The Other Whistler Gets His Comeuppance at the Tate

A video about a mural’s racism gives lots of room for thought.

I n Viva Voce, a single video at Tate Britain, Whistler’s head is paraded on a spike, figuratively. No, not James McNeil Whistler, whom the Brits claim for themselves but who always thought of himself as an American. I mean the other Whistler. That’s Rex Whistler (1905–1944), the high-society portraitist, muralist, costume designer, and Bright Young Thing.

Long years after he died a hero, a Welsh Guard fighting in Normandy, Whistler is in the crosshairs over a 55-foot-long mural he painted in 1927 for what was then the Tate’s elegant museum restaurant. It’s got three tiny passages that everyone now acknowledges are racist. Two depict a black child kidnapped by Bright Young Things and enslaved while one shows his mother, screaming in protest from a tree and looking like a monkey. The black figures are about four inches tall.

Unnoticed, trivialized, or ignored for years, they turned toxic in 2020 during Britain’s Black Lives Matters reckoning. The museum and restaurant were already closed because of the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis. So mortified was the museum by the mural that it moved the restaurant to another space. The mural, The Expedition in Search of Rare Meats and accessioned as part of the Tate’s collection, stayed off view.

What to do, what to do, museum brass moaned between sobs and calls to PR crisis consultants. This past spring, the Tate premiered Viva Voce, a 22-minute video about the Whistler murals and highbrow racism. Made by artist Keith Piper (b. 1960), it will run at least into January.

Piper, also a critic and curator, is a central figure in the 1980’s BLK Art Group, mostly concept artists from England’s Midlands. The video runs in what was once the restaurant, with Whistler’s mural on view as star player, mark of shame, and murder weapon.

Viva voce is a Latin expression meaning “with the living voice,” or “word of mouth,” but it’s also a college term for an oral exam in which a professor questions a student, challenges his responses, and tosses a rhetorical grenade here and there. At Tate Britain, London’s museum for historic British art, it’s the name of Piper’s extraordinary video project. With backing and forthing, I veered from “much ado about nothing” to “they’re nuts” to “well, they have a point” to “they did what they needed to do.” Though irritating and very unfair to Whistler on so many levels, the video’s not at all bad. It’s a case study in handling art that’s now offensive.

The video is a three-character drama starring Ian Pink as a short, rat-faced, pasty, tweedy Whistler, brought back from the dead, and Ellen O’Grady, playing a 50-something white, surely Corbynista professor turned prosecutor who has been researching the mural and has enough bones to pick to constitute several pairs of feet. Everything about her, her screech, faux-Afro hair, and endless finger-pointing, says “stick bitch.” She’s called Professor Shepherd, endowing her with the wisdom and righteousness of Jesus.

A third character, Edith Oliver, is played by Cindy Evans. Oliver was Whistler’s close and much older friend. She pops in and out to contradict Whistler and to note his character flaws. I’d never heard of any of the actors. The actress O’Grady is not to be confused with another Ellen O’Grady, who belongs to a group called Cartoonists for Palestine.

The video is filmed in what was once the Tate restaurant, everything removed except that leather banquettes that line the walls beneath the mural. The banquettes suggest seating in an old English courtroom drama. The video is displayed in the space, visitors sitting on a banquette if they want or wandering around what’s now a gallery. The video plays on four screens, two each on a freestanding wall. The space is dimly lit. This makes the film both a drama and an effective documentary. We’re there.

Whistler thinks he’s there for a friendly interview, his first in many a moon, since he’s been dead for 80 years. He’s in for what he soon protests is an inquisition. He first explains what The Expedition in Search of Rare Meats depicts. It starts with a great truth, which is true no longer. English cooking, historically, was awful.

Over the years, I’ve eaten in the Tate’s restaurant and was, in fact, offered a job at the Tate as I sat on one of those banquettes. Whistler described his conception of the project, which made him, then an art student, famous.

