Do we like them the less knowing, as we know now, that during those years at Ditchling, Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters? When in 1980 I came upon the evidence, up to then suppressed, in Gill's private diaries in the University of California at Los Angeles, I cannot say I was totally surprised. The flesh-and-spirit tensions in his work are palpable: this was what had in the first place attracted me to Gill as the subject for critical biography. In his portraits of his children, I was already conscious of a sort of overbalance of tendresse. Many who admire Gill’s work said it can still be enjoyed, despite what the public now knows of the man who produced it.

Others have gone further still. John MacGregor, an expert on the art of the clinically insane, believes Darger was a kind of repressed serial killer. It’s now known he kept a shrine to a murdered Chicago schoolgirl. When he lost a photo he had of her, he begged God to return it. When He didn’t reply, Darger sat down and immediately wrote gruesome execution scenes killing his child characters as punishment. What is striking is that once the immediate commotion over Gill's sexual aberrations had died down, there was a new surge of interest in his work. The 1992 retrospective at the Barbican finally demolished the patronising view of Gill as a Catholic sculptor, setting him in the mainstream of modern British art. The monumental architectural carvings made in Gill's Pigotts period in the 1930s, such familiar elements in the London street scene that they were in danger of being overlooked, emerged with a new clarity. Prospero and Ariel outside the BBC building in Portland Place; the large-scale East Wind sculpture that hovers over St James's Underground station: these are weirdly wonderful examples of Gill's work. Should Gill's life and art be kept separate? Does art transcends any human biography? Is it acceptable to ever show art by someone guilty of such horrendous crimes? The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the four evangelists. Hague & Gill Printers. 1934 Faber & Faber More is known about the private lives of artists - not least because many draw on their experiences for their work - so moral dilemmas will continue to arise. In Gill's case the outrage has not significantly undermined his status. The BBC uses Gill Sans typefaces in corporate branding and Westminster Cathedral retains its Stations of the Cross.As someone who carries out investigations of computers belonging to suspected paedophiles with a view to gathering evidence where it is available, I would challenge Alext, Ian B and any others like them to continue holding the view they do after having been forced to actually see with their own eyes the utterly revolting acts that these kind of filth perpetuate and get a thrill from viewing - I find it hard to believe that anyone, having seen this kind of material, could want anything less than complete erasure from existance of anything linked to individuals that commit such abhorrent acts. Gill was one of the most respected artists of the 20th Century. His statue Prospero and Ariel adorns the BBC's Broadcasting House and the Creation of Adam is in the lobby of the Palais des Nations, now the European HQ of the United Nations in Geneva. But for every viewer who can separate the art and the artist, there will be another who can't. For every dispassionate critic, there is another who can't ignore the crimes of the artist. For every philosophical purist, another with a gut feeling that the work of paedophiles should be shunned. There seem to be several arguments here on a number of different areas. The reason that Davey wrote the books was to be able to get close to children. This is very different to an artist who did terrible things but didn't produce their art to facilitate their crimes. In these cases we can differentiate between the person and the art, but in the case of Davey, the person, the work and the crime are the same thing.

The furore continued into Thursday as the debate developed into an art vs life dynamic on social media.

Survivors couldn't pray at the Stations of the Cross. They were done by a paedophile. The very hands that carved the stations were the hands that abused. One of the most widely used British typefaces, Gill Sans, used in the classic design system of Penguin Books and by the London and North Eastern Railway and later British Railways is a font that speaks volumes. It is also a visual system haunted by the legacy of its creator aka English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, Eric Gill who was a serial criminal. Kip Fenn is a success: his career has taken off within a major UN agency trying to spread wealth from the rich to the poor. But all is not well with the world - the golden age of oil and chips is now over, and unsustainable development is leading to social turmoil, and to world war. Kip has found love and a new family, but he can find no way to stop his older children self-destruct; nor does he realise his partner’s deceit. With this in mind, Hepburn’s decision to mount Eric Gill: The Body might be thought rather brave – and certainly this is the word I hear repeatedly from those who support his project. “My overriding sense is that this is quite brave,” says Alistair Brown, a policy officer at the Museums Association. “It’s a test case.” But still, I wonder. Is it courageous, or is it merely foolhardy? And what consequences will it have in the longer run both for Gill’s work and those institutions that are its guardians? Is it possible that Hepburn, in fighting his own museum’s “self-censorship”, will start a ripple effect that ultimately will see more censorship elsewhere, rather than less? And once Gill is dispensed with, where do we go next? Where does this leave, say, artists such as Balthus and Hans Bellmer? Even if their private lives were less reprehensible than Gill’s, their work – that of Balthus betrays a fixation on young girls, while Bellmer is best known for his lifesize pubescent dolls – is surely far more unsettling. The striking thing about Gill's work, whether carving, letter-cutting or typography, is his mastery of linear expression. As a young art student, he knew the cathedral in intimate detail, affected most of all by Chichester's remarkable pair of early Norman stone panels carved in relief with biblical scenes. Gill, his emotions always close to the surface, could not look at these carvings without tears. Their influence is obvious on his own characteristically two dimensional carvings: the Westminster Stations; the Creation of Adam panels on the League of Nation's building in Geneva. The strange, ecstatic flatness of such famous wood engravings as Divine Lovers also originated here.

