Angel of The South (Bank)

There is a survey trotted out by journalists to illustrate the dearth of knowledge amongst the general public about contemporary British artists. It goes like this: one hundred people are stopped in the street and asked to name a living British artist. Of those hundred, 94% quote Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin: respectively the enfant (now middle aged) terrible and ladette of British art. The remaining 6% of votes are apportioned thus: two votes for Gilbert and George, one for Rachel Whitehouse (it’s Whiteread but marks for trying,) one for Picasso (dead and Spanish,) and two for Anthony Gormley.

The survey goes one step further: each participant is asked to name a work of art by their chosen artist. Without exception all nominators of Hirst choose ‘The Shark Tank’ and all champions of Miss Emin ‘The Bed’ (the Rachel Whitehouse fan also plumps for Emin’s masterwork.) The two Gilbert and George fans cannot not name a single work by the duo and the Picasso aficionado suggests‘Sunflowers’ (that’s Van Gogh: French, and also dead.) Full marks though to the Gormley fans who not only displayed admirable originality and artistic nous for rejecting Emin and Hirst but who correctly identified Gormley as the artist behind The Angel of The North.

In the wake of Gormley’s Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in London, I would hope that a second survey would reveal a contingent of Gormley converts: someone needs to release the stranglehold that Emin and Hirst hold on the imaginations of the general public. It is a superlative exhibition possessing both style and substance in an age when too few contemporary artists muster anything more than the former. The focus of the exhibition is the human body. Not the body’s visceral workings as extensively catalogued by Emin nor its inner psychological yearnings, but rather an examination of the body in relation to its environment. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia are the watchwords here. Life-size lead casts of Gormley’s own body are imprisoned by iron spikes or perch atop rooftops along the North and South Banks annihilated by the vastness of the skyline.

The eponymous piece of the exhibition is a 20ft glass room filled with thick water vapour generated by ultrasonic humidifiers. Its aim is to disorientate. Gormley likens it to ‘being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea.’ Visibility was said to be no more than two feet, in reality it was a matter of inches. The peasouper conditions reduced visitors to cripples, shuffling forward incrementally, hands outstretched, searching for a wall, a fixed point by which to navigate. The space is small enough to keep fear at bay. How different it would be if the experiment was reproduced on a larger scale; the clammy isolation magnified ten or fifteen times, the exit panic-inducingly distant.

The space is no less impressive from the outside. You watch as those trapped inside emerge from the swirling mists, flatten their palms against the comforting solidity of the glass walls, summon their courage and stride off again into the unknown. One gorilla in the mist had daubed ‘HELP!’ in the condensation of the glass striking a humorous note in an otherwise disquieting exhibit.

Less successful was Gormley’s Space Station, a 27ton steel structure tilted precariously on its axis and perforated by square openings. Gormley likened it to a ‘dark, labyrinthine, prison’ and also to the compressed, foetal form of a human embryo. Try though I might, squinting as if looking for the unicorn in a Magic Eye picture, the foetal form remained hidden.

Upstairs, this foetal motif is used to greater effect. Matrices and Expansions is a collection of suspended works in stainless steel, their tentacles interlacing with all the intricacies of coral. They recall hornet’s nests or a chrysalis and within their tendrils, a human-shaped void is discernable, floating like a laboratory specimen, not waving but drowning.

The crowning glory of the exhibition is Event Horizon. Thirty golems, life-size casts of Gormely’s own body, stand atop buildings on the North and South banks, over a distance of 1.5 sq km. From the Hayward’s terraces you can spot them; one atop the National Theatre, one on Waterloo Bridge, another atop the Royal Festival Hall, like a latter day Terracotta Army, standing sentinel over the heart of London. More disturbingly, their precarious stations at the precipices of each building suggest incipient suicide leaps into the abyssal Thames. It is a superlative and innovative staging of a sculptural installation, animating the buildings along the river banks and uniting the disparate styles of the North and South. The sentinels are due to be removed when the exhibition closes. I wish they could remain, not only as river guardians, but as permanent reminders that there are greater forces at work in modern Britain than Emin and Hirst.