He describes it as a capriccio of the sort that Tiepolo painted. It’s a whimsical adventure story in which a group of toffs travel the world from rural England to Europe, India, and China, skipping the U.S. The Brits resented us even then because of our prosperity and freedom. They land in the Duchy of Epicurania. The search is for the best food, which, it suggests, could be found at the Tate restaurant, which was new and an innovation in British museums. “I wanted to make it look like Chinese wallpaper,” Whistler adds, meaning chinoiserie wallpaper produced by the French company Zuber and Cie. The party returns to London, laden with delicacies destined for the Tate restaurant’s menu. “It was after the war,” Whistler says, referring to World War I, “and London was such a dreary, sad place.”

I think on my job interview I ate an indifferent mushroom omelet but suspect I impressed my boss-to-have-been by ordering a double scotch, neat. They needed American chutzpah, she said. I gave the murals a quick glance. A scholar of American art, I’d never heard of Rex Whistler. Though a Masterpiece Theater fan, and partial to Evelyn Waugh, I’m a Yankee. The Bright Young Things? Fifty push-ups, I think.

Piper’s Professor Shepherd is having none of Whistler’s cant. She forces him to concede that the black child was nabbed, enslaved, and chained as a scout. Whistler painted his self-portrait, nonchalant and on a bike, behind the chained, naked child. The boy is freed at the end, Whistler says, but Shepherd’ has already made lamb chops of the hapless artist, long dead and unaware of woke traps.

With friends like Oliver, who needs enemies? She says that Whistler got lots of help on the mural from an uncredited fellow student — a woman — and, along with Shepherd, pushes the point that Whistler got the job through cultivating Joseph Duveen, the dealer and Tate donor. “He’d be a safe bet for the job,” Duveen said in recommending him. “You can never have too many friends in high places,” Whistler says. Stephen Tennant, an aristocrat and Whistler’s boyfriend for a bit, helped. Whistler went all ways. Talullah Bankhead is said to have turned him straight.

Why bother with this particular Bright Young Thing? Whistler’s murals made what a critic in 1927 called “the most amusing room in Europe,” but, knowing how lazy art critics can be, I’m wondering how closely anyone looked. I learned years ago that he was a very good artist, high society, to be sure, and not as revered as he should be. His best murals are in country houses rather than museums. His views are very much of his time, and he represents a class of rich people we love for their glamour and despise, as we should, for how silly and empty they were. He was, though, only 21 when he got the Tate job, and 22 when he finished.

Watching Professor Shepherd, I thought of an old Yiddish expression. “I hope all her teeth fall out but one, and that one aches.” I’m relieved I’m not married to her. The film aims at establishing Whistler as unusually racist, which is unfair, and Shepherd is so extreme. Cut the dead guy some slack. He was killed by Germans in 1944 after he got out of the tank he commanded to move wounded men to safety.

Show trials are decidedly not England’s cup of tea. Common law, proper trials, and “innocent until proven guilty” are English and transplanted to America, where we’re busy strangling them to serve left-wing ideology. Viva Voce isn’t a real trial, of course. Whistler’s long dead, and the mural is nearly a hundred years old. No one’s going to the slammer, and the film’s a drama. To its credit, the Tate isn’t closing the space. The otherwise hapless and now gone Tory government prohibited the destruction of offensive art. Rather, the art has to be “retained and explained.” Piper made a film — a work of art — that, like all good art, is nuanced and layered.

At some point, the Tate should commission a reality video with two barristers contesting a hate-crime charge against Whistler. What we’re getting now is one-sided. Piper and Tate researchers plumbed the files on Expedition. They found, we learn, letters from as far back as the 1970s complaining about the racist bits, so the museum’s brass was well aware. I wonder how Britain’s hate-speech law would fare in a brisk debate, Whistler at the center. Or put wigs on Alan Dershowitz versus the loony toon Jack Smith. Nothing wrong with encouraging people to think.

My Tate job? I declined. My late father suggested that the salary, robust by British curatorial standards, would have led me to live off capital, a couple of thousand or so quid per month. Skinflint Yankee as I am, I like nice things and wouldn’t want to live in Tooting. He knew this. He lived off capital to the point where I paid for his funeral.

I love London, the greatest place on Earth. We speak English but the English aren’t us. We’re more like the Scots and the Irish. The English invented passive-aggressive psychology, then perfected it and made it a religion, notably among the curatorial class. I would have supervised curators at the Tate, which means “make them work.”

In six months, they’d hate me, and I’d hate them. I’d be taking my scotch, neat, and by the bottle.