“Painting the Century” at London’s National Portrait Gallery

FROM THE CELEBRATORY FACES of commissioned canvases to satirical caricatures for the press, the tradition of portraiture is endlessly revealing of an era and its mores. This eternal fascination with face and figure has inspired a millennium exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (“Painting the Century,: Oct. 26,2000–Feb. 4, 2001) which, if it works, will surely be both popular and enlightening. Robin Gibson, the gallery’s chief curator, has selected one portrait from each year of the twentieth century. The idea is hardly complex, nor could it possibly initiate a profound study of the genre in a century that saw the disappearance of the official portrait, countless movements eschewing such direct representation, and stiff competition from photography. Despite these challenges, however, portraiture—battered, transformed, decanted—has survived, and the variety of images on offer testifies to its endurance.

Appropriately, the previous century’s old warhorse, Queen Victoria, begins the show in 1900, the last year of her life. Edwardian swagger ensues with its unquestioning portrayal of rulers and shakers (Sir Frank Swettenham, 1904, by John Singer Sargent; the glittering bravura of Giovanni Boldini’s Consuela Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, 1906). But other voices soon interrupt—in 1905, Picasso’s Woman in a Chemise shows a waiflike model wearing not jewels and silk but a simple, barely decent shift; and in 1907, Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait Against Red Background sounds a note of high anxiety. Already, different worlds have collided: Two survivors from a more confident age encounter younger artists who set the tone for much that is to follow, when highly personalized images dominate over the public collusion of formal portraiture.

Gibson admits that this genre cannot always demonstrate the century’s stylistic diversity. And some of his best ideas were thwarted by refusals of requests for loans. Nevertheless, the modern movement is well represented by Roger de la Fresnaye, Oskar Kokoschka, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix. Gibson has also given eye to pieces that provide historical context, featuring some unfamiliar artists depicting celebrated sitters. Men and women of science and the arts make appearances, as do political players including Lenin and Hitler. On the lighter side are such surprises as Fernand Léger’s Charlot Cubiste (Charlie Chaplin), 1923; George Gershwin’s Self Portrait, 1934; and the wonderful Walter Sickert oil painting of Edward G. Robinson and Joan Blondell from a publicity still for the 1936 film Bullets and Ballots—prophetic photo-based portraiture leading to Warhol’s (Double) Elvis, 1963.

From there onward it becomes increasingly difficult to find good and representative images, and, on paper at least, the last two decades appear almost too diverse to be coherent, ranging from British dullards to A.R. Penck and Cindy Sherman, the latter questioning the very premises of the genre through subversive self-portrayals. At the time of writing, 1999 and 2000 are blanks in the sequence, works yet to be chosen to usher the portrait, limping, into its next century.

—Richard Shone