FOUNDLINGS

Someone's tiny hand is frozen

I am lost.  I have come to Bloomsbury to locate a small sculpture by the artist Tracey Emin.  All I know about it is that it’s in the open, very small, seemingly unremarkable and very moving. . . if you can find it.  No other clues?  Yes, it’s in the vicinity of the Foundling Hospital Museum in Bloomsbury.  Which is a double clue.

When it’s hot in London it’s hotter than Death Valley.  It’s as though the heat has nowhere to go and sits on the city like a cat that means never to leave.  I have my old geezer’s floppy trilby pulled down so low over my eyes against the sun I can’t see where I’m going.   I know I’m in literary Bloomsbury from all the blue plaques and mentions of Virginia Woolf.  I navigate myself blindly to Brunswick Square Gardens, but how exactly I get from here to the Foundling Hospital Museum I have no idea and because I’m a man and men don’t ask for directions I don’t ask for directions.  I look so hot and bewildered I could be mistaken for a foundling myself.  Is someone going to take me by the arm and hand me over to the nursing staff?  I imagine being fitted with an identity bracelet - PERSONAGE OF INDETERMINATE  AGE FOUND WANDERING CONFUSED IN VICINITY OF HOSPITAL - and then shoved into a cold bath where they shave my beard and scrub me to get rid of lice.

Suddenly I hear the excited cries of children accompanied by the cheers of adults and deduce I’ve blundered into a school sports day.  Wiping my eyes, I look over a fence and make out infants racing one another in brightly coloured sacks.  Did Virginia Woolf ever run a sack race, I wonder.  It takes me a moment to remember that a single man mustn’t ever be seen looking at children even when they’re in sacks.  One or two of the parents eye me suspiciously.  ‘I’m sorry,’ I call to a group of them, ‘I’m trying to find the Foundling Hospital,’ which makes them if anything even more suspicious.  A woman sheltering from the sun under a floral umbrella says, ‘These are our children.  They don’t need to be found because they were never lost.’  Does she say, ‘Now beat it, you pervert,’ or is that the voice of my conscience?

Eventually, I manage to weave my way out of the park, and find a somewhat indecorous statue to Thomas Coram, the philanthropist who created the Foundlings Hospital.   I find the clumsy, jovial bulk of it endearing, despite the man-spreading, especially in this corner of London which is largely dedicated to fine-boned poets every one of whom was reputed to be hopelessly in love with every other.

Coram was cut from coarser cloth.  An uneducated seaman, he returned from his travels early in the eighteenth century and set about raising funds to establish a Foundling Hospital for children left to fend for themselves on the streets of the capital.  In 1741, after what he described as ‘seventeen years and a half’s contrivance, labour and fatigue,’ which included walking 12 miles a day to drum up support, he obtained a charter to establish the charity.   He was seventy and would live another ten years or more.  Which just goes to show what a good heart and strong legs can do for you.  As someone who finds two-and a half miles a day a Gargantuan effort and considers tossing a homeless person a pound coin a noble deed, I confess to being ashamed.

But I’m not here to admire Thomas Coram.  A far greater art treasure lurks nearby but I am damned if I can spot it.  I walk three times around the statue, examining the ground and the railings.  Still nothing, apart from an old, discoloured cotton mitten, dropped presumably by a small unruly child and plonked on one of the spikes of the railings in case anyone should come looking for it.  But something makes me look at it again, touch it, smell it, rap it with my knuckles.  Call me slow on the uptake, but this is no real cotton mitten.  This is - this can only be - Tracey Emin’s bronze sculpture, at last.   And although it is nothing to look at, it emanates, by position and association, enough feeling to flood the world, and I am overwhelmed.

How to explain it?  An objet-trouvé, a found piece, or rather a fabricated piece made to look like a found piece, a lost belonging returned to where it might be found again just like the children who began to be housed here in 1741.  Lost by a foundling and symbolically returned to all foundlings, as small and delicate as an orphaned baby bird.  A thing of beauty, not in itself - in itself it’s only a bronze copy of a disregarded glove - but beautiful by virtue of where it is and the sad frailty it evokes.

How many times, at yet another exhibition of the conventionally conceptual, has one heard the cry ‘My three year-old could have done that!’  Tut, tut, we say, but let’s be honest with one another and admit that in front of many a feeble work of whimsy we have thought the same.  ‘A crumpled paper-bag?  Why, I crumpled one just like that this morning and threw it where it belongs.’  Comes back the answer - ‘Art is no longer merely defined by appearance.  The where and when and why also determine aesthetic value, as does the ironic possibility that this object has, as usually defined, none.’  Try telling that to the I-know-what-I-like innocents who have a Constable print above their mantelpiece and with whom you daren’t be seen to collude for fear you’ll be taken for a Hay-Wain aficionado yourself.

Pause at this mitten, however, and we can resolve the argument about beauty or the lack of it once and for all.  Those who say that art need not be beautiful betray the subtleties of the modernity they embrace.  Art to be art is always beautiful, but its beauty does not necessarily reside where the untutored spectator thinks it should, that’s to say in the lineaments of the work itself; it might just as readily be found in the surprises it evokes or the meaning it finds as an act of criticism or comparison, in juxtaposition or manner of display.  The beauty of Tracey Emin’s mitten is that it is neither beautiful nor displayed.  Like the children it commemorates, it is hidden, forgotten, easy to miss and easy to ignore.  Eloquent in its silence.  Mute.  A foundling.  But in its very throwaway coldness, warm with life.