A rave review for Kylie? She should be so lucky

Pity the poor custodians of the new Kylie exhibition at the V&A. For theirs is a hard lot. Not only must they contend with the heaving throngs of Kylie fans all fighting to get a look at those gold hot pants, but they must do so while listening to Kylie’s entire back catalogue, on a loop, eight hours a day, seven days a week, for the next five months. So, to the strains of Now We’re Back Together, I climbed the East Stairs of the V&A and ventured into the high camp world of Miss Minogue.

Apparently, and this is news to me, Kylie is a fashion icon on par with Gianni Versace and Vivienne Westwood, the last two subjects of V&A costume exhibitions. In the Autumn, the V&A will unveil The Golden Age of Couture, profiling the 'New Look' of Christian Dior, Hubert de Givency and Cristobel Balenciaga.  But Kylie is not now nor will she ever be a tastemaker on the Balenciaga/Versace/Dior scale. So why then is she the subject of a major retrospective at the V&A?

Because she’s popular, of course, and as Waldemar Januszczak put it, there is a lamentable vogue among the nation’s art institutions for ‘catering to the tastes of the average Heat reader.’ Unlike Januszczak, I have no objection to such transparent, populist tactics. There’s always an outside chance that somewhere between the Kylie, the café, and the gift shop a visitor might stumble upon some proper art (by which I mean art that wasn’t worn to the Brit Awards.) But there are ways and means. This retrospective is an epic act of lazy indulgence on the part of the V&A. There has been no attempt at originality or ingenuity in the display of costume, no effort at revelation, and no pretence that this is anything more profound than a feature in Hello!

Despite contributions from Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano there is a cheap, shoddy look to the clothes on display. A lycra mini-dress by Veronique Leroy could have come straight from the bargain bin at Jane Norman, while a pink chiffon number from Chanel trimmed with ostrich feathers was more Soho Drag-Queen than Rue St. Honoré . Most hideous of all was a yellow marabou bolero last seen on Sesame Street's Big Bird. Most of these outfits were never designed to be seen up close and personal. An aggressively sequined number that might have looked fabulous on a distant stage, appears tarnished at first hand. A feathered and plumed dress which moved like a dream on MTV just looks mangy and moth-eaten in the flesh. Only a Helmut Lang couture creation, all cascades of pleated crimson chiffon, held its own under the gallery spotlights.

The designers who steal the show, however, are Dolce and Gabbanna who designed the wardrobe for Kylie’s sell-out Show Girl tour. Among the D&G outfits on display are a sumptuous black velvet appliqué dress with a ten foot long train, a midnight-blue star-spangled bustier, and several of their signature silk corset dresses. Also on show are Dolce and Gabanna’s original Show Girl design sketches. Far be it from me to be prescriptive but wouldn't a Dolce and Gabanna retrospective have been more diverse, more adventurous, more culturally exciting than this rummage through Kylie’s cast-offs? And talk about populist! Oscar dresses, condemned advertising campaigns, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Mario Testino, Victoria Beckham, Chloe Sevigny, Giselle, Charlize Theron…Need I go on? A D&G exhibition would have shed light on a hugely influential and innovative fashion partnership while also appealing to that all-important Heat reading demographic. Instead we have to make do with the lazily curated Kylie, an exhibition as skimpy as those infamous gold hot-pants.

From Brideshead to B*llocks

In the Summer of 2005, the infamous artistic double-act Gilbert and George were chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. These Saville-row attired doppelgangers were sent as ambassadors, as emissaries, as representatives of our great nation. And what did the dynamic duo offer up for the arbitration of those snooty Europeans? 25 images featuring their V-sign flicking selves. Rule Britannia.

It could have been much worse. In the context of Gilbert and George’s repertoire of motifs: of which semen, excrement, urine and the word c*nt are the perennial stalwarts, a few V-signs were very much the lesser of several evils. But is this really the best we can do? Does this artistic paring, obsessed as they are with bodily emissions and expletives, really represent the pinnacle of artistic creativity in 21st Century Britain? Nicholas Serota certainly seems to think so.

The Tate Modern is currently host to a two-hundred image strong retrospective spanning G&G’s forty year career. The exhibition is so extensive that it spills out of the gallery space into the concourse, vestibules, and café of the fourth floor. That’s an entire floor of Tate Modern devoted to poo, expletives and spermatozoa. What must foreign tourists think of us?

