The National Portrait Gallery is on tour (but it'll cost you more up north)
So far, after six months as director of the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria Siddall hasn't put an elegant shoe wrong. Her predecessor, Nicholas Cullinan, departed to run the British Museum after masterminding a £41 million revamp that was acclaimed by nearly everyone. Siddall, 47, was appointed after directing and expanding the fashionable art fair Frieze for more than a decade, but with no experience of managing a publicly funded arts organisation. 'The mindset is very different,' she admits.
Yet already she has conjured up the one essential thing the NPG regularly needs: a photocall at the gallery with its royal patron, the Princess of Wales, surrounded by lots of tiny tots. And now she has launched two initiatives signalling a new way forward for the NPG.
One, opening at MediaCity in Salford, is billed as 'the first immersive art experience of a UK national collection'. Called Stories — Brought to Life, it's a walk-in-and-gawp show of digital projections. Based on 19 portraits from the NPG collection, ranging from Elizabeth I, Darwin and Shakespeare to such mandatory modern cultural icons as Amy Winehouse and Grayson Perry, it surrounds visitors with sound and visuals, whisking through the lives of the chosen subjects.
A portrait of Amy Winehouse at Stories — Brought to Life
DAVID PARRY
A portrait of Mary Seacole at Stories – Brought to Life
DAVID PARRY
It has been put together by the NPG in association with Frameless, a commercial company specialising in immersive art experiences. Who approached whom? Siddall seems surprised by the question. 'Work has been going on for some years and predates me,' she replies. 'There was a desire on the part of the NPG to look at innovative technologies and how these could be harnessed to share the collection in new ways. Frameless has been doing this successfully for years.'
So who chose which portraits to use? 'That's another great question,' Siddall replies, without answering it. 'The show covers a wonderful range of people and beautifully illustrates the diversity of voices who've made up UK history.'
And the point of the project is? 'The challenge of being a national museum in one building in one city is how you can be truly national and show the collection all over the country,' she says. 'Because, of course, the collection is owned by everybody. So the main driver is this desire to take the collection out and reach new audiences in this very different new format.'
But isn't there a flaw in this thinking? People who are able to visit the NPG in London get free admission. That's very much not the case with Stories — Brought to Life, which runs in Salford all summer before touring other UK venues. In fact the ticket prices seem steep, especially as the show is over in 45 minutes.
'They are very much in line with other immersive experiences,' Siddall replies. 'We want everybody to be able to see this.'
Really? When I went online to book for this weekend I found adult (over-16) tickets priced at £29.95, children's tickets at £19.95, and the family ticket (two adults, two children) a hefty £80. It's not exactly flinging open the doors to the poor of Salford and Manchester, is it?
'Yes, at peak times it will be more expensive,' Siddall concedes, 'but there's quite a range of pricing there for people to work with.' How is the ticket revenue being divided between the NPG and Frameless? 'We have an arrangement with Frameless that I can't delve into,' she says.
She points out that this project is not the only way in which the NPG will reach out to the country in the coming year. J oshua Reynolds's magnificent Portrait of Mai, which the NPG helped to buy for a jaw-dropping £50 million in a unique 50/50 sharing deal with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, embarks this month on a national tour — Bradford (for its City of Culture year), Cambridge and Plymouth — with what Siddall describes as a 'fantastic learning and engagement programme built round it'.
Her other recent initiative demonstrates how important it now is for directors of arts institutions to have friends in wealthy places — something that Siddall undoubtedly put into practice during her time at Frieze and, before that, the auction house Christies. She has persuaded Anastasia and Igor Bukhman — Russian-born billionaires living in London with Israeli passports and a fortune made from an online gaming business — to donate £1 million so that that NPG can start a new fund, Collecting the Now, to buy 'major contemporary artworks'. It will run for three years and the first two artworks have already been acquired: a self-portrait by Sonia Boyce, and a satirically embellished portrait bust of Edward VII by Hew Locke.
