A spirit of terror stalks the land which leaves no one – or certainly no male – living or dead, free from the possibility of retrospective guilt. Latest in the firing line are the kind of Victorian academic painters who until now have been considered guilty of nothing more heinous than being irredeemably boring and stuffy.
On Friday, Manchester Art Gallery removed without warning John William Waterhouses’s 1896 Pre-Raphaelite painting Hylas and the Nymphs, which shows an ancient Greek hero being “abducted” into a lily pond by a collection of rather blank-faced pubescent nymphs. In its place, visitors have been invited to leave their responses to its removal on Post It notes. As if taking down the painting wasn’t censorious enough, postcards featuring the image have also been removed from the gift shop.
Clare Gannaway, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, says she took the decision to...