Cheeky is the word that springs to mind. Placed centrally, highly visible at the end of what used to be known informally at the National Portrait Gallery as the Statesmen’s Corridor, now hangs one of the most significant bums in art.
Laura Knight’s audacious 1913 self-portrait, showing her simply dressed and painting a nude female model (Ella Louise Naper), is a middle finger elegantly raised to the art establishment, at a time when access to life drawing was restricted for women. Damn you, it says, I am an artist and a woman, and I do this at least as well as you, even if you do your best to make me do it backwards, and in heels.
The painting’s placement, dominating the vista in the newly rehung and refurbished gallery, itself just one part of a £41.3 million, three-year transformation for the NPG, is a statement of intent. The idea of the NPG, to display “portraits of individuals who have had an impact on British history”, remains intact, but this immense overhaul, as well as being about the building itself (more on this later) was always about upgrading and updating the collection.
“We’re meant to reflect Britain as it is, and obviously, if your collection only represents a fraction of Britain, then that’s a problem,” says the gallery’s director Nicholas Cullinan. “We serve Britain, we’re funded in part by the British people, and we also serve an international audience; it’s our duty to represent that. And that includes diversifying the collection in all senses, and achieving gender balance.”
This has been helped by a long-term project sponsored by the Chanel Culture Fund, which is headed up by former Serpentine director Yana Peel. The Chanel Curator for the Collection, Flavia Frigeri, has dug down into the archive to see what’s already there, and what’s missing, and has made a number of acquisitions and commissions to plug the gaps. The result is that the percentage of female sitters has risen from 35 to 48 per cent.
Frigeri has also commissioned a huge new artwork, created by the artists Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake alongside community workshops, depicting 130 women who have had an impact on British history and culture, from mathematician Ada Lovelace to former pro boxer Nicola Adams, and has curated a new display of women’s self-portraits, from Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Rose Finn-Kelcey to Gluck, Madame Yevonde (the subject of one of the opening exhibitions), Susan Hiller and Helen Chadwick.
The gallery is publishing a book, Women at Work, celebrating professional achievement; starting in 1900 with Charlotte Cooper, the first woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics (tennis), while the Statesmen’s Corridor has been renamed Inspiring People. It now features several great women, including my personal favourite, the actress Dame Anna Neagle. Her likeness, by McClelland Barclay, beams with an unashamed, knowing sexiness; exactly the kind of woman that many of the upstanding old men on the walls might have considered mistress material.
The representation of people of colour has also been hugely increased. One of the first things you see when you walk in will be a small version of Thomas J Price’s Reaching Out, a bronze figure of a young black woman, lost in whatever is on her phone (the 9ft tall original is part of The Line, the sculpture trail in East London).
There are portraits of the opera singer Sir Willard White, Sir Lenny Henry, Marcus Rashford, Mary Seacole and the artist Steve McQueen; Toyin Ojih Odutola’s recent painting of Zadie Smith and Maud Sulter’s fantastic image of Bonnie Greer, based on Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist’s 1800 Portrait d’une Negresse in the Louvre. Oh, and of course the £50m Reynolds portrait of Mai, the first Polynesian visitor to Britain, of which the NPG now shares ownership with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Just off the top of my head.
Cullinan doesn’t have a lot of patience with the idea that museums widening their scope like this is wokery. “I don’t really know what that word means,” he says, icily polite. “It’s not something that is particularly interesting to me.” They’ve been working on this project since Cullinan arrived at the NPG in the spring of 2015, he says. “We don’t do things because they’re a hot topic, we do things because we really believe in them, and because we think they’ll have enduring value.”
And there’s the labels, every one of which has been rewritten. A number of museums have come under fire in recent years for knee-jerk, hand-wringing image captions that have been altered in a rush in response to events such as the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol. The NPG has had a bit of time to think about it, and, in a move that echoes the successful update to the gallery done by Roy Strong in the 60s, each room (the hang is still broadly chronological) will feature a bit more historical context to help visitors picture more easily how its denizens fit into their world. Cullinan assures me that the captions themselves will be “more engaging and more lively” than they were before.
