‘Myra’: the most controversial artwork of the 1990s
Sometimes, a name is all it takes to stir controversy. In the aftershock of the Moors Murders, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered five children, that was something artist Marcus Harvey exploited, to great controversy. In the 1960s, news of the murders rocked Britain, and the recreation of her infamous mugshot did the same when it was shown at the Sensation art exhibition by the Young British Artists at the Royal Academy. The backlash began before the show even opened and continued long after that.
Years later, he reflected on the ensuing chaos Myra caused and its association with the boundary-pushing group of British artists he was associated with. “The media created this popular conception that we were all a gang together, and that was just not the case,” he said. “I had a strong friendship with Damien Hirst and not really anyone else. And I had very little in common with their work or their approach to it.”
But one thing they were bound by was controversy, and in a bizarre turn, Harvey faded into obscurity compared to his peers. Tracey Emin and Hirst became household names, but Myra might have been a bridge too far for even the most forgiving art audiences. It fared better when shown outside of Britain, but the horror continued to cloud its reception at home. Not only did it use Hindley’s mugshot, but he painted it using casts of young children’s hands. It was universally agreed to be unnecessarily cruel.
At the time, the Secretary of the Royal Academy, Norman Rosenthal, attempted to put a positive spin on it, saying: “It is an incredibly serious and sober work of art that needs to be seen.” Four members of the Academy disagreed with this verdict, all resigning when it was included in the exhibition. The police even visited before the opening but weren’t satisfied they could convict under the Obscene Publications Act.
The exhibit naively went ahead and was vandalised twice in the same night. On its opening day, artist Peter Fisher managed to smuggle in ink by hiding it in camera cases, which he threw over the painting in disgust. That then inspired another artist in the crowd to do the same, and Jacques Rolé promptly left, nipped to the shops to buy eggs nearby, and threw a couple at the painting.
Of all those protesting, two parties stuck up. One was Winnie Johnson, who was the mother of one of Hindley’s victims. Anguished by the loss of her son Keith Bennett, whose body was never recovered, she begged for the portrait to be excluded from the exhibition. When it was, she picketed the opening with the Mothers Against Murder and Aggression group.
The next was Hindley herself. She wrote a letter from prison asking that it be removed, and suddenly capable of sympathy, said displaying it showed “disregard not only for the emotional pain and trauma that the families of the Moors victims would inevitably experience but also the families of any child victim”. Her alignment with the protest groups was baffling and no doubt exceptionally painful for Johnson in particular.
But shock is evergreen. The painting continued to hang, protected by security and perspex. The exhibition had a massive uptick in visitors and was eventually sold for a figure close to £100,000. “I don’t want to produce work that is a pleasant distraction, then you move on to something else,” Harvey later admitted to the Guardian. “I would actually like it to fuck their day.”
