A couple of weeks ago someone cut off the head of Copenhagen's kitsch
"Little Mermaid" statue - a target of feminist (amongst others) protests
over the years, but the hooded person who returned the head to a newspaper
office a few days later was reported to be a (hooded) man.

More relevantly, there were waves of destruction of statues and monuments
in honour of past Communist and workers' revolutionary leaders across much
of the former Warsaw Pact territory with the fall of communism, but this
was just the latest of no doubt many waves of such "popular" (or State)
activity.

I remember being surprised when visiting the sculpture storage of major
Moscow museums in the late 1980s to find many examples of representations
of Stalin carefully preserved, though away from the public gaze. I was
assured that these were being preserved (probably in defiance of official
edicts) because of their artistic relevance, rather than because the
museums were closet Stalinists.  The centenary of the Prague National
Museum in about 1991 also saw the re-emergence of portrait sculptures
of not just pre-Communist leaders but also pre-World War I royals and
nobles.  Both groups had in turn been ordered out of the national Pantheon
in the Museum for destruction after each successive revolutionary wave,
but had been secretly hidden away for generations by curators anxious to
ensure their survival as important examples of the work of the artists
and sculptors represented.

Also, doesn't India have a isolated public park somewhere full of statues
of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII etc. moved out of public view and to
avoid further vandalism when their subject matter became politically
unacceptable as features of the country's town hall squares, main streets,
waterfronts etc.?


Patrick Boylan