Helen Cammock Pulls ‘Persistence’ From the National Portrait Gallery After Churchill Backlash
A video work at the center of a historical dispute has disappeared from view in London. British artist Helen Cammock removed her film “Persistence” from the National Portrait Gallery after criticism over its claim that Winston Churchill deliberately starved Indians during the 1943 Bengal famine.
The museum confirmed the work’s removal on Monday, saying it respected Cammock’s decision while acknowledging that some viewers were offended by the film’s contents. More than 50 people, including Churchill’s grandson, had signed a letter arguing that the artist had misrepresented the facts. Cammock, who won the Turner Prize, said the piece was never intended as a documentary and urged audiences to “hear it out.” In a statement, she also defended the role of art in confronting contested histories, saying artists and institutions face intense pressure to become “benign at best and silent at worst.”
The episode underscores how quickly museum programming can become a flashpoint when contemporary art collides with national memory. Cammock’s work was not simply presenting an argument about the past; it was testing how far an institution devoted to portraiture can accommodate a work that challenges the moral framing of one of Britain’s most scrutinized political figures.
The same roundup also marked the death of Charles Hinman, the American artist known for sculpted canvases that pushed painting into relief. Hinman died on May 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 93 from complications after a fall, according to his daughter, Delphine Hinman Zohn. Beginning in the 1960s, he built shaped canvases over curved wooden armatures, a process he described as “skin over bones,” and became associated with a lyrical strain of Minimalism alongside Frank Stella, Leon Polk Smith, and Ellsworth Kelly.
Elsewhere in the art market, the top ten sales at Art Basel included a $2.3 million Yves Klein sculpture and a $35 million Picasso, while French police said they recovered a stolen Picasso during a drug trafficking raid outside Paris. The week’s headlines also pointed to mounting political pressure around cultural institutions, from the Kennedy Center to the Smithsonian, where Lonnie Bunch has faced renewed scrutiny. Taken together, the stories suggest a season in which museums, markets, and public memory are all under unusual strain.
