Do You Want to Know a Secret? Get to London for the New Portrait Gallery

Sir Paul’s newly discovered early-'60s photo archive charms, alongside royals old and new.

T here are many wonderful features of the newly renovated and expanded National Portrait Gallery in London. Earlier this week I wrote about its inviting, spacious new entrance, its specialty galleries for Renaissance miniatures, daguerreotypes, and death masks and life masks, and its splendid spaces treating the Tudor, Stuart, and Hanover eras. Today I’ll look at the Victorian galleries and the 20th- and 21st-century galleries as well as the NPG’s exhibition philosophy.

Yes, the gallery’s forte is portraits of people who inspire, but nothing could be more subjective. Take two examples. Judge George Jeffreys’s portrait from 1675 is a stunner. He was to become a prominent judge allied with James II during the upheavals of the 1680s. His courtroom, I hasten to add, produced so many death sentences that it coined the phrase “bloody assizes.” He wouldn’t inspire anyone except psychopaths and owners of rope factories. Another portrait depicts Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. I hear she inspires Meghan Markle. Wallis is her favorite duchess, excepting herself, that is.

It’s sharper to say that the NPG gives history a human face. It shows us that events don’t happen from kismet or karma, accident or happenstance. Natural disasters excepted, it’s people who make events or who prosper or suffer from events other people made. And, at the NPG, there’s no caterwauling about enslavers, bad parents, tyrants, or psychos. “People do good and bad things,” the director, Nicholas Cullinan said. “We try not to judge.” How refreshing. How sensible.

One of the best parts about the NPG’s redo, which premiered in late June, is the cull of mediocre portraits. Most everything’s good as both art and documentation. The gallery owns more than 200,000 portraits and chose well.

Except for here and there. The NPG brags that 48 percent of the portraits in the 20th- and 21st-century galleries depict women. I’m not sure how the gallery’s counting, but a chunk of that number comes from a wall packed with self-portraits by women artists. Neither the portraits nor most of the sitters are remarkable.

On Thursday, I wrote about a new gallery of life masks and death masks. A good concept but the death masks make the subjects look most sincerely dead. Not a good look. And how do you suppose you’d look, living as you are, with a pound and a half of plaster on your face and a straw in your nose so you could breathe? Not your best.

I’d ditch the ensemble of self-portraits by women for a look at women in British politics since, say, 1918, when women over 30 who owned property got the vote in the U.K. and Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the House of Commons. She was elected by a Dublin constituency on the Sinn Fein ticket and refused to take her seat. The next year, Nancy Astor was elected as an MP. She did indeed take her seat, starting her 26 years as a profound irritant and a great champion of her pet causes. Yes, she might have had crypto-fascist moments but, again, to quote the NPG’s director, “people do good and bad things.”

Portraits of Markievicz and a few other women pols are displayed in isolated spots, but I’d make a group of them together since the barriers and prejudices they all faced are similar, especially in the Labour Party. I suggest this, since, for almost all women of achievement in American and British politics, every step of the way was uphill and, on many counts, still is. I like trailblazers, and these women march to the beat of their own drummer.

Though married to a duke, the Duchess of Atholl could sit in the House of Commons and, by the by, fought against women’s suffrage before it became the law of the land. Yes, she’s a hate figure and now in the doghouse. Nearby, Nicola Sturgeon, from our era, is one tough dame.

There’s Mrs. Thatcher, of course. Thelma Cazalet-Keir gets wall space also — her bill to pay women teachers the same as men passed the House of Commons by one vote in 1944, the only bill to pass without Churchill’s support during the war. There’s Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams, and then there’s Lady Falkender, Harold Wilson’s political guru and muse. She suggested many of the plots for the TV series Yes Minister.

The NPG makes a mistake in stripping the walls of so many politicians from the past 25 years or so, though, as I wrote on Thursday, it’s understandable. They’re awful. Nobody wants to look at them. It has good photography of this cast of characters, though, so the art would support sections focused on the faces of Brexit, the failed Scottish independence vote, and the adventures of Tony Blair in 1997. These three big events would, it seems to me, transition from the front pages of newspapers to the history books.

