London’s National Gallery Throws Itself a Birthday Bash

It’s 200 years old, but the celebration has awkward moments.

I t’s the National Gallery’s 200th birthday, so I’m in London covering what seems to be a moment of both vacuity and splendor. The place was certainly packed, with even the Dutch galleries seeming more like beehive Amsterdam than Friesland in February, so flat and so rural that you can skate across the province. To its great credit, the NG, founded in 1824, is high and dry. Poets and Lovers, the anniversary year’s Champagne pop, gathers 61 works by Vincent Van Gogh. The art’s dazzling and uplifting, but the scholarship’s gooey. Like many action heroes, he’s had a lot of sequels lately.

There’s yet another David Hockney exhibition, this one comparing him to Piero della Francesca. Hockney’s a national treasure here, but he’s been matched over the past few years with Matisse, the Impressionists, Hogarth, and Van Gogh, every artist, it seems, but my own local heroine, Grandma Moses. Enough, already. Much, too much, already. As I walked through both exhibitions, I felt that I was expected to be wowed by big names when fresh, good ideas are what I like with what I acknowledge are many of Van Gogh’s best things.

Then there’s the Sainsbury Wing, which is now a construction site. The project’s a £35 million ($47 million) redo of the 1991 wing’s entrance, lobby, and stairs. That’s a whole lot of shillings and pence for a transitional space. The architect Denise Scott Brown, who designed it along with Robert Venturi, called the renovation “a circus clown dressed in a tutu.” Putting this aside, bludgeon-of-an-insult that it is, the thing’s not done, and tick-tick-tick runs Big Ben on 2024. This is Britain, we know, but shouldn’t the project have been done in time for the anniversary?

Call me a purist, but when it comes to museum anniversaries, and I like writing about them, I have specific expectations. They recognize the high points of the past. They convey the current state of the brand, accentuating the positive, all spit and polish. They hint at what the ideal future will be, and I admit we live in parlous times and the U.K. seems to be on the verge of a national nervous breakdown. “What are we thinking we’ll be?” is a good question to tackle.

I haven’t visited the NG in a couple of years. My favorite things have moved, but, as past high points go, the collection’s fabulous. The museum collects paintings starting only from Cimabue (c. 1240–1302) and Duccio (c. 1255–1319) and up to the broadly defined Post-Impressionists. I always visit Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey, painted in 1833. It’s slick, but in pathos and brutality it can’t be bested. George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, from 1762, commanded the museum’s longest vista for years, projecting command and presence from hundreds of feet. Raphael’s portrait of the wizened, cunning Pope Julius had to be the biggest hit of 1511. I always find Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, from 1486. Its colorful clutter and wild angles tell us that the Renaissance was about more than order.

Titians, Caravaggios, and Poussins are plentiful and define entire movements. In the U.K., draconian death duties weren’t a consequence of post-war socialism. Laws allowing gifts of art to the nation in lieu of inheritance taxes date to the 1890s. Otherwise, great works owned by aristocrats would have left the country in a stampede. A big part of the collection’s growth comes from these breaks.

So the collection speaks to the past. The present and the future? Poets and Lovers is a feast. Each room has a theme — gardens, the artist’s home, decorative painting, which concerns patterns, and a gallery devoted to variations on a theme. The themes are vapid, but it’s a thrill to see the Musée d’Orsay’s Starry Night over the Rhône, which lifts us up and thrusts us into the night sky; Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait, owned by the National Gallery in Washington; and The Trinquetaille Bridge, owned by casino mogul Steven Wynn. The “lover” in the show’s title is a ruse. Van Gogh’s love life was in itself a joke. The Lover, his portrait of Lieutenant Milliet, comes to the show from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands. Van Gogh said the Zouave soldier got all the women he wanted owing to good looks and a flamboyant uniform. Van Gogh lacked both, so he went to brothels for his whoopee.

Van Gogh’s color and lush surfaces are the stuff of fantasy, indescribably delicious, as the candy-bar ad went, and a joy to see. Still, Van Gogh and the Olive Groves, which I reviewed at the Dallas Museum of Art, was a far better exhibition. The two shows overlap in heavy hitters, but the Dallas one had a specific, new, and scholarly theme.

Poets and Lovers is a glitzy treasures show. Nothing fatal about that, but the NG is a serious place. It can celebrate without so brazen a grab at numbers and buzz. That’s been the Met’s strategy the last few years. Again I have nothing against pleasure, but these loans have been taken off the walls at their home museums and tossed in pallets, planes, and trucks. There’s got to be a good reason, and a fun party isn’t the best.

And why is part of the place a construction site? There’s no jackhammer noise, but a quarter of the museum is off limits. The Italian early Renaissance art that usually lives in the Sainsbury Wing is adequately displayed. The Sainsbury Wing resulted from a long, painful design process famously marked by the then–Prince Charles’s description of the preferred plan as “a monstrous carbuncle.” Carbuncles, it seems, can kill, at least when it comes to architecture. The proposal, very sleek and glassy, died. The Sainsbury Wing ensued, courtesy of the married team of Venturi and Scott Brown. It was not much liked for its faux classicism but is now revered and listed Grade I, signaling top historical importance.

