Great London sculptures

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak points out some of our city’s sculptural treasures, as well as the genuine sculptural stinker

‘Quantum Cloud’ by Antony Gormley (Greenwich)
It was unfortunate to get caught up in the anxiety about the Dome. Gormley was going for the effect of a figure emerging from a cluster of parallel and interlocking lines – I think he had to work it out on a computer. It wasn’t as obvious as the Angel of the North, and people have tended to disregard it. I was lucky enough to go past it on a boat a couple of times, and caught it with the sun setting behind – lovely and astral. And, like all good public sculpture, it makes you think about the landscape and riverscape around it as well.

‘Prospero And Ariel’ by Eric Gill (Broadcasting House)
When Broadcasting House was built in 1932, Gill did something based on ‘The Tempest’, with Ariel becoming this sort of spirit of broadcasting. Gill was a bit of a pervert and gave Ariel rather a large member, and there’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that Lord Reith ordered him to make it smaller to avoid offending the British public. But it’s a great example of the BBC being a patron of the arts by recruiting a notable sculptor.

‘Royal Artillery Memorial’ by Charles Sargeant Jagger (Hyde Park)
At first, I just thought it was a typical army memorial, but I’ve since had cause to think about how you commemorate a war. Before Jagger, public sculptures about war tended to heroicise those involved – so Nelson gets a huge tower to himself while those that perished in the Peninsular War get forgotten – and during WWI artists were banned from doing pictures of dead soldiers. Jagger – who served in Gallipoli – bravely went against that edict with a dead soldier, a list of people who died and so on. There are right and wrong ways to remember Britain’s many, many wars, and this really captures the sadness and pathos.

‘Torsion Fountain’ by Naum Gabo (St Thomas’ Hospital)
One of those potentially awful abstract public sculptures that you or I would just walk past, stainless steel and a water feature. It doesn’t look like much except what Peter Fuller used to call ‘a turd in the piazza’, but it’s a piece of Russian Revolutionary art that’s been smuggled into London. Gabo was one of modern art’s great pioneers, who went on a dodgem ride around Europe after the upheavals and spent his last 20 or so years in Britain. It’s a beautifully futuristic piece – a proper piece of high-class modernism, and worth going into hospital just to see it.

‘Tondo Taddei’ by Michelangelo (Royal Academy)
The only Michelangelo sculpture of any note outside Rome or Paris is a key part of the Italian Renaissance, a gentle Michelangelo masterpiece, right under our noses. The ‘Tondo’ is a lyrical, religious circular relief carving, displayed on the first floor; hardly anyone’s ever seen it, yet everybody can. I don’t know why there isn’t a bigger song and dance about it. It falls between the cracks a bit: the Royal Academy has its exhibitions policy and the Academicians doing their thing, but their permanent collection isn’t very well appreciated.

‘Nelson Mandela’ by Ian Walters (Parliament Square)
The very worst kind of public sculpture, worse even than the Kissing Lovers at St Pancras. Mandela looks like a zombie, lurching around in the
netherspace with arms outstretched. I’d never heard of the sculptor before and I’ve been an art critic for 30 years. It’s as if there’s a group of people whose only job is to produce bad sculpture for councils and governments. Where do they all come from? For a great man like Mandela to be remembered by this awful, wobbly piece of public sculpture is very sad indeed.

Have you got a favourite piece of London sculpture? tell us in your comments, Gustavo