Review

Culture

Music

Race

12 April 2024

6 min read

Beyoncé’s breaking barriers

Cowboy Carter sees the star crack her whip in the temple of the music industry.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Side by side, two rodeo riders on horses trot toward the camera. One is Beyonce, the other a cowboy

Beyoncé at the Houston Rodeo.

Beyoncé.com

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat with flashbacks of one terrible swimming lesson at school. I had accidentally forgotten to forget my kit, so was forced to face not only the freezing water, but the spouting of ignorant prejudice from my teacher.

“Kandiah, you’re useless,” he said, as I heaved myself out of the pool at the end of the lesson. “Although I guess it’s not your fault you can’t float like the white children. Your bones are heavier. Look at the Olympics – you never see black and Asian swimmers, do you?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like the fish out of water I suppose I was, but inside I was seething.

Being told I couldn’t do something made me all the more determined to do it. Back in I jumped.

Last week, in another splash aimed at proving people wrong, Beyoncé’s magnificent album “Cowboy Carter” became the first album by a black woman to top the country charts.

On her Instagram feed she said: “the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.”

It was a brave move. Back in 2016, she had received heated and hate-filled reactions when she performed her song Daddy Issues at the 50th Country Music Association Awards with the country music group Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks. Many country music fans were outraged, calling it an act of cultural appropriation. One response on social media put it starkly: “SHE DOES NOT BELONG!!”.

But as a Texan who had been brought up around country music, Beyoncé disagreed. She would spend the next five years planning her response. Cowboy Carter proves her country credentials beyond all doubt. It’s not only about the music. It also does three important things that show the world what can be done when faced with barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

She honours the past

The album is clearly an act of tribute to trailblazing country artists before her. Beyoncé included notable guest appearances and feature tracks and took the unusual step of sending flowers to all who had inspired her.

Beyoncé sent flowers to Mickey Guyton, the first black female artist to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the Country category. She also sent flowers to K. Michelle and featured Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts on the Cowboy Carter track Blackbird, a song that Paul McCartney wrote as a response to the case of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American schoolchildren initially barred from attending a previously racially segregated school in Arkansas. It took the direct intervention of then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 to make it possible for these children to attend their school. She also included guest appearances from country music royalty Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, who both introduce songs on the album. Dolly’s introduction to Beyoncé’s reworking of Jolene is particularly poignant: “Hey Queen B it’s Dolly P”.

The song Jolene sticks faithfully to the guitar riff from the original, but the words and the tone of this song are completely different. Dolly’s original Jolene was begging another woman not to take her man from her. But Beyoncé will have none of that. She is full of threat and menace:

“I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man… don’t take the chance because you think you can.”

As Beyoncé pays her dues to the greats that have gone before, she also offers a very different picture. She can recognise the past, and yet not be imprisoned by it. She can appreciate those who have laid the foundations for a new era, unbound by cruel stereotypes.

She challenges the present

We don’t have to look far to see the way that western society is splintering. It is becoming harder to find common ground, harder to move from one tribe to another. Beyoncé’s album is political in that it is deliberately breaking down a wall and smashing a division. She refuses to accept that there are no-go areas for people of colour. The album feels like Beyoncé’s famous baseball bat from Lemonade, but this time it isn’t smashing cars, but preconceptions and prejudices instead.

There’s anger in this record. The first song is “American Requiem” and includes the line:

“They used to say I spoke ‘too country’./ And the reaction came,/ said I wasn’t country ’nough / If that ain’t country / I don’t know what is?”

Full of confidence and rage she asks over a bed of country music guitar chords:

“Can you hear me? / Can you stand me?”

Beyoncé does not disguise the ironies. The fresh anger and challenge weaves into classic forms and tropes of country music. The artist that some wanted to exclude from the genre tops the charts. The pop icon becomes an iconoclast. The smashing of divisions makes way for the building of something new.