Which makes sense for what is essentially London’s most intellectually accessible art gallery. The NPG is, at its core, a big, decorous party full of famous people, to which you are invited but without the pressure of having to talk to anyone.
“I’ll take that,” says Cullinan, when I suggest this critique. But over the years it had also become one of London’s least accessible public museums – there was no step-free access; the lifts didn’t serve all floors; most of the natural light, made ingenious use of when the building, designed by Ewan Christian, first opened in 1896, had been shuttered out during the Blitz and never readmitted. The education room was woefully uninspiring, and piecemeal additions and alterations had made the gallery, in Frigeri’s delightful description, “itsy-bitsy” and the wayfinding “haphazard”. Another word she uses is “dingy”.
Not any more. Next week, when the NPG turns its face to the world again, it will be an extraordinary transformation. The old girl’s had some serious work done and her surgeon, the architect Jamie Fobert, has achieved something remarkable.
The weird, disappointing entrance opposite William IV Street (deliberately facing away from the notorious fleshpots of Covent Garden in the hope of attracting a better class of visitor) has been replaced by a grand triple set of doors sympathetically cut into Christian’s elegant north facade, proudly looking up Charing Cross Road and fronted by a new area of open public space. The statue of the actor Henry Irving that has stood there being paid zero attention for decades has been shifted to make it more prominent, and turned to face the Garrick Theatre, which is a nice touch.
Working on the principle ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if it is, do’, internal improvements have expanded the public areas of the museum by about 20 per cent, and opened them up again to natural light (window scrims diffuse it to protect the artworks) and to each other, enabling those stop-you-in-your-tracks moments like the Laura Knight.
But the light of day that is set to come streaming in is pretty cold right now. The National Gallery next door is facing an agonising post-Covid recovery, with visitor numbers down 55 per cent on 2019, due largely to a drop in tourism. Arts funding, meanwhile, is in a parlous state, with money being sucked away from the capital in spite of solid arguments for increasing it across the country. Cullinan, though, is bullish.
“For London and the UK, I think we need now to move the discussion,” he says. “If we’re serious about regaining momentum, all of these quite divisive discussions are not going to get us very far. It’s not going to make people visit the UK. So my focus is very much on moving forward and doing something positive. I’m not sure that endless bickering amongst ourselves is going to get us much further.”
It’s a decisiveness that has served him well over the course of the project, after making the possibly not-actually-terribly difficult decision to refuse £1.6m of Sackler money in response to the opioid scandal (in the event, they managed to raise more than their target, with major grants from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Ross Foundation and David and Molly Lowell Borthwick, plus a whopping £10m from the Blavatnik Foundation that rather blew the Sackler offer out of the water).
“Museums raise money to support what they do, which is for the public good,” he says now. “You only turn down money for very good reasons, which are, in a nutshell, if you think it could be from an illegal source, or the reputational risk is so high that it’s counterproductive.”
He acknowledges that “in the last eight years, the temperature around those discussions has probably increased. But we made sure we had a good ethics committee, and a good process. We consider things very carefully, and we do what we think is right and what is in the public interest. And then you have to let everyone else decide what they think about it.”
And everyone will, of course, have an opinion, as indicated by the flurry of attention that came when it was reported that Nicola Phillips’s 2010 painting of Princes William and Harry won’t be going on display in the opening hang, which represents a fraction of the NPG’s holdings. Cullinan calls it a “non-story”.
“We’re not showing it because we’re focused on new things that we haven’t shown before,” he says. “For example, there isn’t the [Paul Emsley] painting of the Duchess of Cambridge, because we want to show the Paolo Roversi photograph of her, that is new. I think it’s a bit ridiculous to assume that because 250,000 things aren’t on display, they’ve been ‘removed’. Er, no, we just can’t show 250,000 things.
“There’s still lots of the great things that people really enjoy coming to see, but we also wanted to give people something fresh and new,” he continues. “It’s that simple.”