Chichester is the right place for reassessing Gill, since it was his home town. Gill, for all his wildness, was a very small-town person. He lived in Chichester, where his father was a clergyman, through his formative teenage years, the time when this most phallic of artists discovered the unexpected functioning of his own male organ: "What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water tap into a pillar of fire." The impecunious curate's family were crowded into a little terrace house on Chichester's North Walls, and it seems likely that incestuous relations with at least one of Eric's sisters started here. The books should continue to be published and used for what they are. By the law of averages there are nasty people working in banks for example, but there is no suggestion that we should close our accounts. Why not use the royalties to help a charity working in this area - Childline for example. And if attitudes count as well as deeds then there are Wagner [composer, raging anti-Semite] and Larkin [poet, supposed racist and sexist]. Until 2017, work by Gill, who lived and worked in Ditchling for 15 years, was exhibited at the museum without any commentary on his personal conduct. But then, following a lengthy review involving a panel of artists and critics, the museum decided to make reference to it next to his work – while continuing to show it.Among Gill's last sculptures were a series of commissions for Guildford Cathedral. He spent time between October and December 1939 working at Guildford, on scaffolding carving the figure of John the Baptist. [1] He also worked on a set of panels depicting the stations of the cross for the Anglican St Alban's Church in Oxford, finishing the drawings three weeks before he died and completing nine of the pieces himself. [42] [29] For the Chapel of Saint George and the English Martyrs, in Westminster Cathedral, Gill designed a low relief sculpture to occupy the wall behind the altar. [16] Gill's design showed a life-sized figure of Christ the Priest on the cross attended by Sir Thomas More and John Fisher. [16] Gill died before the work was completed and Lawrence Cribb was tasked with finishing the piece by the Cathedral authorities who insisted he remove an element of Gill's original design, a figure of a pet monkey. [16] When the chapel was eventually opened to the public this censorship of Gills' last work was a matter of some considerable controversy. [16] a b c d e f g David V Barrett (5 August 2021). "Eric Gill: a moral problem". The Catholic Herald . Retrieved 12 February 2022. He abused his maids, his prostitutes, animals, he was having sex with everything that moved - a very deranged man sexually." His Perpetua typeface with the uppercase based upon monumental Roman inscriptions was first designed in 1925 and it was first made public around 1929.

A victim of a paedophile teacher has asked for his music textbooks for children to be banned. Does the work, or the art, of someone who has committed such a crime have to be condemned? Clothes: An Essay Upon the Nature and Significance of the Natural and Artificial Integuments Worn by Men and Women, 1931 [73] No need for a high profile ban of Davey's music textbooks - the publisher could quietly delete them & let the supply dwindle away. Where the crimes & the readership are so closely linked, it'd clearly be wrong to keep selling, and profiting from, them. I think the problem is that these works frighten people. They are reminders of the complexity of human life. We would much prefer it if our "monsters" could only do monstrous things as it helps us catagorise them. If the monsters are instead capable of also doing good things then it makes us feel more uncomfortable as it makes us think of them as human with both human talents and human failings. Petra Gill's upbringing was unorthodox. Gill had positive ideas about the role of men and women in society. Neither Petra nor her two sisters - Betty, born in 1905 and Joanna, born in 1910 - went to school. Eric Gill himself taught them arithmetic, drawing, elementary Latin, history and geography; their mother Mary Ethel taught them reading, writing, sewing and all the skills necessary for a full domestic life.

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Others clearly didn’t feel the same. One person thought it – knowing what had gone on in the Gill household – ugly and rather horrible. A discussion followed in which someone asked if its value as art – fairly minimal, in her opinion – would merit its inclusion in any future exhibition; while another suggested that, conversely, it might be a rather useful object in terms of telling Gill’s story: after all, while it connects directly to his daughter, it is not, in and of itself, a controversial object (unlike, say, a nude drawing of her).