Lammy isn’t the only one. Labour Cabinet ministers just hate looking at the late Queen, apparently…
On 2 May this year Yvette Cooper’s Home Office removed a portrait of Elizabeth II, Dorothy Wilding’s HM Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) Queen Regnant. Government Art Collection records show it was not replaced with another portrait of the Queen…
On the same day as the Queen portrait was put away Cooper’s Home Office installed 27-year-old contemporary artist Winnie Hall’s painting Life Gets Harder, Trackies Grow Thicker, described as follows:
“This painting in red and white plays on the visual effect of a red Adidas track suit and striped trainers. A small faceless figure clad in this outfit in the centre of the painting expands outwards in a concertinaed Russian-doll type configuration to form other figures in the same tracksuit and trainers, and eventually grows too large to fit fully on the page. Life Gets Harder, Trackies Grow Thicker, the title explains. Hall grew up in London where the track suit or trackies are ubiquitous, particularly on sports grounds and gyms but also on the streets. She plays with the visual elements of colour and line in the apparel to abstract an item that many might consider mundane and everyday, creating a visual composition that draws us in. Her humour and playfulness in applying an art-led lens to this element of popular or street culture extends the vocabulary of abstraction outwards from the gallery to a wider audience.”
One month later the Home Office removed Charles Thomas Burt’s Queen Victoria arriving at Alderney, 1859. Those feelings of burning shame must have been too much to bear…
