To the English summer certainties of untimely rain, tennis at Wimbledon and holiday traffic jammed on motorways, we must acknowledge that the annual Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery has been added. Now so long established that most of us have forgotten how it began and what its intentions were, we take for granted that every year the procedures of sending in, judging, acceptance and rejection will take place and that some 50 or so (one in 40, this year) will for three months be exposed to public gaze as the very best of portraiture worldwide. To this thrilling event 341,500 visitors flocked last year. Thrilling? Never quite that, there have indeed been years when the quality has been dire enough for me to suggest that the award should be put out of its misery, but it suits the sponsor’s purposes for advertising and soothes its conscience for the ecological damage that it does, and as long as its funding is proffered the NPG is unlikely to send it away with a flea in its ear.
My recollection is that the award was intended to encourage young British painters to turn to portraiture before this genre, stultified by custom and the unadventurous expectations of patrons, fell irrecoverably into terminal desuetude. It has to some extent succeeded in that, occasionally, amid the strivings of overblown photography, the fashionable tendencies towards gigantism and the false naive, the disturbing obsessions with pores and wrinkles, red-rimmed eyes and crinkly hair, there have been a few portraits that were both likenesses and paintings that stand in their own right as much more than charts of features, and the early shows were hopeful.
Quality fell away, however, the rules had to be changed, and in making it an international competition there was a significant shift of purpose from the notion of supporting and promoting portraiture in Britain; this year two of the four prizes, the first and second, have been awarded to entries from the US and Spain. That British entries numbered 1,486 and the international 701 is, when the latter run away with the best prizes, statistically a devastating criticism of the former, but no doubt it suits the sponsor very well in terms of exploitation; we, on the other hand, might reasonably conclude that the award has failed in its original purpose to invigorate our historically and commercially most successful genre.
More often than not the few modest successes have been far outweighed by horrors — but not so this year. There are horrors, and the most ghastly of them greets us at the door — Ruth Murray’s depiction of a disgruntled girl squatting among clay portrait heads that oozed from one of Anish Kapoor’s electronic sculpture machines. This may, however, be a device to hurry us on, shuddering, into the body of the exhibition, fearing to encounter something even worse, only to be reassured by the ordinariness of almost everything else, the close relatives, friends, batty old ladies, blokes in pubs, men at work, the High Sheriff and the Chelsea Pensioner, the slack-mouthed youth with acne and two others with black eyes, all more or less commonplace year after year.
A number of small paintings require a measure of contemplation before we see how good they are, for it is too easy to walk unseeing past the discreet and sympathetic observation that does not shout “Look at me, look at me”, past the painting conceived in tone rather than colour, past the sketch left unfinished at the shrewdly chosen moment. Half a dozen check the visitor’s stride with some combination of perception, insight, understanding and the painter’s sleight-of-hand — by Nathan Ford (whose Joachim, unfinished, not wholly clarified but delicately smudged, reinforces a conviction formed last year that he is a painter to watch), by Eileen Hogan, Anastasia Pollard, Roni Taharlev (gentle but unkind honesty in a portrait of herself), Elizabeth Thayer and Peter Wegner (whose portrait of a Desert Rat in his nineties is particularly touching). Some of their undemanding sincerities survive on a larger scale in Frances Bell’s Postman and Isabella Watling’s Glenn.
This annual exhibition has no point if it fails to engender patronage, but I cannot see any army mess, city boardroom or hall of academe turning to these small-scale painters for portraits of their peculiar grandees. Surely patrons have a conventional size and scale in mind, a conventional pose too, and, expecting the conventional indications of dignity and status, they must ignore the painter who does not give them pomposity or swagger big enough to loom across a room; in error they assume that size and quality are necessarily happy bedfellows, but they are not. Nor can I believe that these painters, so evidently at ease on the small canvas, could ever turn to large without losing the particular and intimate quality that distinguishes their work — nor should they, but if they do not, are the patrons to change?
Apart from the four portraits that split the £44,000 prize money, the remainder, ranging from unambitious to acceptable, are hardly worth a second glance. Colin Davidson, with a broad brush and a slick of dribble and splash, escapes the usual traps of the gigantic head and is the best of them — behind the rest lurk the glossy photograph, the post-Conroy Glasgow school, William Roberts, Danish painting of the Golden Age and even Caravaggio, futile, monstrosity, vile, impertinent and contemptible all words among my notes.
As for the prizewinners, I have saved the worst for last. From four square metres of canvas painted black, the grey and glowering grandfather of Ignacio Estudillo looms to win the second prize — but four square inches would have been enough. The first prize, of £25,000 and the promise of a commission worth another £4,000, has been awarded to Aleah Chapin’s Auntie. Silhouetted against a white ground embellished with meaningless blotches of ochre, this ancient crone stands life-size, full-frontal and stark naked, heavy breasts drooping low, skin stretched and sagging, looking as though, par-boiled and with the lividity of death about her lower quarters, she has just escaped from a cannibal’s cooking-pot. This is the figurative realism of the new American academic painter — no sympathy gentles the stark observation of every detail, nor is desire roused; instead, this painting stimulates revulsion.