I loved seeing a group of portraits by George Frederic Watts of intellectual grandees such as Cardinal Manning, Baron Leighton, and Thomas Carlyle. Thomas Eakins is our Watts, both presenting eminent Victorians in all their gravity and heft but keeping them human. The Watts portraits together with photographs convey the complex, vibrant Victorian world. There’s a photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert from 1861. She was the first monarch to be photographed. The gallery’s called “Hall of Fame” and also displays photographs of Tom Thumb, Alice Liddell, who was Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, the actress Agnes Elsworthy dressed as Britannia, with a lion by her side, and Trollope.

There’s a room on whether the Empire was a good or bad thing, and that’s fine, though the gallery’s a small one considering the immensity of the subject. There’s a good portrait of Prime Minister Henry John Temple Palmerston, acknowledging him as a great statesman, and an opus depicting the relief of Lucknow in India, in 1857, after a six-month siege by rebel Indian soldiers. A portrait of Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia is on display, too. He was the orphaned son of Ethiopia’s king and brought to London to live among Queen Victoria’s court. He died at 18 and is buried among kings and queens in St. George’s Chapel. The room “opens up conversations about the complex history” of colonialism but does so with a light touch.

One gallery is devoted to World War I, and another to World War II. Is this enough, given the scope of both calamities? The gallery focusing on the First World War returns to view Sargent’s big group portrait, General Officers of World War I, from 1922, and James Guthrie’s Statesmen of World War I, painted between 1924 and 1929. I couldn’t help but think about how many young men they sent to slaughter. This makes the combination of the war years with the era of the Bright Young Things in the ’20s jarring, as much as I like Ivor Novello, Cecil Beaton, and Anna Mae Wong. The Second World War gallery merges the ’40s with the ’30s but, given the ’30s, is less awkward.

It’s understandable to think portraiture from both wars could fill an entire museum, and that museum ought to be the Imperial War Museum in London. If there are subjects more deeply branded in the British consciousness, I can’t name them. The art is deftly arranged and, as it is in every gallery, interpreted with a succinct grace. That said, I would have made the war galleries bigger.

Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, is in a corner of the Thirties to the Second World War gallery, with a photograph of the future George VI and his family and another of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. There’s also a bust of Elsie Cohen, who pioneered art cinemas in London, and portraits of artists David Bomberg and L. S. Lowry, and the Modernist architect Erno Goldfinger. Together, they’re either artists, arts purveyors, or, in the case of Mrs. Simpson and the royals, works of art.

I left these galleries in a questioning frame of mind and, in the spirit of life moving on, enjoyed the portraits — in a court-size gallery — of the movers and shakers of my day. Making the Modern World starts with the socialist winners of the 1945 general election. James Gunn’s 1950 conversation piece of the royal family anchors one part of the gallery while down the way Pietro Annigoni’s majestic 1969 portrait of the queen hangs. She’s alone, robed, and looks as grand as the full-length portraits of her Tudor predecessors a floor above.

The portraits are grouped. One wall stars Conservative Party Conference, Brighton, 1982, by Paul Brason. Margaret Thatcher stands and speaks. Sitting by her side are her key cabinet members and her husband, Dennis. The banner behind them reads “The Resolute Approach.” At the 1984 Brighton conference, an IRA bomb nearly killed Thatcher. “We have to be lucky only once,” the IRA said when Thatcher survived. “You have to be lucky every time.”

Next to the 1982 painting is a dynamic portrait of Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam, a pivotal figure in Tony Blair’s government and in what became a few years later the Good Friday Agreement. Blair said she had the best political mind of anyone he’d known. Next to her is a portrait of Salman Rushdie, whom Mrs. Thatcher protected from terrorists targeting him.

The Beatles, Elton John, Shirley Bassey, the Who, and the Beyond the Fringe gang are there, as are Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, and Iris Murdoch. It’s an inspiring mix and proves that whatever the U.K.’s woes, it’s as happening as ever. I didn’t need persuading.

