Manchester Art Gallery’s New Hyper-Woke Exhibition Shows it Has Lost its Way

I am currently reading Andrew Doyle’s latest book The End of Woke. I have not yet figured out how the contents are congruent with the title but if anyone, including Andrew Doyle, thinks woke has ended, they have not visited Manchester Art Gallery.

Having picked up my umpteenth visa for China at the Chinese visa centre, and with time to kill, I went next door to the gallery which I have visited many times. I headed straight for the 18th century collection as I find the depictions of classical scenes fascinating. There is always something new to see.

On entering the main room, I was confronted by a garish yellow painted wall with a few posters and paintings on them and wondered if I had come to the right place. Turning round to view the first of the regular collection, deciding to take in the yellow wall later, all was revealed.

This was no longer just an exhibition of 18th century art, much of it inspired by the Grand Tour (think Percy Bysshe Shelley and not Jeremy Clarkson) – it was now an exhibition dedicated to ‘Rethinking the Grand Tour’. I can do no better than quote the words on the information plaque: “Beneath the refinement of the Grand Tour is a story of empire and cultural appropriation.” And there was me thinking it was just a gap year for sexually repressed 18th century upper class men of an artistic nature to sample the pleasures of the flesh – often with each other – across Greece and Italy.

The plaque continues:

As the scope of European tourism extended to the Middle East and Asia, a colonial viewpoint prevailed. Artefacts were taken back home in private collections and were later acquired by museums. Manchester Art Gallery maintained this classical fantasy, purchasing Grand Tour artworks during the mid 1900s.

Referring to the yellow wall opposite, this was dedicated to “the theme of migration, with a focus on empire and colonisation, trade, gendered experience and feelings aroused by the comfort of home”.

The posters on the yellow wall depicted Nigeria which, correct me if I am wrong, was not part of the Grand Tour. The posters “were created during the British government’s brutal rule of Nigeria – depicting the country in an overly simplified manner typical of the Grand Tour’s colonial perspective”.  Whether or not Britain was brutal I leave to the experts but I knew a former Nigerian District Officer who became the private secretary to Nnamdi Azikiwe the first President of Nigeria. They maintained long and cordial relations for many years.

However, ‘brutal’ the British were, I imagine it paled to insignificance compared with the brutality into which Nigeria descended in 1967 during the civil war, always described by the BBC as the Biafran War. The war led to the first televised famine. I recall, as a child, nightly depictions of starving Biafran children with skeletal legs, grossly distended abdomens and bulging fly infested eyes. One of my French teachers was a Biafran missionary who had to flee the country. The morality of colonialism aside, I cannot help thinking things were a tad better when the British were in charge.

The yellow wall exhibit ended with the statement: “If there were opportunities for growth, people within Africa would have no reason to migrate.” Britain gives Nigeria £38 million in aid annually, but the lack of opportunities still seems to be our fault. We left an education system, an infrastructure and a system of government. Perhaps it’s time the Nigerians got on with things by themselves and stopped depending on ‘colonial’ money.

If only it stopped there. Moving to another room I came across Thomson’s Aeolian Harp by Turner. Described on the Manchester Art Gallery webpage as “a radical treatment of a well-established and popular subject: the River Thames seen from Richmond Hill” it was the focus of an attack in 2022 by Just Stop Oil protesters who “glued their hands to the frame of this painting to protest against the burning of fossil fuels”.

This information is helpfully added to the plaque about the painting. Lest the lunatics descend again and do something worse, the gallery has clearly had to genuflect to their insanity by adding: “Climate change is predicted to be the most significant driver of population displacement in the near future.” Presumably that explains the thousands of mainly young men turning up on the southeast shores of England daily.

Then Hodges’ View of Calcutta (Kolkata!) is used to explain to anyone with the will left to read it that “Art in the 1700s served as a tool of imperial power and economic conquest. The colonial migration that dispossessed local people of their land, resources and culture is quietly celebrated in such paintings.” Why, thank you Mr Killjoy.

In the midst of all this interwoven intersectionalism I felt privileged to see a very rare item. Attached to one wall, with a bench placed in front of it so that people could take a load off while contemplating this unusual artefact, was a Refusal of visit visa document. Someone had tried to enter the UK, their stated purposed being to “visit Manchester Art Gallery” but had been refused a visa by an immigration officer. The reasons given were that the bank balance provided by the applicant did not match the amount found in his actual bank account. The bank account also showed evidence of some substantial payments exceeding the applicant’s stated income which raised the suspicions of the immigration officer. I would like to think that Manchester Art Gallery is celebrating the hard work and dedication of our Border Force. But I doubt it.

Next in this dismal tour I saw from a distance a huge Union Flag and guessed that it would not be portrayed in a positive light. And it wasn’t. The poster was titled Empire Marketing and the plaque said: “In 1930 Britain dominated vast areas of the globe: around 70 countries were aggressively controlled through invasions and colonisation. Entire economies and their resources were forced to serve the polluting industries of the UK. Sustainable systems were destroyed, tens of millions died and livelihoods were made precarious. All this was justified by the British sense of racial superiority.” It looks like the staff held a competition to write a paragraph with as many woke terms as possible. According to the plaque the poster displayed “brutally colonised geographies” and “depicts the founding causes and economic relations of today’s climate crisis”.

One is not allowed to view Hylas and the Nymphs by Waterhouse, which was removed temporarily, without reading that this was done “to encourage discussion about the representation of gender, class, race and sexuality”. And to be reminded in the same gallery that many of the paintings in the section “use classical myth to perpetuate Victorian myths of gender and power”.

Even the two famous Mancunian sons, Lowry and Valette, did not escape. Nothing specific is said in relation to their work but halfway round each side of their gallery was a poster, one titled No War but Class War and the other Jive Azz Jim Crow Gotta Go. At that point, I decided that I too ‘gotta go’ and exited through the gift shop of cultural contrition.

Dr Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong SAR, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.