Had the painter stopped at the neck, this would have been a portrait of sorts; had she included the shoulders, it would still have been a portrait; but below them it becomes a grotesque medical record, the body disproportionately large. Did Miss Chapin not see that in her obsession with the ghastliness of ageing flesh, she had enlarged this repellent body beyond the scale of the head and given primacy, not to the implications of the face — the eyes purblind, the slight smile a rictus, the tousled hair perhaps some indication of character — but to the belly-button and the breasts. Could the judges not see this too? Just think: the National Portrait Gallery took down the nudes of Freud to award a prize to this.
BP Portrait Award 2012 is at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020 7312 2463, npg.org.uk) until September 23. Open Sat-Weds, 10am-6pm; Thurs-Fri, 10am-9pm. Admission free.
Quality fell away, however, the rules had to be changed, and in making it an international competition there was a significant shift of purpose from the notion of supporting and promoting portraiture in Britain; this year two of the four prizes, the first and second, have been awarded to entries from the US and Spain. That British entries numbered 1,486 and the international 701 is, when the latter run away with the best prizes, statistically a devastating criticism of the former, but no doubt it suits the sponsor very well in terms of exploitation; we, on the other hand, might reasonably conclude that the award has failed in its original purpose to invigorate our historically and commercially most successful genre.
More often than not the few modest successes have been far outweighed by horrors — but not so this year. There are horrors, and the most ghastly of them greets us at the door — Ruth Murray’s depiction of a disgruntled girl squatting among clay portrait heads that oozed from one of Anish Kapoor’s electronic sculpture machines. This may, however, be a device to hurry us on, shuddering, into the body of the exhibition, fearing to encounter something even worse, only to be reassured by the ordinariness of almost everything else, the close relatives, friends, batty old ladies, blokes in pubs, men at work, the High Sheriff and the Chelsea Pensioner, the slack-mouthed youth with acne and two others with black eyes, all more or less commonplace year after year.
A number of small paintings require a measure of contemplation before we see how good they are, for it is too easy to walk unseeing past the discreet and sympathetic observation that does not shout “Look at me, look at me”, past the painting conceived in tone rather than colour, past the sketch left unfinished at the shrewdly chosen moment. Half a dozen check the visitor’s stride with some combination of perception, insight, understanding and the painter’s sleight-of-hand — by Nathan Ford (whose Joachim, unfinished, not wholly clarified but delicately smudged, reinforces a conviction formed last year that he is a painter to watch), by Eileen Hogan, Anastasia Pollard, Roni Taharlev (gentle but unkind honesty in a portrait of herself), Elizabeth Thayer and Peter Wegner (whose portrait of a Desert Rat in his nineties is particularly touching). Some of their undemanding sincerities survive on a larger scale in Frances Bell’s Postman and Isabella Watling’s Glenn.
This annual exhibition has no point if it fails to engender patronage, but I cannot see any army mess, city boardroom or hall of academe turning to these small-scale painters for portraits of their peculiar grandees. Surely patrons have a conventional size and scale in mind, a conventional pose too, and, expecting the conventional indications of dignity and status, they must ignore the painter who does not give them pomposity or swagger big enough to loom across a room; in error they assume that size and quality are necessarily happy bedfellows, but they are not. Nor can I believe that these painters, so evidently at ease on the small canvas, could ever turn to large without losing the particular and intimate quality that distinguishes their work — nor should they, but if they do not, are the patrons to change?
Apart from the four portraits that split the £44,000 prize money, the remainder, ranging from unambitious to acceptable, are hardly worth a second glance. Colin Davidson, with a broad brush and a slick of dribble and splash, escapes the usual traps of the gigantic head and is the best of them — behind the rest lurk the glossy photograph, the post-Conroy Glasgow school, William Roberts, Danish painting of the Golden Age and even Caravaggio, futile, monstrosity, vile, impertinent and contemptible all words among my notes.
As for the prizewinners, I have saved the worst for last. From four square metres of canvas painted black, the grey and glowering grandfather of Ignacio Estudillo looms to win the second prize — but four square inches would have been enough. The first prize, of £25,000 and the promise of a commission worth another £4,000, has been awarded to Aleah Chapin’s Auntie. Silhouetted against a white ground embellished with meaningless blotches of ochre, this ancient crone stands life-size, full-frontal and stark naked, heavy breasts drooping low, skin stretched and sagging, looking as though, par-boiled and with the lividity of death about her lower quarters, she has just escaped from a cannibal’s cooking-pot. This is the figurative realism of the new American academic painter — no sympathy gentles the stark observation of every detail, nor is desire roused; instead, this painting stimulates revulsion.
Had the painter stopped at the neck, this would have been a portrait of sorts; had she included the shoulders, it would still have been a portrait; but below them it becomes a grotesque medical record, the body disproportionately large. Did Miss Chapin not see that in her obsession with the ghastliness of ageing flesh, she had enlarged this repellent body beyond the scale of the head and given primacy, not to the implications of the face — the eyes purblind, the slight smile a rictus, the tousled hair perhaps some indication of character — but to the belly-button and the breasts. Could the judges not see this too? Just think: the National Portrait Gallery took down the nudes of Freud to award a prize to this.
BP Portrait Award 2012 is at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020 7312 2463, npg.org.uk) until September 23. Open Sat-Weds, 10am-6pm; Thurs-Fri, 10am-9pm. Admission free.
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