'It's particularly important for museums like the NPG to collect works by living artists, reflecting our times, before they become too expensive,' Siddall says. 'This fund will enable us to think more strategically and be more nimble about acquisitions. Making quick decisions is sometimes essential when buying contemporary art.'
Also essential, one imagines, is the knack of wooing art-loving, m ega-rich individuals like the Bukhmans, especially at a time when (if you believe the newspapers) thousands of multimillionaires are quitting Britain for less taxing regimes. 'Oh, there are still a few around,' Siddall says with a laugh. 'But yes, that's really critical. I hope they [the Bukhmans] will be an inspiration to others. We have such high ambitions for the NPG. There are so many things we would love to do, whether it's learning programmes, exhibitions, building the collection or taking shows round the country. But we do need financial stability and donors to achieve those.'
• Nicholas Cullinan, British Museum boss: 'I won't conform to political agendas'
It could be that Siddall has a self-inflicted problem, however, when it comes to attracting potential sponsors. Five years ago she co-founded Gallery Climate Coalition, committing all its member galleries to a 50 per cent reduction in their carbon emissions by 2030. The following years she raised over £5 million for the environmental charity ClientEarth by persuading artists to donate works. She then founded Murmur to champion the idea that 'the arts industries have the potential to ignite a critical mass of action on the climate crisis and to be leaders on this vital issue'. Unsurprisingly the anti-oil pressure group Culture Unstained, which ferociously denounces sponsorships such as BP's £50 million to the British Museum, announced that it was 'encouraging' to see Siddall appointed to the NPG. Were the eco-warriors right to be encouraged?
A portrait of Malala Yousafzai at Stories – Brought to Life
DAVID PARRY
A portrait of Emmeline Pankhurst at Stories – Brought to Life
DAVID PARRY
'Like many of us, I care about the future of the planet,' Siddall replies, 'and it's right that we look at the sustainability of our own building. But in terms of support from sponsors for institutions, it's vital to be able to achieve what we want to do, and I'm very grateful for the corporate partners that we do have.'
What would she do if she was offered sponsorship by, say, Baillie Gifford, the investment giant that has tiny links to fossil-fuel companies yet was dumped as a sponsor by various literary festivals? 'It's hard for me to comment because it's another organisation and I wasn't involved,' she replies. 'But I would definitely encourage corporates and individuals to think about how they can help our sector continue to flourish.'
Should the UK's national museums still have free admission? No other country does it. 'Yes, it creates this incredibly democratic access to culture,' Siddall replies. OK, what about London imposing a hotel or city tax on visitors, to be spent on culture? At least tourists would then be contributing something towards the huge cost of running the museums they are free to enjoy. 'I'm sure those conversations are underway,' she says.
She is clearly already skilled in the corporate art of giving absolutely nothing away. She will go far.
