Two Faces: The National Portrait Gallery and Academia

Abstract

In December 2008 the doors of the new Australian National Portrait Gallery were opened to the public. Visitor numbers quickly exceeded expectations and currently stand at over 1.5 million. In this paper it will be argued that the appeal of the portrait gallery relies upon the presentation of an accessible and relatively simple view of biography. This simple view is at odds with academic perspectives and revisionist scholarship which increasingly examines portraits as complex, dense and historically difficult images. Given the differences between popular and scholarly ideas of portraiture, this review considers viable and productive paths for collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery and academia.

Notes

^*I would like to acknowledge and thank the Director of the NPG, Louise Doyle, and the Deputy Director, Michael Desmond, for discussing their views of the NPG with me. I also want to thank the anonymous referee for their pertinent comments.

¹ The Carlyle Letters Online, Thomas Carlyle to David Laing, 2 May 1854, http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/

²Anna Gray, Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010), 15.

³For the precursor exhibition to the National Portrait Gallery see Julian Faigan, Uncommon Australians: Towards and Australian Portrait Gallery (Sydney: Art Exhibitions Australia, 1992).

⁴Humphrey McQueen, ‘‘In for “Higher Art” I'd Go”: at the National Portrait Gallery’, Australian Book Review (May 2009): 41–3. This article is reproduced with a commentary on McQueen's website (webhttp://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/art_aust/art_aus_portraits_power.htm) and as this version of the article has sections that were not in the published edition I am using the online version throughout the review.

⁵John Thompson, ‘At the National Portrait Gallery: art or history?’, reCollections: A Journal of Museums and Collections 5, no. 1, http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/notes_and_comments/.

⁶Richard E. Spear, ‘Art History and the “Blockbuster” exhibition’, The Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (September 1986): 358.

⁷S. J. Freedberg, Gervase Jackson-Stops, and Richard E. Spear, ‘On ‘Art History and the “Blockbuster” exhibition’, The Art Bulletin 69, no. 2 (June 1987): 297.

⁸Charles W. Haxthausen, ed. The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002).

⁹Harry Berger, ‘Fictions of the pose: facing the gaze of early modern portraiture’, Representations 46 (Spring 1994): 87–120 and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

¹⁰Elisabeth Findlay, ‘The authentic portrait reconsidered’ in Art & Authenticity, eds. Jan Lloyd Jones and Julian Lamb (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 34–42.

¹¹Paul Barlow, ‘The imagined hero as incarnate sign: Thomas Carlyle and the mythology of the “national portrait” in Victorian Britain’, Art History 17, no. 4 (December 1994) 517–45 and ‘Facing the past and present: the National Portrait Gallery and the search for ‘authentic’ portraiture”, in Joanna Woodall, ed. Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

¹²Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991).

¹³See Joanna Mendelssohn and Catherine de Lorenzo, ‘Institutional radicals: co-examining curatorial visions and art histories in Australia’, The International Journal of the Arts in Society 5, no. 2 (2010): 153–64 and Catherine de Lorenzo, Joanna Mendelssohn and Catherine Speck, ‘1968–2008: Curated exhibitions and Australian art history’, Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011); 1–15.

¹⁴Andrew Sayers, ‘Curators and Australian art history’, Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011): 1–10.

¹⁵Thompson.

¹⁶Andrew Sayers, Sarah Engledow and Wally Caruana, Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2008).

¹⁷National Portrait Gallery, Corporate Plan: Giving a Face to the Nation 2011–2014, http://www.portrait.gov.au/UserFiles/file/NPG%20CORPORATE%20PLAN%202011-2014.pdf.

¹⁸Thompson.

¹⁹Lynette Russell and Jane Lydon are the Chief Investigators on the ARC funded Aboriginal Visual Histories: Photographing Indigenous Australians, which is producing a systematic history of photography of Aboriginal people since 1841 (see http://arts.monash.edu.au/mic/research/visual-histories/).

²⁰Melinda Hinkson, ‘Seeing more than black and white: picturing Aboriginality at Australia's National Portrait Gallery’, Australian Humanities Review 49 (November 2010): 5–28.

²¹Melinda Hinkson, ‘Seeing more than black and white: picturing Aboriginality at Australia's National Portrait Gallery’, Australian Humanities Review 49 (November 2010): 5–28.