Since the 1990s, the Sainsbury Wing evolved into the NG’s primary entrance, and it can’t accommodate a doubling of yearly visitorship, from 3 million to 6 million. Part of the problem is the NG’s abandonment of the old entrance from 1838. Yes, it’s small but, accessed via a grand staircase from Trafalgar Square, it’s gracious, and visitors feel that they’re arriving at a very special place, which they were. The driver for closing the original entrance was probably its spectacular mosaic floors from the late 1920s into the early ’50s. I love them — The Awakening of the Muses, The Labours of Life, and The Pleasures of Life.

All depict timeless subjects, but there’s a twist here. Rather than generic faces, Greta Garbo is the Muse of Tragedy, Virginia Woolf is the Muse of History, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn represents the pleasure of Delectation, and Winston Churchill, dressed as Defiance, signals to what’s obviously a German half-man, half-beast, telling him to bugger off, as the British say. God forbid we offend the Germans. I think the powers that be hated the narrative, celebratory of the British as it was.

The renderings I’ve seen promise that the new interior will look like an airport terminal. Selldorf Architects, a New York firm, is the architect. I don’t know why the NG didn’t hire a British architect. In any event, the thing’s not done in time. Selldorf has tweaked the interior in response to each wave of complaints, making it look corporate and conveying a boring, anonymous, international taste. Everything has to have an EU sameness.

Acquisitions are a thorny proposition for the National Gallery. It’s a public institution, on the one hand, ostensibly competing with a zillion other interests for public money. On the other hand, it’s the ultimate deep pocket for “must keep” art otherwise set to leave the country, possibly for the Getty or, worse, for a sheikh’s delectation after the camels are sent to bed.

As art prices have soared, high-profile acquisitions have put pressure on the NG’s fundraising arm. Three years ago, it bought Thomas Lawrence’s The Red Boy for £9.3 million ($12.2 million), a hefty chunk of sterling. It depicts Charles Lambton, the son of the future Earl of Durham. Lawrence, the star portraitist of his day, painted it in 1825, the year after the National Gallery opened. He emulated Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, which, though done in 1770, set the standard for juveniles with sass and dash. The Times commended the subject’s “sparkling intelligence of youth,” but I detect a sybarite in the making.

We’ll never know, alas. Young Lambton died at 13 of tuberculosis. Still, the picture has always been famous for its artsy, androgynous languor and was, in 1967, the first painting in the U.K. to appear on a postage stamp. Velvet, lace, a moonlit sea, curls, red lips, a rocky promontory, and we have a future Byron, so I’m not surprised.

It stayed in the Lambton family until the National Gallery bought it, raising most of the money privately. The American Friends of the National Gallery is a very deep pocket, raising $200 million, it says, over the years for the NG, largely for acquisitions.

I don’t doubt that George Bellows’s Men of the Docks is a very good painting, but I can’t fathom why the NG spent $25.5 million for it — the first American painting of consequence in a national U.K. collection. Nicholas Penny, the director at the time, predicted an “electrifying effect” among visitors but, when I was there the other day, no one was looking at it except me. A wall panel lumped it in with a Sorolla painting of a drunk. Bellows’s picture, I read, concerned the unsettling issue of unemployment while Sorolla’s lamented alcoholism. Clearly the curators didn’t know what to say. Electrifying the public in that particular gallery were the late Impressionists. So much for $25.5 million.

The NG made two major purchases last year. Abraham Bloemaert’s Lot and His Daughters, from 1624, is a handsome, substantial Dutch Caravaggisti painting by the movement’s father. Lot’s wife having filled a multitude of saltshakers, his two daughters seduce him to continue the human race. It’s an oddball story for an oddball time. The picture has been attributed to Rubens and Jordaens and, in another twist, once belonged to the Des Moines Women’s Club. It came to the U.S. sometime in the mid 19th century, went as far west as Des Moines before heading back to New York, and, now, it’s back across the Pond to London.

Henri Rousseau’s Portrait of Joseph Brummer, from 1909, is a stark but fun look at the collector who introduced African sculpture to Paris. It’s not at all PC. Brummer sits on what looks like a throne, a stylized jungle behind him, and seems a jolly well-pleased appropriator of African culture. Displayed near the ignored Bellows, it was a big crowd-pleaser.

Saving the best for last, the NG is displaying seven of Mantegna’s nine Triumphs of Caesar, part of the ducal Gonzaga collection that Charles I bought in 1620. Charles was one of Europe’s greatest collectors among dukes, popes, and kings, but much of his art was sold after he lost his head. Mantegna’s cinematic, life-size history paintings stayed snug at Hampton Court. Painted from the 1480s to about 1506, they depict triumphant processions that followed Caesar’s conquests in Gaul. Hampton Court is getting a refurbishment, so the current king, Charles III, lent them to the museum as his anniversary present to the NG. “Empire” is a dirty word these days. Otherwise, the NG could have built an anchor anniversary extravaganza around the seven works. Still, the museum is now the world’s Mantegna center. They’re splendid.