THAT WHICH WE FIND IT NECESSARY TO BLASPHEME, WE IMPLICITLY WORSHIP

Margaret Thatcher as Muse: A new exhibition in London tries to plumb the enduring mystique of a woman who still has an iron hold on the British imagination. (SARAH LYALL, 5/12/03, NY Times)

The best-known artistic depiction of Margaret Thatcher in recent years is a huge marble statue showing her standing magnificently erect, gripping her famous handbag. This work was decapitated last year at the Guildhall Art Gallery by an anti-Thatcherite Londoner ("We can ill afford to ever lose our sense of humor," he said, before being sentenced to three months in prison), which is as telling a comment as any on the passions this former prime minister still stirs up here.

Those feelings are on full display at the Blue Gallery in East London, where a new exhibition, simply called "Thatcher," tries to plumb the enduring and still confounding mystique of a woman who has meant many things over the years but has still not loosened her iron hold on the British imagination.

Francois Mitterrand once said of Lady Thatcher that "she has the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe," but the works in the exhibition, which closes on Saturday, examine her from the perspective of hindsight, her power and her vibrancy diminished. In "3 ft. Thatcher," for instance, the larger-than-life leader has been reduced to a tiny dull-eyed figure in a plain overcoat and humble head scarf.

In other works she is painted with a clown's mouth and nose, bearing a striking resemblance to Ronald McDonald; shown with her face stamped onto sheets of government-issue toilet paper; and depicted in sand, in a mixed media work that offers a kaleidoscope of images from the 1980's and concludes that she is "already transformed into pixels of dust."

Lady Thatcher is now 77, and more than a decade has passed since she was deposed as prime minister in a humiliating move by enemies from her own party. She is in frail health, and after she suffered the latest in a series of small strokes, her doctor advised her last year not to speak in public again.

But Lady Thatcher, who as recently as the last general election, in 2001, was still making front-page news every time she held forth on British politics, which was often, has not gone away. An audience of 3,000 executives recently gave her a rapturous and sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage at the Royal Albert Hall after a taped interview that revealed her to be as implacably self-assured in her beliefs as ever.

"She still has the power to provoke incredibly extreme feelings in people, which is very unusual in this country--we're normally very unemotional about politicians," said Tara Howard, curator of the Blue Gallery show. (Lady Thatcher has not seen the exhibition, her office said.) "She has this ability to get under people's skin, to be very, very provocative."

On the Lady Thatcher, tweed wore like gossamer. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 9:18 AM