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Portrait of a director

Mark Glazebrook

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Mark Glazebrook talks to Sandy Nairne, who explains why the NPG is part of the life of London

While interviewing him the thought occurred to me that perhaps the long Oscar Wilde-generated battle, between arty types and sporty types, may have been resolved in the energetic dual personality of this alert and athletic-looking director. Nairne possesses what P.G. Wodehouse could have described as ‘rugged good looks’. He read history as an undergraduate and has acquired his considerable knowledge and experience of art while working at the Tate, the Arts Council and at the ICA — where he was noted for promoting women artists.

It’s no surprise to discover that in the early 1970s Nairne rowed for Oxford University in the Isis crew or that he is strongly in favour of the NPG’s fairly recent policy of featuring popular sporting heroes, such as David Beckham — even though the iconic footballer is captured fast asleep rather than ‘bending it’ near the goalpost, in Sam Taylor-Wood’s popular video portrait of him. Stardom for sportsmen is something that neither Oscar Wilde nor Nairne’s sober 19th-century predecessors at the NPG would ever have countenanced. As Nairne puts it, ‘Our Victorian forebears didn’t really regard sport as an interesting area of achievement.’

But what about great fighting commanders who would have been grist to Reynolds’s mill? I mentioned three prominent living soldiers who seem to have been neglected by the NPG. Nairne explained that, although we are not now in a period when wars are thought to be about national survival, a portrait of General Sir Mike Jackson has been commissioned as well as a portrait of the heroic driver, Private Johnson Beharry VC.

Sandy Nairne comes across as open, fair-minded and above all democratic. Anyone can propose himself or herself to be an NPG trustee nowadays. Nairne feels that the NPG is ‘part of the life of London in a much more open way than the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. We are part of Charing Cross Road, Covent Garden and Soho,’ he says. Before our talk, the downstairs receptionist and telephonist referred to him as ‘Sandy’ rather than ‘Mr Nairne’ or ‘the Director’ or ‘Sir’. I imagine that this is how he likes it. I asked him how life at the NPG differed from working at the Tate. ‘By the time I finished at the Tate with Nick [Serota] we had over 800 employees,’ he said, ‘whereas here I’ve got about 250 ...I’m very, very happy with that number because I know most of them.’