A large sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head that’s slated to be unveiled in a public garden in southwest London has been panned by the late poet and playwright’s grandson, Merlin Holland.
The six-foot-tall sculpture by the late Scottish artist Sir Eduardo Paollozzi depicts Wilde’s head lying on its side with his face sliced into segments. It’s been called “absolutely hideous” by Holland.
“I’m all for any sort of innovations in modern art,” he told the Observer. “But this does seem to me to be unacceptable.” Holland added that the work looks nothing like Wilde and fails to convey his grandfather’s brilliance as one of the greatest English playwrights.
He went on to say that the segmented bronze head is so gloomy that anyone who sees it is more inclined to consider Wilde’s demise as opposed to his celebrated writing. The wordsmith died in 1900 of meningitis. Some claim the cause of his disease was syphilitic, but Holland believes this is a misconception, arguing that his grandfather’s infection followed a surgical intervention, perhaps a mastoidectomy, in which diseased cells are removed from a part of the skull behind one’s ear.
The sculpture is due to be installed on Dovehouse Green, a garden near Wilde’s former home, in a few weeks.
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Paolozzi, who died in 2005, submitted his design for the sculpture to a committee back in 1995, which was chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs and included Holland and the actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. Despite being shortlisted to six candidates, the artist’s vision was rejected for being too brutalist. Holland described Paolozzi as “a great artist of modern times” but said “[the committee] just didn’t feel that a segmented head of Oscar would represent what we wanted the public to enjoy and admire about him.”
The committee opted for Maggi Hambling’s bust of Wilde, which emerges from a bench-like granite sarcophagus inscribed with a quote from the writer’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. It reads, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The work was installed near Charing Cross station in London in 1998.
Simon Wilson, a former curator at the Tate, also didn’t hold back about the sculpture. “Why is the head all chopped up? Why is it lying on its side?” he said. “As an art historian, I can construct a reading – that the cuts in the head are symbolic of Wilde’s suffering and that it’s toppled on its side is a symbol of his fall from grace. But will a non-specialist viewer see that?”
The Paolozzi Foundation said in a statement: “The foundation takes the view that everyone is entitled to their opinion, including Oscar Wilde’s grandson. We also note that the Oscar Wilde Society is fully supportive.” Wilde would no doubt have had something to say about it. He once observed of sculpture in England: “In looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one could almost wish that we had killed the noble art completely: to see the statues of our departed statesmen in marble frock-coats and bronze, double-breasted waistcoats adds a new horror to death.”