Stories — Brought to Life is at MediaCity, Salford Quays, from May 2 to Aug 31, npgunframed.com. thetimes.com/timesplus
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New Statesman
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- New Statesman
Jenny Saville's human landscapes
Such was the noise generated by a cluster of exhibits at Sensation – the 1997 show at the Royal Academy that announced the Young British Artists to a fascinated-appalled public – that it is easy to forget that there were more than 40 artists on display. Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn's self-portrait head made from his own blood, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley simply drowned out many less strident voices. One of those belonged to Jenny Saville, who had five pieces in the show. However, while many of her fellow YBAs have, since that high-water mark, seen a steep downwards trajectory in terms of creativity (though not necessarily fame) Saville's career has followed the opposite path. In 2018, when her painting Propped (1992) – a massively fleshy naked self-portrait showing a ham-thighed Saville on a stool (in reality, she is not a large woman) – sold at Sotheby's for £9.5m, it became the world's most expensive piece by living female artist. And this time it seemed that the market was acting not on whim or media wattage, but on worth. Propped is one of the paintings included in the National Portrait Gallery's new survey of Saville's work. It is an appropriate venue because all her work is a form of portraiture although not of the conventional kind. She prefers to work from photographs rather than the live model and when she draws and paints faces she gives them titles that anonymise the sitter further, such as Stare, Witness or Figure 11.23; when she paints the naked body they are named Odalisque or Couples Study; when it is simply headless but stretched or pitted flesh it becomes Trace or Hybrid. All, however, show real people – or bits of them – but rather than read their personality through their gaze, clothing or setting, Saville writes it in their skin. The abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, an artist Saville greatly admires, wrote in 1949 that 'flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented', and it is a dictum she has taken to heart. Her pictures are about both elements – flesh and paint – and her interest is rarely in the conventionally beautiful but rather in human mass and how best to depict it. For clues she has looked not just at De Kooning but at Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Titian and Chaim Soutine, scoured medical textbooks and observed in operating theatres. However, the artist she most resembles in many ways is a less hallowed name, Henry Tonks, the First World War surgeon who produced numerous pastel drawings of soldiers following rudimentary reconstructive surgery. In Saville, as in Tonks, the surface of the skin and the subcutaneous layers are intertwined. Saville has expressed an interest in bodies 'that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness', such as in her paintings from the 1990s of bodies with marks drawn on them by a surgeon as a guide to operating, or a hefty back and bottom bearing the impress of recently removed bra straps, waistband and knickers. As she told an interviewer about her fascination with imperfect flesh: 'As we go through life, traces or memories both physical and psychological are left on the body; they almost help to produce your body.' This kind of scrutiny makes her a non-judgemental observer. She has also followed Mark Rothko in stating that her pictures should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches. While with Rothko this fills the viewer's field of vision with colour that begins to throb after a few moments, with Saville, a painter who more often than not works at a large scale, it means submersion in flesh. It is rarely a comfortable experience but Saville's particular gift is to make sure it is not a repellent one. One and a half feet is too close perhaps but it forces the viewer to confront the abstract nature not just of her paint but of flesh itself. From her early paintings to her more recent huge and vibrantly coloured heads, Saville treats the body as a form of landscape. Limbs are less objects for propulsion or lifting than elements of corporeal scenery, offering valleys and crests, enclosures and vistas. In some of her head paintings from 2020, such as Cascade and Virtual, she emphasises this non-figurative strand. Like Georg Baselitz's work, they are painted upside down and the controlled marks of her early work have here turned riotous – slashes and rubbings of roughly mixed pigments surrounding disembodied eyes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The sense of the body as something liminal is most evident in her mother and child pictures which she started to paint following the birth of her own two children in the late 2000s. Although they clearly refer to innumerable depictions of the Madonna and Child, Saville's contain an element of struggle – the naked mother (herself in several) trying to hold on to a wriggling child. The squirming infants are engaged in a battle not to cling on their mother but to escape from her; having been born, they fast-forward to separation. Poignantly, in Aleppo (2017-18), her response to the war in Syria, that struggle has ended prematurely in death. The mother and child has become a pietà. In this picture, as in many, she leaves the drawn outlines of rejected poses, the preparatory studies familiar from Renaissance cartoons. The reason for these pentimenti, she says, is that she is 'trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image'. They don't always work: for example, One Out of Two (Symposium) (2016), a monochrome, Freud-like drawing of naked women on a bed, is overlaid with