Madiba statue - is it art?

2007-08-20 23:19

Joylene van Wyk

London - A prominent British art critic says the statue of former president Nelson Mandela which will be erected in London soon is by no means a work of art.

The statue will be unveiled in little more than a week in Parliament Square opposite Westminster after an extended tug-of-war between the Mayor of London and Westminster municipality as to where it should go.

The city council's planning committee has given permission for the 2.7m statue to be erected in Parliament Square.

One of the election promises of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was that it would be erected on the northern side of Trafalgar Square. The city council wanted it on the southern side, on the opposite side of the road, right in front of South Africa House.

The sculptor, Ian Walters, completed the clay model, which has recently been cast in bronze, before he died of cancer last year.

'Unsuitable as a major work of art'

Charles Saumarez Smith, former director of the National Gallery, has written to a planning commission that the statue "is unsuitable as a major work of art", according to London's Sunday Times.

Saumarez Smith wrote that Walters was not necessarily the best choice of sculptor, lacking "distinction or artistic merit".

"His principal qualifications for this project are that he has already done one bust of Nelson Mandela and that he has met the sitter, but not that he is regarded by anyone, even including the supporters of the project, as a sculptor of any public distinction."

Saumarez Smith, who takes up the post of executive head of the Royal Academy of Arts next month, also wanted to know why the commission on "a project of this scale has not followed any of the normal rules of public competition".

Walters's statue will be unveiled on Wednesday August 29.

- Die Burger