The National Portrait Gallery in London has been closed for three years. I wish I could say that I’ve missed it. This is a museum with barely any great art in it, a peculiarly British institution that reflects our national cult of celebrity. Since 1856 it has amassed pictures of the great and good, as they were seen in their day, and consistently downgraded art: labels give the sitter first, then the artist. The NPG has always been surface, flash, fame and, artistically, nothingness.
Now it is about to reopen, changed utterly, we’re told. It makes a massive claim to have become a serious temple of art before you even get inside. Tracey Emin has etched female faces with stark intensity on the new bronze doors. This is her answer to Rodin’s The Gates of Hell in Paris – a very personal hell, her pain preserved permanently, facing Leicester Square and the West End crowds. Her soul-baring is apparently a manifesto for the new National Portrait Gallery, an insistence that this is now a place that sees past celebrity to the inner self.
