For Years Our Art Critic Has Railed Against the Selectors of the Annual BP Portrait Award

EVERY year since I was appointed the Evening Standard’s art critic, I have reviewed the annual Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery.

Rarely have I agreed with the judges, my disagreement with them frequently so strong that it has been expressed in unmannerly terms of profound contempt for nincompoops entirely ignorant of the history and purposes of portraiture.

Perhaps wearied by this abuse rather than convinced by the arguments that lay behind it, the powers that be at the NPG spiked my guns this year by asking me to be one of the judges – only being invited to the Royal Academy’s annual dinner could have surprised me more.

I accepted with alacrity. At last, I thought, I shall be privy to the machinations and intrigues, the manipulations and expedients, the stratagems and finagling, and I shall resist them all. I shall care not a hoot for the colour of a model’s skin, nor that of any artist, neither race nor gender shall influence my judgment and all political correctitudes will be damned for their irrelevance. My judgment will be clean and clear, based on nothing but a painting’s quality. In adopting such a stance of intellectual honesty I was, as it were, embracing a vow of monkish chastity.

We met in the bleak circumstances of a store in Clapham, bright spring without, but within, from every brick, the retained chills of winter emanated, numbing bodies but, we hoped, not brains and sensibilities.

Our first task was to consider every one of the thousand or so submitted portraits and whittle them down to fewer than a couple of hundred serious aspirants. Many painters would have been appalled at how little time we took, their hours or days or weeks of labour and inspiration dismissed in seconds – but, truth to tell, bad paintings do not improve with longer looking, and many were so bad that we could damn them even before they reached the rostrum. I fell to wondering, yet again, at the vanity of painters incapable of even rudimentary self-criticism and at the boundless conceit of amateurs.

If the Portrait Award has any purpose it is to promote the arts and skills of portraiture, to reassure a public driven into scepticism not only by most manifestations of contemporary art, but by Hockney, Freud and all the weak and feeble painters of faces who belong to supposedly professional bodies and put initials after their names. Year after year at the Portrait Award it has seemed to me that there is a flicker of new life in the old genre and that it is to painters included in this annual exhibition that every adventurous patron seeking a portrait should first refer. That said, how many painters over the years can I recall whom I’d commend to friends?

If I go back only a decade, the number is surprising, high enough in its growing total to suggest that the award has indeed fulfilled its function in bringing to the fore young painters of whom otherwise we might not have known. And if they are not now household names then the fault lies with dull-minded patrons – none duller, perhaps, than HM the Queen who, given the opportunity to be adventurous, has chosen Rolf Harris, quack, imposter, mountebank, to be her next and very public riposte to Rembrandt and Velazquez.

But let us return to paintings far worse than Rolf ‘s. There were so many of them, fortunately so bad that they found no defenders, engenderedno debate and could be easily dismissed, and yet, for one reason only, I sometimes doubted our corporate response – that was when the portrait embodied an idea, sometimes witty or ingenious but more often of some depth, that was utterly undone by the wretched incompetence of the execution. Time and again I wished it possible to speak or write to painters whose work we were rejecting, to urge them to develop an idea with greater skill, even to sacrifice it to another painter to make a better fist of it; in portraiture it is evident that many painters are better able to think their pictures than to paint them.

IT may be some small consolation to rejected painters to know that judges leafed through their pictures again on the day we were supposed to concentrate on the second round, choosing the paintings that should be included in the exhibition and selecting the four prizewinners.

We were troubled by the thought that our standards might have been inconsistent, harsher at the beginning, more magnanimous at the end, but most of us could find nothing to retrieve and only Maggi Hambling, the most generous of judges, understanding, boisterous, impetuous, determined, eccentric, egregious and lovable (now), rescued one.

The second round was slow; as almost every picture had an advocate and argument was occasionally fierce, selection drifted into what were essentially third and fourth rounds, perhaps even a fifth. And then other factors began to weight the scales.

Some portraits were preferred over others because they were large and would look well on such and such a wall in the gallery, even though there they would occupy as much space as four others perhaps better painted.

Some were selected because they conformed to the requirements of advertising. Some kept their places in response to fierce defence by a single judge, and in this the principle of quid pro quo came into play. As for selecting prizewinners, we reduced the possibilities to ten or so and, listing them in order of preference, discarded those with fewest votes. This worked well enough in reducing the number of candidates but not at all in establishing who should win which prize, for no judge’s first choice led the count.

How could we, I argued, give the first prize to a compromise candidate with every single one of us feeling that a better painter had been deprived of it?

And thus the advocacy began again, some of us moved by it, some of us obstinately digging in our heels.

There was even some argument about what constitutes a painting, for I had doubts about the integrity (as drawing and painting) of the image on one canvas, but as the Royal Academy this year is perfectly happy to exhibit, as the work of artists, many prints that to me are no better than worthless, coloured reproductions, fraudulent in any sense that I understand the connoisseurship of prints, I suppose that I should accept without question the technical innovations that now sometimes pass for paintings.

Is this year’s exhibition better for my having been a judge? It has a worthy winner in Giulietta by Dean Marsh, whose painting makes the point that when quality is allowed to speak, size is of no importance; small in scale and as coolly probing in perception as the scientific dismantling of a butterfly, this portrait trounces canvases ten times the size as surely as David did Goliath. But if I retained my monkish virtue in the preliminary judging, in the selection for the exhibition and the prizes, I sensed that erosion was at work, expediency its instrument, but then I realised that had I not felt compelled to compromise, particularly in my surrender to large paintings in which I perceived no merit, the exhibition might well have been dull, and for it to have been that would have done no good for any of the better painters.

This is an exhibition that should stir debate, should challenge preconceptions, should draw in the crowds, and to do that it needed the contrasts that it has of size and quality, of intense analysis and empty bluster, of concentrated depth and surface emptiness. In their way, the bad paintings enhance the good.

I am left asking a number of questions. This award has helped to make a number of painters who, when they reach 40, are no longer eligible; is that, in an age of equality, fair? What has happened to past prizewinners and regular exhibitors, some now beyond that age?

THE NPG must surely take great pride in some; what, for example, has happened to Peter Edwards, who for years was consistently interesting, what to Roxana Halls, whose precocious first submission of herself, stark naked, was one of the most touching pictures ever to appear in the award, and what, I am most curious to know, has happened to Philip Harris, whose naked portrait of himself lying in a ditch with his clothed girlfriend, was the oddest and most extraordinary of all winners?

Should we not have occasional retrospective exhibitions?

How, in future years, can the crass amateur be discouraged from submitting work – or is the tedium of examining their pictures the price that we must pay for discovering the stray genius? To what extent does the part played by so much dross deter the serious painter from submitting work, as it does with the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition? Should a portrait exhibition mounted by a national gallery that is the repository of the nation’s iconography be open – as it is – to painters and sitters of other nationalities? Should the NPG, in an attempt to raise the quality, invite particular artists to send in their pictures, as well as keep the award as an open exhibition? Should the gap in value between the first prize (Pounds 25,000) and the fourth (Pounds 1,000) be quite so wide?

This is the 25th year of the award; if it is to run another quarter-century, I feel that it should, in some senses, be rejigged a little, tightened, sharpened and given a new lease of life. Of all the annual prizes for the visual arts it is intellectually the most valuable, but it needs a clearer focus. I wish it well, give BP, its generous sponsor, great credit for their persevering support, and fervently hope that it is not drifting towards desuetude.

. The BP Portrait Award exhibition is at the National Portrait Gallery (020 7312 2463) until 25 September.

Admission free; open Saturday-Wednesday, 10am-6pm; Thursday- Friday 10am-9pm.