Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’, was dedicated today – Wilde’s 170th birthday – on Dovehouse Green, Chelsea.
A sculpture of Oscar Wilde by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi was dedicated today on Dovehouse Green, Chelsea. The former churchyard is a short walk from Tite Street, where Wilde lived with his wife and children until his 1895 conviction on a charge of ‘gross indecency’. The posthumous casting of ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ was commissioned by the Paolozzi Foundation.
Paolozzi’s original design gave Wilde’s year of birth incorrectly as ‘183[?]’ (the last number is illegible; click to enlarge).
In the sculpture as cast, the birth year is given correctly as ‘1854’ (click to enlarge).
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s ‘Newton after James Watt’. Image: George Rex/Flickr.
The colossal bronze head, lying on its side and sliced into sections, has already attracted much criticism. Melanie McDonagh, writing in The Standard, slammed it as ‘quite, quite hideous’.Melanie McDonagh, ‘Oscar Wilde would hate this hideous sculpture of him that’s coming to London’, The Standard (London, UK), 29 Apr. 2024, view source She is echoed by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, who last month told the Observer: ‘I’m all for any sort of innovations in modern art. But this does seem to me to be unacceptable. It looks absolutely hideous.’Dalya Alberge, ‘“Absolutely hideous”: new London sculpture of Oscar Wilde condemned by his grandson’, Observer (London, UK), view source
Holland wonders what meaning the statue is intended to convey. ‘It seems to say “here is a monument to a man whom society decapitated”. How do we want to remember him? Amusing, entertaining, engaging or carved up and beheaded for breaking the law of the time? I know which I prefer.’
Simon Casimir Wilson, a former Tate curator whose extensive writings on Wilde include a 2020 book about Jacob Epstein’s monument to the poet and playwright, is also unimpressed. ‘Why is the head all chopped up? Why is it lying on its side? 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?Dalya Alberge, ‘“Absolutely hideous”: new London sculpture of Oscar Wilde condemned by his grandson’, Observer (London, UK), view source
Paolozzi’s ‘Newton after James Watt’, a similarly toppled and sliced head, was installed outside London’s Design Museum in 1990. It seems to allude to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, and their impacts both positive and negative.
The Wilde sculpture is so similar to ‘Newton after James Watt’ that it is difficult to see it as anything other than a repurposing of an idea that had previously worked: the sculptural equivalent of Elton John’s hasty rejigging of ‘Candle in the Wind’ so that the tribute to Marilyn Monroe would serve for Princess Diana. Searching for meaning in the Wilde sculpture may, therefore, be a futile task. Then again, Wilde is known for reusing his favourite epigrams in play after play, so perhaps we can imagine that Paolozzi intended to reference Wilde’s self-plagiarism.
Plaque describing ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ (click to enlarge)
Maggie Hambling’s ‘A Conversation with Oscar Wilde’. Image: Zoer/Flickr.
Danny Osborne’s Oscar Wilde memorial. Image: William Murphy/Flickr.
A plaque displayed near ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ explains that Paolozzi was invited by the Chelsea Society in 1998 to propose a public sculpture. He chose to commemorate Wilde, but the project could not be completed before his death in 2005.
What the plaque omits to mention is that in 1995 Paolozzi had submitted his design to a committee tasked with selecting a sculpture of Wilde for London. The committee, which included Holland and the actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, selected Maggie Hambling’s ‘A Conversation with Oscar Wilde’. Hambling’s sculpture of a bleary-eyed and slightly sloshed Wilde emerging from a black granite sarcophagus was unveiled near Charing Cross station in 1998.
‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ has much in common with Danny Osborne’s Oscar Wilde memorial. Both were runners up in the London competition, though Osborne’s later won a similar competition and was installed in a corner of Merrion Square, Dublin, in 1997. Both sport floppy fringes à la Hugh Grant in his Four Weddings pomp (Wilde never really had a hairstyle quite like it). And both depict their subject as many saw him in the 1990s: as a gay martyr.
As I argued in my article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Osborne’s memorial, time has marched on and Wilde’s image has marched with it. Recent biographies and monographs have been less interested in Wilde’s sexuality than in his political ideas and his status as a pioneer of modern celebrity culture.See e.g. Friedman, D. M. (2014) Wilde in America, Norton; Gillespie, M. P. (2018) Branding Oscar Wilde, Taylor & Francis; Ó Donghaile, D. (2020) Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siécle, Edinburgh University Press; Williams, K. (2020) Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, AK Press; Frankel, N. (2021) The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Reaktion. Meanwhile, LGBTQ historians have championed other figures from the past, many of whose stories are less tragic than Wilde’s.Joyce, S. (2022) LGBT Victorians, Oxford University Press
Because of this, Paolozzi’s sculpture, despite being unveiled in 2024, already looks dated. A new memorial that is actually new would have been preferable to one that was rejected as unsuitable almost thirty years ago.
I shan’t go as far as Independent critic Tom Lubbock did in 1998 when he called for sappers to demolish Paolozzi’s ‘unspeakable’ sculpture of Newton outside the British Library.Tom Lubbock, ‘It’s Got to Go’, Independent (London, UK), 1 Dec. 1998, view source Instead I will be grateful that ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ is conveniently pre-toppled.