This week Philip Jackson came to lunch at Cumberland Lodge to discuss his talk here in a few weeks from now. Who he? I needn’t ask that of anyone who follows contemporary figurative sculpture, for Mr Jackson is among the best artists of the human form and of animals anywhere today, particularly when they are used in memorials.His statue of the late Queen Mother adorns the Mall in London and here in Windsor Great Park he has rendered a commanding Golden Jubilee equestrian statue of The Queen. He is an artist of consummate imagination, whose Venetian and ecclesiastical figures have been seen all over the world. Increasingly he has been commissioned to design and produce major works which pay tribute to great personages or events in our national history. The latest of these is his design for the sculpture that forms the central feature of the Memorial to Bomber Command, which will be placed near Hyde Park Corner and will depict the seven man crew of a Lancaster bomber newly returned from a raid over Germany in the Second World War.
Why blog about this? In a week that saw teachers criticised for going on strike and a consequent flurry of criticisms of standards in our schools - “how can they neglect our children’s education for even a day, when they have so much to catch up on?” was the implication – it is salutary to ask whether we should still be remembering the past through the erecting of solid objects. Teaching is now as much interactive, online and encouraging a creative response as it is about reading documents, going round museums and admiring portraits and statues. Are effigies of dead men and women the best way to recall and record such people? Philip listed all the groups who have protested about his commemorative work on Bomber Command – pacifists, traditionalists, modernists, environmentalists, all have something to say about it, usually critical.
And yet, and yet... Five young men gazing at the sky looking out for their lost companion who will never return, while their two comrades look to the ground recognising the absolute nature of death, make a sad and disturbing tableau. The average age of the 55,500 men who died in Bomber Command was 22. They have no visible memorial. Today one has been planned only through the generosity of people now in their 80s and 90s and those who remember the sacrifice these airmen made. It is not sentimental, lachrymose, chauvinistic or ‘half in love with easeful death’ to acknowledge their contribution to history and to our democratic survival by depicting them in a manner that they themselves would have understood. It is true that London and other cities proliferate with statues of forgotten soldiers, politicians and occasionally philanthropists, whose reputations may not be nearly as high now as it was when their monument was unveiled – what price Earl Haig in 2011? But without these figures we would have only a partial knowledge of our own story. I for one am honoured to have met Philip Jackson while he is at work on what may be his masterpiece. It will certainly be the largest figurative war memorial in the country. He is fully alive to the ethics of what he has been commissioned to do and we should all be proud that we can still engage great artists to remember great stories.
Alastair Niven
Principal
Philip Jackson was at Cumberland Lodge on Saturday 30th July 2011 as part of a weekend conference called ART IN THE PARK.
