘our’ octoroon, a mullato mascot, and nobody could accuse anyone of being a whiny ‘white’ bigot.
This Brown, Brit, Bloke, Broke, Woke. The press could use my story as the NPG had done with Edward Fox-White and Moses Gomes Silva. We are just sliced-up scraps to be used in someone else’s collage. Paintings cut to fit ready-made frames.
