Boards
"Tha National Portrait Gellery is a Joke"
"It's a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a well-loved friend," said Prince Charles of a proposed modern extension to the National Gallery in the 1980s, but personally I feel the same way about the National Portrait Gallery that nuzzles against the north-east side of Britain's great collection of Old Master paintings. It's a hideous joke. There in the National Gallery are works of art that allow you to experience the deepest and most uplifting emotions and ideas ever put on canvas ... and there beside it is a meretricious collection of mostly second-rate pictures that perpetuates, with savage philistine glee, the worst and most idiotic notions about what art is.
I happened in passing recently to call the National Portrait Gallery "a temple to middle-class moronism", and bloggers mistook this for snobbery, accusing me of looking down on good, honest middle-class taste. But I was looking up, if that's the right way of putting it, at the well-heeled suburbocracy who complacently think they're sophisticated when they come and look at photos of Kate Moss and have lunch at that nice Portrait restaurant. The moronism the NPG represents is that of the affluent, not the masses. The NPG flatters their intellectual laziness and complacency by reducing art to the status of a digital snap.
The art of the portrait is a noble, beautiful enterprise that amazingly, and to this day in the work of Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Gerhard Richter, mediates the down-to-earth, very human desire to record faces with a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the self. The portrait is at the heart of European high culture - but you won't even glimpse the rudiments of a history of the portrait as art in the NPG. This museum is not about art. It's about famous Brits down the ages. The faces come first, the art is very much in second place. This was the way aristocratic patrons liked it in the 18th century and it's the way celebs, and admirers of the NPG, like it today.
Go next door; look at Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, Holbein's Ambassadors, Bellini's Doge Loredan, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait, Velazquez's Philip IV, and other treasures of portraiture in the National Gallery proper. Look above all at Raphael's Pope Julius II. These are all true portraits full of human interest - the story of, say, Julius II is infinitely more dramatic than the dull lives of the colonial administrators and minor poets the NPG glorifies. But these great paintings are works of the most ambitious and achieved art; they are about so much more than anecdote.
The British have never produced a Rembrandt or a Raphael and this has something to do with our prosaic cult of the portrait as a slavishly realistic record of power, wealth and glamour. Take my advice, don't waste time on a visit to this cretinous parish church of bourgeois individualism. Go next door and see real art - including real portraits.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/04/the_national_portrait_gallery.html