Why Christie’s is wrong to cancel Eric Gill

Eric Gill was an incestuous paedophile and his own letters prove it, but the value of his work can run into millions of pounds. So it was a surprise to hear rumours that auction house Christie’s will no longer be accepting his art. Will they really be turning away all Gills, even the masterpieces? I asked one Christie’s employee for confirmation. ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘It would not be consistent to refuse to sell the Gill trifles but continue to sell his masterpieces.’ The Christie’s press office said they wouldn’t comment, which is a shame because the decision raises interesting questions.

Why single Gill out? Christie’s will keep selling art by murderers such as Caravaggio (if they can find it) and next month they will be selling work by Balthus, an even more expensive artist who often eroticises children. Picasso made explicit drawings of his lover’s adopted 13-year-old daughter, but it’s unthinkable that Christie’s would stop selling his pieces. By rejecting Gill’s whole body of work yet continuing to accept art by more expensive reprobates, Christie’s have made themselves look like hypocrites.

Perhaps they have decided to cancel Gill because he’s recently made the news. At the beginning of the year a man with a hammer attacked Gill’s carving of Prospero and Ariel on the front of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. Days before, four men who had toppled a sculpture of the slave trader Edward Colston had been acquitted of causing criminal damage. But these two attacks are fundamentally different. It’s one thing to say that you shouldn’t celebrate a slave trader but it’s quite another to say that an artist’s work should be judged by his life, and that it’s legitimate to destroy work by artists whose lives we think immoral.