Art
Face to Face
By NE VILE WALLIS
ABOUT 160,000 people rounded London's windiest corner last
year and entered the National Portrait Gallery. A surpris- ingly large number that, when you consider that those laby- rinthine galleries are as se- cluded and almost as little publicised as the director, Mr.
C. K. Adams, a gentle, patrician scholar who has been glancing for over forty years up the Charing Cross Road. No great stir attended the Gallery's unique exhibitions celebrating Eliza- beth I, Charles II, Cromwell or Alexander Pope.
Few know that next year Shakespeare is to be honoured there with the greatest ingenuity, see- ing that only two portraits, both posthumous, are held authentic.
The Portrait Gallery's primary value, in fact, is to the art historian or research student. The specialist knows that the 1,500 pictures, busts and reliefs, representing our kings and worthies from last year's obituaries to Saxon times, on view in some thirty-five rooms, are the iceberg's visible part. Submerged in the reference section are 3,000 more works. Any one of the vast wire screens holding tiers of paintings can be hauled forward, within five minutes' notice, and a platform staircase wheeled into place so that a topmost Watts can be inspected as ceremoni- ously as one mounts an elephant at Whipsnade. Only Hitchcock's stealthily pursuing camera could enhance the mystery of the lofty Vic- torian corridor flanked by coffins containing huge, unremembered engravings, leading to this hidden repository. To remove all the contents of the Portrait Gallery to a new building on the Hampton site would indeed be a major operation. But this proposal to enable the National Gallery to overflow into the rear premises on its island site is favoured by the trustees of both. `A properly designed museum with our front door in Trafalgar Square,' Mr. Adams has said, 'would satisfy our needs for years to come.'
If that came about, conceivably in Mr. David Piper's prospective reign, the Gallery's activities could be redoubled. Parliament might be moved to increase the basic annual grant of £4,000 for portrait purchases (the NPG could make only a pitiful offer for the stolen Goya Wellington which it once housed, and where it morally belongs), and facilitate the mounting of more special exhibitions. Here is an institution well equipped to give a stimulus to contemporary British por- traiture, perhaps leading to a revival of the conversation-piece in new, expressive guise. It could show us instructively the miraculous flight and descent of the miniature between the Eliza- bethan reigns. Its purchases last year (now hung in Room 21) include Henry Lamb's hypersensi- tive studies of his intellectual features to remind us of the absorbing collection it could assemble of British self-portraits, supplemented by loans of such contemporaries as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Carel Weight, who merit a permanent place there.
Contemplating some of the finest heads painted in England during the half-century since early Sickert, Lawrence Gowing once commented on their distinction and the artists' comparative isolation. We lament the present state of por- traiture. Yet, as he remarked, how good portrait painting could be, how serious and committed, how revealing, if we had the kind of faith iii painters that they have in themselves. Suther-, land's presentments, even those as intensely in dividual and individualised as his Maugham Sackville-West, are generally regarded as aber-_ rations. Spear's penetrating characterisations of dons are virtually unknown. The chill of isola-, tion induced Rodrigo Moynihan to abandon classically disposed groups, and re-enter the ab- stract movement. Since that questionable ex- change, no single native painter of distinction has mustered a group of his contemporaries in a room and made a significant comment on them. This genre needs a lead today such as Henry Lamb once gave when he was close to Spencer. Studious design, with an intimacy so heightened as to give domesticity the air of a freshly seen, surprising phenomenon, characterised his family' groups up to the 1920s. Thereafter a certain fateful strangeness began to desert him. His Neville Chamberlain, portrayed shortly befori the war and now acquired by the Portrait Gal- lery, lacks the divination of the Tate Gallery's masterly painting of Lytton Strachey—a mild--; eyed, boneless wonder reclining in a basket chair, which combines respect and irony as subtly as in the historian's work. Latter-day compositions of such expressive emotion may be found here and there in the Portrait Gallery, but they are scarce, and denied our encouragement may be-' come extinct.
This dearth will be most evident when the Contemporary Art Society holds its major ex- hibition this, year, simultaneously at the Tate and Whitechapel Galleries, entitled 'British Painting in the Sixties.' Some fifty selected painters can be expected to provide their informal or formal abstractions, together with figurative paintings at the opposite extremes of impish" `pop' art and plodding nudes out of the Slade. In between, we shall be fortunate to find more than one or two biographical chapters in paint one-half as revealing as a Kokoschka, to work subtly on our imagination and restore our faith- in the dignity of man.
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