Rachel Reeves has been criticized for replacing Nigel Lawson’s portrait in the Treasury with a portrait of pioneering politician Ellen Wilkinson, who organized the Jarrow March and was one of the first female cabinet ministers. .
Manchester-born Wilkinson became an MP for Jarrow in 1935, and a year later was part of the Jarrow Crusade, in which workers from the north-east walked to London to protest the soaring unemployment rates that had devastated the region. Organized the famous march.
Wilkinson, nicknamed “Red Ellen” by the press, also worked as a journalist and was known for her passionate defense of the working class in parliament and public life until her sudden death in 1947 at the age of 55. was.
Although she was a founding member of the British Communist Party, she always remained a member of the Labor Party, becoming Secretary of State for Education in Clement Attlee’s postwar government, and also serving in the Churchill government during the war.
The Telegraph said Ms Reeves “has the right to display any picture she likes in her office” but that Mr Wilkinson’s participation “makes clear the direction she and her boss are taking this country”. ”.
When asked about the switch, a Treasury spokesperson told the paper that the answer was simply “change.”
Ms Reeves, the first female Prime Minister, has previously pledged to ensure that all artwork displayed at 11 Downing Street is by a female artist or person.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer was recently criticized for removing a portrait of Margaret Thatcher shortly after moving into Downing Street, saying he disliked “pictures of people looking at me”.
Eddie Frankel, Time Out’s art editor, said the new government’s art choices signify an administration that wants to be seen as doing things differently.
“Any rehang is a reordering and reprioritization of cultural symbols,” he says. “When it comes to government collections, it’s even tougher. The old (and conservative) doesn’t fit in, and the new (and radical, modern) comes in.”
The Daily Mail has criticized the decision to publish two paintings depicting part of Dame Paula Rego’s mural ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ as part of a Downing Street hang-up, criticizing the He claimed there was “growing anger over Keir Starmer’s purge of No. 10” against people. Mr. Gladstone’s portrait had been removed.
Former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith told the paper the decision was “hysterical woke madness” and claimed Labor “doesn’t like our history or who we are”.
Frankel said the Lego piece was not too radical, considering it was painted more than 30 years ago and is based on a Renaissance altarpiece in the National Gallery.
“While some of Lego’s themes, particularly the foregrounding of women and their stories, are ‘anti-establishment’ by today’s standards, and perhaps even by the standards of the 1990s, Lego’s work is not radical art. There’s not…It’s about as ‘conservative’ as painting has been in the 1990s,” he said.
“It’s not like the new government has hung a picture of Sarah Lucas with her boobs and fried eggs on the walls of Whitehall, or punched a Damien Hirst shark at the entrance to No. 10.”