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Face to Face SUMMER 2007 My Favourite Portrait by Jeremy Paxman BP Portrait Award 2007 Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street Devotional by Sonia Boyce From the Director This year’s BP Portrait Award exhibition will be particularly intriguing after the change in the rules which no longer restricts the entrants to artists under forty. This has allowed a much wider range of artists to put themselves forward, and should enable the exhibition to be a fuller test of the Zeitgeist of what is happening in contemporary portraiture. A special prize for artists under thirty has been added, so we are still able to continue the tradition of nurturing younger talent. The judges make choices anonymously – having no idea who the artists are as they view each portrait – and as Chair of the judges I am very conscious of wanting to make sure that the very best and most telling portraits are carefully considered. Do come along and see whether you agree with the views of the judges and make up your own mind about what you believe is the best painted portrait this year. The ‘Devotional Series’ by Sonia Boyce offers a fascinating view by a prominent British artist of some of the great black women soul singers of the twentieth century. The special installation by Boyce, devised with curator Eddie Otchere, pays homage to the great musical tradition created within the black African diaspora following the period of the transatlantic slave trade. As such this celebration complements the ‘Portraits, People and Abolition’ trail and display created with other events to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. COVER AND ABOVE Joan Armatrading The newly acquired portrait of Thomas Paine is a reminder of the importance of the by Joel Andersen, 2003 Gallery’s ability to acquire – in this instance with help from Philip Mould, one of our © Joel Andersen Patrons – major works that illuminate different periods of British history. Paine is This photograph is part of portrayed at the moment when he was at the centre of the complex and shifting Devotional on display in Room 37a from 16 June 2007. politics of post-Revolutionary France. As you will have seen in the last edition of Face to Face the growth of the Portrait Fund is the long-term approach for the Gallery to accumulate the resources to respond when really significant works become available. I make no apology in appealing to everyone who cares about the Gallery to give support to the Fund, whether now or through future provision. Do get in touch if you would like to know more about the Portrait Fund and its work. Daily Encounters, the summer exhibition in the Porter Gallery, takes a journey into the world of Fleet Street and the way in which photographic images within newspapers have created the public face of people in the public eye. These are the portraits of the street, often capturing moments of triumph or despair. Such ‘portraits’ offer us – as readers – an immediacy to the news and its principal protagonists, but also become images that may last longer in the public imagination than the carefully posed photograph constructed in the studio. The exhibition follows two strands: the photographic images of the public figures and the story of the newspaper photographers, originally treated as the lowest level in the pecking order of the newspaper industry. Sandy Nairne DIRECTOR I LIKE THE PAINTINGS in Room 17 because the story MY FAVOURITE that unfolds here is so amusing. The full-length PORTRAIT portrait of George IV, painted when he was in his fifties but making him look like a man in his thirties, is JEREMY PAXMAN so completely bogus that I find it very funny indeed. He is depicted as, I suppose, a Marshal of the army, in a red tunic and white breeches, boots, spurs, a marshal’s hat, a sash, a sword. He really ‘doth bestride the world like a Colossus’ – which is what the artist has set out to do, to show him as a towering, imposing, commanding presence. The reality was that he was about twice the size of the figure who appears in that picture; he was disgustingly corpulent. I think The Times described him as a man who was always Jeremy Paxman has worked on more at home with a girl and a drink than with a many programmes from reporting sermon and politics. And that was his approach to life. on Tonight and Panorama to He makes a completely implausible military figure, presenting the BBC’s Six O’clock because right alongside him there is a picture, News and Breakfast News. Paxman I think rather a good picture actually, of the Duke of joined the Newsnight team in 1989, and is now chairman of University Wellington and another one of Nelson on the other Challenge. He was awarded Bafta’s side, and something about these two characters – most prestigious award for current I can’t quite work out what it is – reveals that they are affairs in 1996 and 2000 and is unmistakeably military men. Whereas George is just as currently writing a book on royalty unmistakeably not a military man. His nickname was and their complicated marriages. the ‘Prince of Whales’ because he was so enormous. Sire’. His whole mind became addled by laudanum LEFT And he got so bamboozled by incessantly wearing and drink, as his body completely went to seed. We King George IV (detail) military uniforms, of much greater grandeur than this get none of that in this picture: we get a portrait of a after Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1815 one here, that he actually held forth at dinner with the heroic figure. ABOVE Duke of Wellington and claimed to have taken part Jeremy Paxman Jeremy Paxman in a decisive cavalry charge at the Battle of Waterloo, EXTRACT FROM THE BBC RADIO FOUR SERIES PORTRAITS by Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury, 2000 to which Wellington replied, ‘So you’ve often told me, CELEBRATING THE GALLERY’S 150TH ANNIVERSARY © Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury ANTHONY CARO is widely regarded as Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. Complementing an exhibition CARO PORTAITS greatest living sculptor. From the early 1960s he has of new abstract work at Annely Juda Fine Art, the artist been a major, pioneering figure in the development has generously agreed to lend an important group From 21 April 2007 of abstract sculpture. This is an area in which he of his portrait sculptures for display on the Balcony Balcony Gallery continues to innovate, producing sculpture that tests Gallery. These include two early bronze busts of the limits of expression, often using pieces of found Sheila, his wife, made in 1955. In their reductive scrap steel welded together in arrangements whose treatment of the sitter’s features, and emphasis on appeal is at once cerebral and sensuous. purely expressive, abstracted formal qualities, they demonstrate the artist’s admiration for Matisse. These Since the mid-1980s, Caro’s work has proceeded on early heads of Sheila are complemented by more an ever-broadening front, achieving a remarkable recent bronzes belonging to the late 1980s. In these diversity in a range of materials including bronze, extraordinary works, Caro revisited his earlier subject, lead, ceramic, stainless steel, silver, wood and paper. finding new, radical solutions to the issue of resolving A little-known aspect of his refusal to be tied to a observed appearance with an expressive engagement single way of working has been his occasional return with form and texture. to figurative imagery. Prior to his radical breakthrough to abstraction in 1960, the human figure was a As the curator of Tate Britain’s Caro retrospective in principal preoccupation of Caro’s art. During the last 2005, for reasons of space and clarity I elected to twenty years he has returned to this motif, making tell the story of this singular artist’s work through a numerous drawings and sculptures that depict an concise selection of his key abstract works. But even observed model or sitter. Alongside his purely abstract then it seemed to me that a fuller understanding of works, Caro’s output has included recognisable Caro’s achievement called for an appreciation of his subjects such as the nude, as well as occasional recent figurative work, much of which has remained portraits. The result has been a remarkable, liberated unseen. The forthcoming display provides that insight, ABOVE Portrait of Sheila I fertility of invention, of which he commented: ‘I was bringing into view an aspect of Caro’s work that to by Anthony Caro, willing to say, come on, let’s open this up and use it in some will appear initially to contradict the very basis on 1955 every way we can without feeling that we shouldn’t do which his reputation rests. At a deeper level, however, Photographer: John Riddy this. I felt much more freedom to experiment, Caro’s portraits reveal a vital force of imagination – © Barford Sculptures Ltd freedom to try anything.’ unconstrained by habit and undaunted by expectation. From June onwards, there will be a unique opportunity Paul Moorhouse to view a selection of Caro’s figurative heads at the 20TH CENTURY CURATOR DAILY ENCOUNTERS PHOTOGRAPHS FROM FLEET STREET 5 July–21 October 2007 Porter Gallery Admission charge Supported by the Patrons of the National Portrait Gallery CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHS can be both profound and Ronald Kray toasting Reggie profane. While many fail to register beyond the first Kray and Francis Shae at their glance, there are others that shock, surprise and wedding amuse us, lingering in our collective memories long by Norman Potter, 1965 after the editions that first carried them have been © Getty Images separated out and consigned for recycling.