terracotta swirls that neither enhance the drawing beneath nor indeed refer to it, but are simply a wilful addition, as though Saville felt the picture needed something – more energy? more diversion? – but couldn't quite decide on exactly what. Right from the start of Saville's career, there has been much talk – some by the artist herself – of her work being a response to the old debates about naked vs nude, objectification and reclaiming women's bodies. This retrospective, however, suggests something simpler. She is interested above all in the act of painting and how 'to charge the paint with a sculptural force'; it is why she treats the human body as a canvas as much as a subject. Sometimes, when artists make frequent references to the art-historical canon, it is little more than an impertinence. But not with Saville, who has taken a venerable tradition and moved it on. She is a painter of substance. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting The National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 7 September [See more: Anna Wintour still rules Vogue] Related
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The Guardian
3 days ago
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‘So much emotion in a single image': I join a schoolclass admiring Jenny Saville's astonishing new portraits
I went to see Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery recently and the exhibition was swarming with teenagers. Equipped with notepads and sketchbooks, scribbling down words like 'expressive', 'daring' and 'beautiful', the budding art enthusiasts seemed enraptured by Saville's portraits: from blemished backs and wounded faces to colossal closeups of girls and fleshy nude women. I got talking to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville's bodies are the antithesis to the idealised forms we see online today; and how stunned we were by the landscape of textures that can exist within a single cheek. Seventeen-year-old Laurence – who makes drawings with a ballpoint pen – admired the 'messy side' to Saville's work and was fascinated by 'just how much emotion she could portray in one image'. His classmate Georgia, also 17, was drawn to her 'vibrant colours' and felt 'positively overwhelmed' by the paintings, in particular Propped, an exposing early self-portrait that was part of the artist's Glasgow School of Art degree show. Fusing beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness, a nude Saville sits on a precarious-looking stool (spikily jamming into her ankle), with bitten-down nails that violently claw into her skin. Look closer and you'll see the painting is overlaid with text (written backwards) that reads: 'if we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other'. It's a translation from the French feminist Luce Irigaray's 1980 essay When Our Lips Speak Together, and draws not only on the importance of art history not repeating itself (by excluding voices and subjects), but – more powerfully today – about the failings of current leaders. 'It's really inspiring for young women in art to be controversial,' Georgia said. 'It also makes you more confident in your ability and appearance, because you see Saville create it in a beautiful painting.' Frustrated at how 'inaccessible' being an artist has been for women in history, and questioning why men get to be covered up with a fig leaf, whereas women are often fully exposed, she said: 'When [a self-portrait like this] is done by a woman, it's empowering in itself – it's women taking back control.' Georgia's words took me back to my own experiences as a teenager with Saville, who I studied as part of my GCSEs in the early 2010s. I remember my classmates and I coming into school with printouts of our faces pressed up against glass windows (no doubt reluctantly taken by our mums) that distorted our features like Saville's 2002 Closed Contact self-portraits, made with photographer Glen Luchford. Full of expression, and evocative of our teenage angst, the works got us thinking about how portraiture, like our lives, could be messy, fractured, emotional, internal – seemingly worlds away from the gilt-framed pictures that we often saw in museums, or the airbrushed photoshoots in magazines. But only now, at this show, have I been able to understand the monumental impact of her paintings. Not only in challenging notions of beauty in a patriarchal world, but in her ambition to push paint – and charcoal, in her mesmerising drawings – to new limits, in order to viscerally confront, stun and challenge. Whether it be a bloodied face examined under a bright white light, bodies fading from life right in front of us, or her truthful insights on motherhood, Saville's works hold the attention in ways that affirm the power of painting in a world overtaken by mindless scrolling. It was this that I also discussed with the teenagers, whose astute observations made me feel so encouraged about what art can offer us, in this tumultuous world. But these precious youthful discussions could become a rarity, thanks to ever decreasing government funding in arts education. As outlined in the recent spending review, the total expenditure of Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be reduced by 1.4% over the next three years, and research shows that only 38% of A-level students are taking at least one humanities subject (a statistic that drops to 24% when it comes to arts subjects). As a result, we are experiencing a crisis when it comes to lack of opportunities for creatives from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Incredibly, Saville's exhibition is free for anyone aged 25 and under, thanks to a private donor. I hope this will encourage young people of all backgrounds to enter these spaces and feel welcome to discuss, debate and come back again – and to understand the raw, visceral power that painting and the arts can have.