Now I’m no puritan when it comes to art. I’m all for boundary pushing. If Piero Manzoni wants to defecate into eighty small glass jars in the name of art, then let him. If Tracey Emin wants to discard her used condoms on the floor of the Saatchi Gallery, then so be it. What I do object to is artists who pursue the same scant, infantile, attention seeking ideas for the entirety of their careers. What this exhibition makes abundantly clear is that Gilbert and George happened upon a rather good idea circa. 1969 and then proceeded to flog their dead horse for the next four decades. The same urban street scenes, the same expressionless self portraits, the same sexually explicit phrases, over and over again. The most galling thing of all is that the duo’s earliest collaborations yielded some sensational work. But sensational soon turned to sensationalist and well, you know the rest.

The first two rooms of the exhibition are devoted to these early works; ‘charcoal on paper sculptures’ (that’s drawings to you and me) some 13ft in height. These depict the young Gilbert and George on a jaunt to the green and pleasant English countryside, a world away from the urban East End of their later work. In subject these recall those early Et in Arcadia Ego passages of Brideshead Revisited. The long grasses and reeds of a river bank are rendered in hasty charcoal strokes evoking the stir of wind on pasture.

But Arcadian country scenes do not a headline make and so Gilbert and George turned to shock tactics. Their Dirty Words series debuted in the early 1970s. These grainy black and white shots of profane graffiti, toy soldiers, and urban decay make striking images. Like much of Gilbert and George’s work they would make great album covers or bill-board adverts, but that does not necessarily amount to great Art.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Gilbert and George aren’t bad, they’re just limited and endlessly repetitive. They have also lost all power to shock, try though they may with countless images of ejaculating phalluses. Even the BBC, that bastion of the establishment, has now produced a documentary entitled ‘I Love the C-Word.’ Gilbert and George are no more daring than the ten-year old boy who shouts naughty words in the school playground; a fitting metaphor given that Tate Modern's turbine hall is currently over-run with playground slides.

The legacy that Gilbert and George leave behind amounts to nothing more than a few hundred images glorifying distasteful bodily functions and a handful of beautiful drawings no one will ever remember. Leaving the gallery and walking along the South Bank I found myself irresistibly drawn to a suitably G&G verdict : What a load of Sh*t.

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

Sometimes a film comes along, like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day, that restores your faith in the often vacuous, money-grubbing film industry. Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep did just that: intelligent, inventive, thought provoking, all the things a film should be. But sometimes a film comes along that is so unintelligent, so uninventive, so brain-atrophying it makes you want to suffocate yourself in your popcorn. No prizes for guessing which category the newly released Epic Movie falls into.

I wanted to like Epic Movie, I really did. I like the occasional bit of low-brow tripe along with my Napoleonic portraiture and high-concept installation art. I love a good old spoof. Hell, I’ve watched the Naked Gun trilogy and Blazing Saddles more times than I’d care to admit. So, believe me when I say that I really, really, really wanted to like Epic Movie. Really.

Epic Movie comes from the team who brought you Scary Movies 1,2,3, and 4, Not Another Teen Movie, and Date Movie. The first two Scary Movies and Teen Movie are amusing in their own puerile way, but by the time Scary Movies 3 and 4 and Date Movie rolled along the franchise was beginning to smack of desperation and yes, the aforementioned money-grubbing. Now we have Epic Movie a last (we can only hope) ditch attempt to cash in on the success of its older siblings. It is unrelentingly, unapologetically, unashamedly ghastly from start to finish. I haven’t seen actors so embarrassed to be part of a film since Ewan Macgregor cringed his way through Attack of The Clones. Jayma Mays does her best Anna Farris impression but whereas Farris treads the fine line between air-head bimbo and shrewd comedienne, Mays falls off the tight rope altogether. She pouts, and lisps, and minces, and trips, all the while failing to elicit so much as a giggle from the audience.

The publicity bumf credits Epic Movie as ‘a comedic satire of films that are large in scope, reputation and popularity.’ So that’d be: Da Vinci Code, Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean etc. Depressingly, whenever the writers run out of Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, or Narnia jokes they resort to fart gags and getting-kicked-in-the-balls jokes, the last refuges of the comedically bankrupt. There was one prolonged ‘humorous’ urinating sequence that actually had me trying to slash my wrists with the edge of my Calippo.

So, what’s the verdict? As a film Epic Movie is irredeemably awful but as a lesson in 101 Ways to Kill Yourself Using Only Cinema Snack Products, it is truly a master class.

