Peter Seddon

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Tête à Tête avec Cromwell:

           

arts research University of Brighton

Tête à Tête avec Cromwell: A curatorial/historiographic/artist’s intervention using Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles 1st by Paul Delaroche, 1831 

Musée des Beaux Arts, Nimes. 15 November 2007 – 3 February 2008

This curatorial/artist’s intervention into the space of a major French regional museum, unlike the earlier work at Rochdale, provided an opportunity to work directly around a single major painting from mid 19th century French art, and to work with and within the site and gallery where it is permanently installed.  This significantly increased the ambition behind my practice (called elsewhere mixed genre practice) and although simpler and less packed than the Rochdale show it was far more complex in its iconography, in the way it dealt with the vicissitudes of political history and historiography in both France and England, and its treatment of regicide and republicanism.

After my initial approach Pascal Trarieux, the chief curator of the Musée des Beaux Arts at Nimes, commissioned the work. Other significant collaborators and contributors to the exhibition were Barry Barker, artist/curator and director of the CCVA and the artist Michael O’Connell who worked under my direction on the animations used in the show.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was Delaroche’s famous painting of Cromwell contemplating the beheaded corpse of Charles 1st in his coffin after execution in 1649. Painted in 1831, it was the sensation of that year’s Paris Salon. Against it I presented projection of Cromwell’s own subsequently posthumously decapitated head taken from 1950s photographs and animated into slight, almost imperceptible, movement. The ironies of this are many and multi layered but one of them relates to Delaroche’s own much quoted remark on the invention of photography in the 1840s, from today painting is dead!  Death and the echoing presence of afterlives dominated this exhibition which included images from English collections in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cromwell’s alma mater), Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (Charles’s last domicile before his trial) and the Museum of London who gave permission to reproduce digitally a painting in their collection of the dead Charles with his head stitched back on. In a final flourish and acknowledgement of the macabre the Lord’s Prayer was printed in Latin backwards on the gallery wall opposite the Delaroche painting! The show itself was a reflection on historiographic concerns in politics and art from the 17th to 19th centuries; the very period which is the dominant focus of the Museum’s entire collection.

The work was made possible by an AHRC award of £16,400 plus some support from the CCVA and the faculty. Opened with a speech by the Regional Cultural Minister, it was the first time the Museum at Nimes had collaborated with an English artist using a work in their collection. The cultural context of exhibitions within which its sits however includes The play of the unmentionable at the Brooklyn museum by Joseph Kosouth in 1991, Give and Take at the Serpentine Gallery by Hans Haacke in 2001, and the Counterpoint exhibition at the Louvre curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac in 2004.

Peter Seddon's Tête-à-Tête presentation on You Tube