Focus on Statue of Millicent Fawcett and explain the Reaction and commentary.
The arts editor for BBC News, Will Gompertz, gave the statue five stars in his review. He said that prior to the unveiling, the only statues which stood out in the square were those of Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, but that has changed with the arrival of the Fawcett statue. He credited the campaign of Criado Perez, and said that the Wearing's execution of the brief was "exceptional". Gompertz praised the overall conception of the design and said that the banner was compelling. He suggested that the design was influenced by Wearing's early 1990s work Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say in which she took a series of photographs of strangers holding up their personal thoughts on pieces of white card. Overall, he felt that the statue had such impact that it changed the context of Parliament Square, saying that "The Fawcett statue makes most of the others look ridiculous, or pompous or both" (excepting its immediate neighbour, the statue of Gandhi) and that it gave the area a focal point lacking since the end of Brian Haw's peace protest.June Purvis, emeritus professor of women's and gender history at the University of Portsmouth, criticised some elements of the statue, saying that while the message on the banner was indeed written by Fawcett about Emily Davison, it was not written at the time of her death but instead in the "relative safety" of 1920. At the time of Emily Davison's death, Fawcett's NUWSS refused to take part in the funeral and did not send a wreath. Purvis also highlighted that the image of Emily Davison is on the rear of the statue, and that the campaign was launched with the intention of commemorating a suffragette, not a suffragist, in Parliament Square.
statue of Gandhi June Purvis University of Portsmouth Winston Churchill suffragette suffragist BBC News Fawcett Brian Haw David Lloyd George i wreath Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say Parliament Square Will Gompertz Emily Davison