Wanted: one artistic visionary. Must be dead, British and have a face fit for a banknote.
The UK public have been asked to nominate painters, designers, architects, film-makers and photographers to appear on the new £20 note – after the Bank of England announced that it wanted a figure from the visual arts to replace the economist, Adam Smith.
“There is a wealth of individuals within the field of visual arts whose work shaped British thought, innovation, leadership, values and society and who continue to inspire people today,” said the Bank’s Governor, Mark Carney.
The appeal follows an outcry in 2013 over a lack of women on paper money, prompted by the bank’s decision to put Sir Winston Churchill on £5 notes in place of the prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry.
The bank’s new banknote character advisory committee will draw up a shortlist from public nominations, from which Carney will make the final decision. Living visual artists are not eligible for selection.
Independent critics suggest their favourites.
NOTEWORTHY FIGURES?
WILLIAM BLAKE: Whose image would most proudly taunt the perverted ideas of mammon and monarchy which the new £20 note will embody? That visionary genius – poet, painter and engraver – and son of a hosier William Blake (1757-1827) who was the epitome of single-minded dedication to his own artistic ideals, and the very embodiment of cussed self-belief.
Blake is the anti-establishment figure par excellence, and we urgently need his indomitably radical spirit to preside over us at this doleful hour.
He was at war with the Royal Academy and its contemptible president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was at war with the established church and poured scorn, in Songs of Experience, on its darkly oppressive influence. He had one exhibition only during his lifetime and that was a much-mocked failure.
Yet he continued to listen to the voices of his inner angels, and the fruits of all that listening can be seen in his poems, paintings, and great prophetic books.
JAMES STIRLING: British architects have largely become cowed into submission by witless clients, and the banknote should celebrate the idea that great design takes great thought, great nerve, and a great ability to convince others that great architecture is afoot.
The latter-day Awkward Squad includes Sir Denys Lasdun, who designed the National Theatre after admitting he knew nothing about theatres. And we can’t ignore modernists Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, whose buildings include the Cardross Seminary. The most awkward and original of all? James Stirling, who invented strikingly different forms of academic and museum buildings, such as the Florey building at Oxford and the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.
ALEXANDER McQUEEN: In the annals of British fashion history, Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) is the only designer who warrants a place on the reverse of a banknote. The irony of that wouldn’t be lost on McQueen, whose penury as a young designer was such that he created clothes from fabric stolen from flatmates, or industrial plastic found in skips; he set up business under his middle name because he was still signing on to receive unemployment benefit.
So why does McQueen deserve prime position on a new twenty? Because he was a brave, uncompromising pioneer in design; because his clothes were engineered with a precision and invention that put his contemporaries to shame; because he led a French haute couture house to international critical acclaim and commercial success. He is the blueprint others wish to emulate. If Carney wants to surrender the note to those Brits who continue to inspire today, McQueen is a sure bet.
The Independent