In Between Dreams

Other people’s dreams are, without exception, fantastically boring. One’s own dreams, of course, are endlessly fascinating in a solipsistic sort of way. Bearing this in mind, Michel Gondry’s new film Science of Sleep was going to have to pull out all the stops to impress. It falls into that same category as Being John Malkovich, I Heart Huckabees, Mullholand Drive or Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (also Gondry) films which jettison narrative cohesion in favour of wilfully incomprehensible plots and garbled philosophy. But whereas I Heart Huckabees was as hollow and charmless as they come, and Eternal Sunshine suffered from unsympathetic leads, Science of Sleep is charming in an ingenuous, Gallic sort of way. It’s Amelie, but on acid. And with cellophane.

So here’s the plot: Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has moved to Paris from Mexico where he attempts, in his own sweet, ineffectual way, to woo his neighbour, the prickly Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsborough.) Standing in the way of his seduction are his lecherous boss Guy and his surreal, Dali-esque dreams which increasingly encroach on his waking existence. After that, things become a little more nebulous. There are the dreams themselves; not the sort you get from over-indulging in camembert, but bad-trip, Lucy-In-The-Sky-With-Diamonds dreams. It’s never quite clear where these dream sequences end and real life begins, which puts us in the same position as bewildered and frustrated Stephane who finds himself acting out his subconscious fantasies and waking up to the aftermath.

And the cellophane? Where does that come into all of this? Stephane’s dreams are realised in true Here’s-One-I-Made-Earlier-style, all cardboard tubes, felt, papier mache, and yes, reams of cellophane. It is this ‘unmitigated whimsy,’ as Mark Kermode put it, that may irritate many cinema-goers. Some may see these forays into Blue Peter territory as poor compensation for an insubstantial plot; all style over substance. Nevertheless these Surrealist dream interludes with their Arts and Crafts trappings are arrestingly beautiful and earned the designers Pierre Pell and Stephane Rozenbaum the award for Best Production Design at the European Film Awards.

As existential comedies go, Science of Sleep is far superior to any of Mullholland/ Malkovich/ Huckabees, with its combination of off-beat humour, a magnetic lead turn from Bernal and intriguing visual effects. So, would I recommend it? Yes, if you like that sort of thing; existential comedies are something of an acquired taste. Just be prepared for strange dreams.

London, Paris, New York

For a girl who once considered venturing outside Zone 1 an intrepid adventure, I have been living a remarkably jet-set lifestyle in recent months: Marrakesh in October, New York in December, Paris in January. In the course of racking up these airmiles I couldn’t help but notice certain essential differences between the great cities of Paris, New York and my native London. But how best to communicate my sweeping, spurious and stereotypical observations?

I’ve always been rather taken with Craig Brown’s ‘We, You, They’ series:

‘We concentrate on the food
You enjoy the silence
Their marriage is on the rocks’

‘I can still fit into these old trunks
You are holding in your stomach
He should wear a shirt’

And so, in the spirit of doing nothing whatsoever to improve international relations I would like to share my reflections on these three capitals. With apologies to Craig Brown.

Londoners drive on the left
New Yorkers drive on the right
Parisians see how the mood takes them

Londoners feed the pigeons
New Yorkers call in the exterminators
Parisians have pigeon pie for breakfast

Londoners clean up after their dog
New Yorkers hire someone to clean up after their dog
Parisians are knee deep in merde

London is a hive of activity
New York is gridlocked
Paris is an accident waiting to happen

Parisians enjoy a croissant

New Yorkers grab a bagel
Londoners regurgitate last night’s doner-kebab

Paris’ tourists make the pilgrimage to Notre Dame
London’s tourists ride the Millennium Wheel
New York’s tourists visit the Apple Store

London cabbies know the roads
Parisian cabbies know the language
New York cabbies barely know how to drive

Parisians enjoy the finer things in life
New Yorkers invented the Cosmopolitan
Londoners have their stomachs pumped

Londoners admire Shakespeare at the Globe
Parisians applaud Giselle at the Palais Garnier
New Yorkers cheer on the players at Madison Square Gardens

Paris is the city of romance
New York gave us Sex and the City
London’s teen-pregnancy rate is through the roof

