A new, unwieldy tome dedicated to the gallery’s bicentenary is king of contradictions
There’s something both unsettling and appropriate about this massive, lavish tome published to mark the bicentenary of one of the great arks (the one beached in London) of ‘the Western European tradition’ of painting. The fact that it has the size and heft of a tombstone (it’s impossible to read without the support of a piece of furniture), might be appropriate given the recent death of the idea that a singular Western art history is all the art history there is, and yet those same qualities, of size and heft, speak equally to the continued dominance of that idea. Here the gallery is figured (in the book’s preface) as ‘a guardian of human creativity, a beacon of inspiration and a sanctuary of beauty’, as if no other ideologies might frame the images of ‘the world’ it presents. Eighteen of a total of 581 pages later, we’re confronted with a double-page photograph on which a gallery sponsor’s name features as prominently as any of the paintings on its walls. That’s not to deny that the book is peppered with art historical essays that do make some attempt to contextualise what’s on show, but even that takes second place to a series of paragraphs by ‘Ambassadors’ offering short soundbites (next to their own full-page photographic portraits) on works they find memorable. The former include the gallery director, the chairman of its board of trustees, the architect overseeing the gallery’s refurbishment, prominent living British artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Chris Ofili, tastemakers such as Edward Enninful, actors such as Damian Lewis, as well as art dealers, collectors and fashionable darlings of the contemporary market such as Flora Yukhnovich. Plus two ordinary folk: a headteacher and a student. The book begins by stating that the National Gallery was founded on the idea of democratising art that was previously ‘inaccessible to all but a privileged few’. That’s an ideal that this book, given its retail price, can hardly be said to match.
The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits, edited by Anh Nguyen and Rebecca Marks. Taschen, £175 (hardcover)
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
