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Sunday 7 September 2008

Portrait of a director

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

When questioned about his own taste he replied that he was continually making judgments but that ‘you may have personal interests but the fact is that you are running a public institution and you need to be able to try to look across the range of what’s happening’. He is proud of his involvement in recent shows such as the Self Portrait exhibition, the Face of Fashion, the Mario Testino show and the David Hockney retrospective. In the ongoing debate about the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, he argues that it should keep changing.

The first question I asked Sandy Nairne was why it had fallen to England to be so pioneering in the field of National Portrait Galleries given that the continent of Europe, for example, remains largely uninterested in such an institution to this day. He pointed out that, when the NPG was formed in 1856, ‘Germany was a set of states, Italy was a set of small countries’. As for France, ‘You are either a citizen and everybody is important as a citizen or you are in a Pantheon, i.e., among a very few Godlike people and there’s not much in between.’ In England, on the other hand, a great educational movement arose, which included the museum movement. The humbly born ‘great sage of Chelsea, Thomas Carlisle [a founding father of the NPG], writes an essay in 1840 on heroes’. Influential thinkers and politicians realised that it was a good idea to understand history because ‘there were moral and political lessons to be learnt from it’. One of these lessons was how to avoid revolution by building up a ‘secure idea of national identity and nationhood’.

‘Is the National Portrait Gallery in favour of multiculturalism now? Are you in favour of it?’ I asked. ‘We are into a period of complex culture made up of all kinds of people who’ve contributed to British society and British achievement from incredibly different perspectives,’ he replied. ‘We have seen in this last century waves of fascinating immigrant communities...making these astonishing contributions. It’s such a long story but I talk about it in terms of complexity.’

Is complexity the new multiculturalism? Does Gordon Brown know? If there were such a thing as the English face it would be incredibly complex, it’s true. One thing is certain. Sandy Nairne is a man with many responsibilities, who really enjoys his work.

Tom Miller

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