A Missed Trick With Miss Moss

After Monday’s uninspiring visit to Citizens and Kings, it was off to the National Portrait Gallery for a very different type of portrait exhibition. With Face of Fashion, the NPG are no doubt hoping to replicate the success they enjoyed with the blockbusting Testino retrospective in 2002. No mean feat considering the phenomenal ticket sales Testino garnered. Can Corinne Day, Steve Klein, Paolo Roversi, Mario Sorrenti, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott draw in the big crowds? Do you even know who Day, Klein, Roversi et al are? Nope me neither. With the possible exception of Corinne Day, the Face of Fashion photographers will be unknown to all but the most die-hard fashionistas. Therein lies the problem. Without any ‘big names’ the exhibition is likely to flounder which would be a shame since it’s a well put together show. The re-vamped gallery space comes courtesy of David Adjaye who also designed the chapel housing Chris Offili’s Upper Room at Tate Britain; one of my very favourite spots in London. While not quite up to Upper Room standards, Adjaye has created a spacious, yet suitably intimate, series of free-flowing spaces. On the gently curving walls hang a fine selection of portraits, some barely more than Polaroid’s, others great friezes, from some of fashion photography’s leading lights. Yet still this will not be enough to pull in the punters.


The NPG has missed a trick here. They have failed to anchor their exhibition in contemporary events. Since the Size Zero debate erupted last year after the death of anorexic model Luisel Ramos, the newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids alike, have been awash with demands for the fashion industry to put a stop to its obsession with emaciated bodies and underage girls. The NPG have at their disposal a stockpile of photos by the woman who started the craze for stick-thin models: Corinne Day, the photographer who brought Heroin Chic to the masses. But rather than putting Day’s photographs into some sort of context, rather than stressing their topicality and their culpability in this sorry state of affairs on the catwalk, the gallery blurb talks of ‘transitory poses’ and ‘unnerving honesty,’ standard commentary you would find in any GCSE photography project.

The ‘Cocaine Kate’ scandal is still fresh in the minds of the general public, not a week goes by without new concerns about Moss’ relationship with unreformed drug addict Pete Doherty being raised by the gossip rags and red tops. Those Corinne Day photographs capture Moss as a fledgling model at the very outset of her career; an innocent unsullied by the ravages of the industry. Yet, the exhibition leaflet has nothing to say about the commodification of Kate Moss or about fashion’s corrupting effect; about how these infamous photos depict a young girl on the edge of the abyss. No, just more drivel about the ‘special relationship’ between photographer and sitter. This perfectly adequate exhibition could have been elevated to so much more if the curators had had the courage and gall to deliver something more profound than the usual platitudes and clichés.

Jenga!

If the pomp and circumstance of Citizens and Kings isn't your thing, then you may find alternative inspiration in the Royal Academy’s latest courtyard installation. Following in the wake of Damien Hirst’s Virgin Mother and Rodin’s Gates of Hell comes Anselm Kiefer’s Jericho. The installation consists of two towers of corrugated concrete reinforced with iron bars standing slap bang in the middle of the academy quad. They are magnificently ugly. Purists have thrown up their hands in despair and the courtyard echoes with that familiar refrain ‘But it isn’t ART!’ The traditionalists moan that the towers are a cancer on the refined Neo-Classical lines of the Academy buildings.

Far from besmirching the academy’s quadrangle, I think that Jericho only enhances the elegance and grace of its surroundings. Jericho squats like a fat toad in the centre of a beautiful architectiral lily pad. On second thoughts, squatting is hardly the word for it, since these towers, well tower. The tallest of the two is 16.5metres (55ft) high, the smaller 14 metres, and both teeter like demented towers of Pisa as if about to fall and demolish a large chunk of the academy’s East wing. Critics and visitors alike have raised the inevitable comparison with New York’s Twin Towers. But Kiefer has emphatically (and repeatedly) denied that Jericho is in anyway related to the events of September 11th. The idea, Kiefer tells us in his publicity notes, had begun to take shape long before the twin towers fell. There is nevertheless something post-apocalyptic about the towers, they recall the bombed out buildings of Darfur or Basra seen on the news every night, or a set from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. But perhaps Kiefer is exploring less aggressively industrial themes?