She opens a door for the future

It is within living memory of many that black people were prohibited from sitting at the front of a public bus or drinking from the same water fountain as white people. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not just a smash hit it is a smash down of the boundaries of genre that had excluded her and others. With this boundary smashed the opportunity is opened for others too.

For example, there was a recent stand-out performance at the Grammy awards watched by millions around the world – the duet between the country star Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman. Luke, a young white man, is part of a new generation of country singers with a huge following. The legendary black artist Tracy Chapman recently turned 60. The joyful performance was particularly touching as the two of them looked genuinely delighted to be singing together. The video went viral and lead to a huge uplift in Chapman’s sales. The song Fast Car rocketed to the top of the charts some 36 years after it was first released.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé using her voice and talent to push back against prejudice and push forward to a new era. She is cracking her whip in the temple of the music industry. She is driving out those who have commandeered the space that rightly belongs to those from any and all backgrounds. She is righteously angry at the injustice. She is declaring that country music be reclaimed as a meeting place for all nations to enjoy.

When Jesus unleashed the whip against the tables of the moneychangers in the temple who were excluding the non-Jews the space rightly belonged to, he fiercely declared: “My father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.” He was not only breaking the barriers of the past but ushering in a new future, a future where everyone could gather together before God on equal footing. Jesus would eventually die on a cross to ensure this free access to God was available to everyone - wherever they were from, whatever they had done and whatever they looked like.

I welcome this album by Beyoncé in that spirit of challenging prejudices, breaking down barriers, and clearing the decks for a new future equally available to all.

If only I could have whipped myself into shape, I believe I could have been the Cowboy Carter of the swimming world forty years ago.

Beyoncé in her own words

“Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make/ I got love to create on this holy night/ They won’t dim my light, all these years I fight.”

16 Carriages

“Say a prayer for what has been / We'll be the ones that purify our father's sins / American Requiem / Them old ideas (yeah) / Are buried here (yeah) / Amen (amen)

Amen

Review

Art

Character

Culture

Faith

6 June 2025

5 min read

Inside the minds of Siena’s finest artists

To exhibit art from a golden age, it first needs to survive.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A split wooden sculpted head stands in an exhibition.

Lando di Pietro's carving from 1388.

Curating an art exhibition about the emergence of recognisably life like painting and sculpture, pre-supposes just one thing. That the once innovative and venerated art works survive to today, even if shorn of their original, usually religious, settings. Those that made it to the National Gallery’s Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 have some tales to tell. That give us insight into their creators and their beliefs.

A cracked skull is sadly not an unusual find in the aftermath of an explosion. But the head discovered in the rubble of a Siena church following a World War Two Allied bombing raid in 1944 was remarkable. Almost life-sized, made of walnut and depicting Christ’s face, the carving had originally been part of the figure on a crucifix, but now severed from its body, the head was almost sheered in two. From this destruction spilled more secrets.

Hidden inside the skull, its creator Lando di Pietro inserted parchment with personal prayers. What little documentation we have about 14th century artists is usually public: contracts, lawsuits and wills, but these two scraps of writing represented Pietro’s personal faith. He dramatically asserted himself as the creator of the work:

“Lord God made it possible for Lando di Pietro of Siena to sculpt this cross from wood in the likeness of the true Jesus Christ to recall for people the Passion of Jesus Christ…have mercy on all generations”

And Lando also prayed for good health and for the world.

The fragment of a crucifix dating from 1338, is the only surviving example of wooden sculpture by this renowned goldsmith and architect, one of the Trecento creators on display at Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350. In the hothouse of creativity that was the Tuscan town in the first half of the 14th century, goldsmiths collaborated with sculptors and painters, and the images they collectively created inspired manuscript illuminators, whose works, passing through many hands, went on to inspire other artists.

