Critical theory has a perspective on the argument. Post-structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes made a fatal separation between creator and work by announcing the 'death of the author' in 1967. And early 20th-century Russian critic Osip Brik famously opined that Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin would have existed even if Pushkin had never lived at all. A quiet English librarian who spent his days pottering around Hull, Philip Larkin happened to be the greatest poet of his generation. His humane and grounded verse won him admirers across the world. It also disguised a nastier side. In his private correspondence to Kingsley Amis, Larkin wrote some rather vile things.

Others have gone further still. John MacGregor, an expert on the art of the clinically insane, believes Darger was a kind of repressed serial killer. It’s now known he kept a shrine to a murdered Chicago schoolgirl. When he lost a photo he had of her, he begged God to return it. When He didn’t reply, Darger sat down and immediately wrote gruesome execution scenes killing his child characters as punishment. Could a project such as Hepburn’s lead, paradoxically, to more censorship? “I know what you’re talking about,” says Julia Farrington, associate arts producer at Index on Censorship (and another delegate last October). “The kind of care Nathaniel is taking, the kind of resources he is putting in, is potentially a deterrent to others. You can see that people might just quietly remove Gill’s work [rather than go down the same route themselves].” And perhaps it could be argued that there is an important distinction between an intellectual work like this and art. A manual does not demand a sense of allegiance. It does not provoke exalted feelings in the user or a sense of celebration as some art does.

Uncommon Knowledge

The decision will revive the debate in the art world as to whether the great works of art can, or should, be treated separately to the misdeeds of their creators. Gill's religious beliefs did not limit his sexual activity, which included several extramarital affairs. His religious views contrast with his deviant sexual behaviour, including, as described in his personal diaries, the sexual abuse of his daughters, an incestuous relationship with at least one of his sisters and also sexual experiments with a dog. Since these revelations became public in 1989, there have been a number of calls for works by Gill to be removed from public buildings and art collections. It might be easier to make this argument for the Stations of the Cross than for nude sketches of Gill's teenage daughter. Gill's final publications included Twenty-Five Nudes and Drawings from Life both of which included drawings of Daisy Hawkins, the teenage daughter of the Gills' housekeeper with whom Gill began an affair in 1937. [1] The affair lasted two years during which time Gill drew her on an almost daily basis. When Hawkins was sent away from Pigotts, to the boarding house at Capel-y-ffin run by Betty Gill, Eric Gill followed her there to continue the relationship. [2] :284

I'm undecided. As a graphic designer who studied Eric Gill at college, I don't even like using his typeface, Gill Sans, in my work. Then again, I really used to enjoy Chris Langham's comedy work. I'd hate never to listen to his radio series again. On an overcast Wednesday afternoon in January 2022, a 54-year-old man ascended a ladder at Broadcasting House in central London to the ledge where Eric Gill’s 1932 statue of Prospero and Arial from Shakespeare’s The Tempest stands. As a companion guarded the ladder, filming events on his phone, the protester chiseled the foot of the statue and daubed graffiti on the 10-foot figure: ‘BBC PAEDOS + PROPAGANDA’; ‘TIME TO GO WAS 1989’; ‘NOOSE ALL PAEDOS’. It took about four hours for the Metropolitan Police and the London Fire Brigade to bring the protester to safety before detaining him. Gill sets up a lettering workshop and printing press at Pigotts near Speen. He goes on to create the typefaces Perpetua and Gill Sans. The latter appears on the front covers of Penguin Classics.

Diary Review keywords

Philosopher Mark Sheehan, of Oxford University's James Martin 21st Century School, says moral complexities do arise because of the relationship between the artist and the art in the mind of the audience.