The roofs of his towers are each perforated by a rough hewn oculus so that a visitor standing inside at the base can look up through the gutted storeys to a distant patch of sky. I have been to the towers three times now on three very different days. On the first, the sun shone with the blinding milky white of a January frost, the second was overcast, grey, and mild. On the third visit, the heavens opened and rain collected in great puddles around the towers’ foundations. Standing at the base of the towers, looking up through the skylight is like looking through a telescope, with the oculus forming the lens. The sky seemed somehow clearer, more vivid, far closer than it ever had before. These towers, masquerading as hulking, industrial monstrosities conceal a covert beauty. They are not temples to the industrial age but rather viewfinders to the ever-changing facets of the sky.

If you get the chance, go and see for yourself. Walk around them, stand in their shade, step inside and look at the sky. Laugh at them, ponder them, and having done all that by all means throw your hands up in despair and join the rousing chorus of ‘But it isn’t ART!’ Come up with your own interpretation. Maybe the unsound structures represent the fragility of modern society? Maybe they are nothing more than the sum of their parts: just some concrete, iron bars, and plastic sheeting? Maybe Jericho is Jenga played by the Gods? I like that one.

Just don't call it the twin towers.

Liberte, Egalite, Royal Academy

What do you know about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars? That Marie Antoinette said ‘Let them eat cake’ and lost her head to Madame Guillotine? That diminutive Napoleon wore lifts in his boots? That Wellington beat the Frogs at Waterloo? If you are seeking Enlightenment about this turbulent epoch then don’t hope to find it at The Royal Academy’s newest exhibition Citizens and Kings. The exhibition intends to ilustrate the transformation of portraiture during the fall of the Ancien Regime, the age of Napoleon and the subsequent rise of the bourgeoisie. The result however falls short. The exhibition is exhaustive, but by no means illuminating. To paraphrase that stalwart line of music journalists everywhere: it’s all filler, too little killer. What killer there is fails to redeem a lacklustre show.

The exhibition opens on a high, with Ingre’s Napoleon on the Imperial Throne, reigning supreme on the North wall of the rotunda. He is visible through the glass doors even before the humble gallery-goer reaches the exhibition proper. This hanging is something of a coup de theatre on the part of the Royal Academy; you ascend the marble staircase, cross the great hall, are ushered though the glass doors while all the while being held by Napoleon’s steely, imperious gaze. By the time you are stood before him you are all set to genuflect at his feet.

If ever your jaw is going to drop in front a painting let it be this one. Nearly 9ft high this portrait dominates the gallery as Napoleon dominated Europe. The iconography associates Napoleon with Imperial Rome and Charlemagne, while the frontal, iconic pose draws parallels with Flemish depictions of Christ. This portrait is the ultimate assertion of power; portraits of George III, Louis XVI and Catherine the Great on the facing walls, though equally colossal in size, seem to cower in the presence of Ingres’ mighty Napoleon.

After such a breathtaking opening statement its downhill from then on. Too many sub-categories of portrait, one for every one of the Academy’s first floor rooms, hinted at barrel-scraping especially when it came to ‘Family Portraits’ and ‘The Landscape and The Figure.’ Nevertheless, there are some fine offerings from David, Gainsborough, Goya, Reynolds and Ingres. One can only wish they had the space they deserve, unencumbered by the work of so many lesser artists.

David’s Death of Marat, that great emblem of the Reign of Terror, got my pulse racing but it was only on returning home that I discovered courtesy of the Sunday Telegraph that the Marat on display was a copy. The Louvre consider the original too precious to lend, a stance for which I have full sympathy. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain…then tickets on the Eurostar will be booked.

The exhibition closes on a high note with another Ingres’, this time of Newspaper magnate Louis-Francois Bertin who is generally held up as the emblem of France’s newly powerful bourgeoisie. He is the epitome of the nouveau riche; an arriviste, a parvenu, and boy, is he proud of it. Here is a man who is the antithesis of spoilt, little rich kid Louis XVI last seen preening in ermine in the opening room. This is a man who came from comparatively humble beginnings, but whose intelligence, guile and drive earned him a position of power and wealth. He leans forward, arms on his knees, as if to weigh us up. His shrewd look is poised between approval and scepticism and we hover in front of him wondering which it is.

Ingres’ Napoleon and Bertin are the first and last portraits on display and these two images chart the transformation in portraiture that the vague and confused gallery notes fail to make clear. This painter who had once painted Napoloen as Emperor, Tyrant, and Messiah, now paints a business man; no title, no armies at his heel, no delusions of grandeur, just frank, honest and uncompromising.