Siena’s position on the Via Francigena, the major pilgrim route between northern Europe and Rome, ensured the city’s artistic innovations spread to Britain and eastern Europe and beyond. And Sienese painter Simone Martini’s patronage by cardinals and members of the Papal curia in the Pope’s court at Avignon, showcased the techniques, materials and styles of Siena to influential church leaders and royal courts throughout the Catholic communion. Interconnected through marriage and diplomacy, the courts of northern Europe would have diffused Sienese style through the exchange of gifts, and hosting and commissioning peripatetic artists from the city.

The portability of devotional objects also spread the developments of Siena’s more naturalistic and emotional style, way beyond the city’s boundaries.

Decorative crosiers would have been in motion during processions, and the sculptural decoration contained in their curved tops were viewed in the round. On the Master of San Galgano Crosier, about 1315-20, the cast figure of the saint kneels in front of his makeshift cross. St Galgano’s praying hands and bent elbows form a perfect line with the sheathed sword, that the twelfth century knight miraculously drove into a rock. The Abbey of San Galgano grew up near the site of the miracle, and the intricately decorated reliquary containing the saint’s head is faithfully reproduced in enamel at the top of the staff.

Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych, dating from around 1310, can be understood as a freestanding, miniature, double sided altarpiece, depicting a silent Annunciation on one side, and a tumultuous Passion cycle on the other. The polyptych’s probable patron, Cardinal Napoleone Orsini is portrayed at the foot of the cross in the Deposition. Fully closed for transportation, the eight panels resemble a block of marble encased in gold. With the outer wings closed, the marble ‘covers’ become a setting for an Annunciation diptych. Fully opened, the panels tell the Passion, story Christ’s torture and death.

Originally the panels were likely hinged together, so the work could fold like a concertina. After a period at the Papal curio in Avignon, the panels were separated centuries ago. Seeing the panels individually lost the tangibility of the object’s manipulation of space, through folding and portability. Seeing them united in the National Gallery for the first time in centuries is incredibly moving.

An early fifteenth century French prayer book The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, has a Lamentation scene sharing many motifs with the Orsini Polyptych, including the woman tearing at her hair, Saint John the Evangelist covering his eyes, and the back view of Mary Magdalene crouching over Christ’s feet. Within a hundred years, the Sienese emphasis on human emotion and portraying figures in recognisably three-dimensional space, had rippled out to other art forms and other countries.

One of Britain’s medieval treasures, the Wilton Diptych, commissioned by Richard II about a decade earlier than Berry book of hours, also reveals the influence of Siena: from the king’s animated pose kneeling before the Virgin and Child, to the egg tempera paint, and gold leaf sgraffito, where the surface is scratched away to depict sumptuous textiles.

In an exhibition full of showstoppers, the unification of the back predella (altarpiece base) of Duccio’s Maestra altarpiece is a standout moment. Installed in Siena Cathedral in 1311, Maestra has the oldest surviving narrative predella. On the front, depicting the Virgin Mary at the centre of a heavenly court, the painter had included his signature and a prayer.

“Holy Mother of God, bring peace to Siena, and bring life to Duccio who painted you like this.”

While the front image of the heavenly court would have been viewed from afar, the congregation could move close to the back predella and view a sequence of panels on Christ’s teaching and miracles as they prayed.

In 1771 the Maestra was sawn in half, and the predella dismantled. Its individual scenes were dismantled and displayed, and then sold, separately. The eight surviving panels are reunited in the National Gallery for the first time in 250 years.

The Black Death struck Siena in 1348, killing up to half its population, including many artists. Over centuries, plague, war, differences of religious doctrine, and fashion for Grand Tour mementoes, saw objects dismembered and repurposed. Yet the emotional resonance of maternal love seen in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte, c.1325 or the humanising family drama of Simone’s last surviving work, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342, could never be undone. Art grounded in human emotions and human perceptions of the spaces around us, was here to stay,

The wartime work of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) unit in preserving treasures such as the Head of Christ found in the ruins of the Basilica di San Bernadino all’Osservanza, was dramatised in George Clooney’s 2014 film Monuments Men. Creativity’s boundless resistance to the forces of destruction will always be box office.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350 National Gallery, until 22 June.

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