I also saw two very good and different temporary NPG exhibitions, each with lots to absorb. What do these two exhibitions and the upcoming roster tell us about the NPG’s exhibition philosophy, now that it has its fabulous new space?

Well, its anchor show is on the Fab Four, which gives us a clue. Eyes of the Storm displays for the first time photographs taken on the road by Paul McCartney between December 1963 and February 1964. McCartney had never developed the film, which landed in his archives and was discovered only a couple of years ago. The Beatles were ascending the heights, but, on February 9, 1964, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show and seen by 73 million people, me included, they reached an Olympus.

There are 250 photographs on view, which is a lot, but it’s a sweet, nostalgic show. In those three months, the lads from Liverpool went from unknowns to superstars but still lived in their working-class Liverpudlian skin. It’s a story of wonderment, recorded in street-photography style by McCartney. I looked at the program for the Beatles’ first Paris concert. Who’d imagine they were once billed as second fiddle to Trini Lopez?

I liked Eyes of the Storm a lot. It captures a unique moment. Sixty years on, those early Beatles tunes are as fresh and jaunty as they were then.

Yevonde: Life and Colour didn’t get top billing at the NPG. It’s not in the premier exhibition space on the ground floor but near the galleries devoted to the First and Second World Wars. The Beatles get the best real estate — they are, after all, the Beatles — but Yevonde is an art exhibition of consequence. Yevonde is Madame Yevonde, or Yevonde Middleton, a talented commercial and art photographer from the ’30s into the ’60s. She was a pioneer in color photography. It’s a sparkling, incisive exhibition and needs a review of its own.

So, one serious exhibition with dazzling color. Another combines innocence with star power and doesn’t challenge the brain.

Upcoming are four exhibitions that leave me in an uncertain frame of mind, or a resolved one if the question is, Who wins the battle between glib marketers and serious curators? The Time Is Always Now: Reframing the Black Figure sounds like a rehash. It opens in 2024. Goodness, no one can say the black figure is absent in Western art. David Hockney: Drawing from Life, which opens in November, is a reprise of a show of Hockney’s recent portraits that was aborted after three weeks in 2020 by the Covid mass hysteria and the thicket of government and scientist lies. It’s back. I’m not a Hockney fan, so I’d probably find the show pleasing but vacuous.

Also opening this fall is the NPG’s annual portrait show highlighting young photographers and new talent. I’ve seen these shows off and on for years. They’re always great. British Petroleum sponsored it for years, but, after protests by climate kooks, the NPG and BP parted ways. Now, a law firm with 1,100 lawyers is its chief sponsor. Given the choice between shark-infested waters and an oil rig, I’ll choose a warm house.

Portraits to Dream In, set to open in 2024, compares Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman. I’m very doubtful indeed. Woodman (1958–1981) was a Phillips Academy alumna. As director of the school’s museum, I got to know her work well. She killed herself at age 22 and, while a savant, wasn’t a fully formed talent. Cameron had a long career and is in an entirely different league.

Woodman is bound to start very much in possession of the short end of the stick, so the curators will contrive a dozen ways, each more forced than the last, to create a mirage of balance. Good luck on this one.

I believe the last NPG exhibitions I reviewed before it closed for its renovation were shows of portraits of Michael Jackson, Gainsborough’s portraits of his family, and portraits from the Bright Young Things era of the 1920s. The Michael Jackson show didn’t have much depth, and the Bright Young Things theme has been done to perdition, where most of the subjects might very well reside, and back. The Gainsborough exhibition was lovely and satisfying.

There are so many things to love about the reborn NPG. Orange, green, cobalt, and plum walls raise the octane level of the place, and the art loves them. A friend of mine criticized the old NPG as “a gentleman’s club,” which is her right to do, but, let’s face it, it’s not the Whitney. Overwhelmingly, it concerns the great and the good.

Still, a sleeker, more contemporary look is welcome, and the curators, architects, and designers delivered one that’s still intimate and comfortable, though the new benches in the galleries are themselves as uncomfortable to sit one as bare tree limbs.

All in all, the NPG is vastly enhanced as an art museum and a center for history. What a great achievement.