The National Portrait Gallery: Ways to Make a Good Museum Better

This unique institution needs to ditch bad portraits, for starters.

E arlier this week I wrote about the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), the very good and too often overlooked art gallery a short walk from Ford’s Theatre and the National Archives. It shares an elegant, indeed breathtaking, old Greek Revival building with the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), my topic today. The building, modeled after the Parthenon, was once the U.S. Patent Office. It was renovated and repurposed in the Aughts for these two impressive museums. Both are part of the Smithsonian.

SAAM looks great and, aside from acquisition duds and an uneven exhibition program, it’s a model museum. The new home of the NPG and SAAM opened in 2006. It has an immense courtyard, once open but enclosed with a handsome glass roof during the renovation, thanks to the generosity of Washington art collectors Bob and Arlene Kogod. It’s a chic, comfortable space and one of Washington’s most elegant.

My feelings about the NPG were different. The National Portrait Gallery in London, after which the NPG is modeled, is one of my favorite places because I love English history and theater and Trollope and the English Romantic poets. Our NPG shares its mission. It displays portraits of people who’ve contributed in a positive way to our history and culture, ranging from all of our presidents to athletes, movie stars, writers, generals, politicians, activists, captains of industry, and scientists. It’s our hall of heroes, with a villain or two.

To be honest, and I know it’s been open only since 1968, it has always seemed to me to be what I diplomatically called a work in progress. I’ve visited dozens of times, and it has always seemed uneven. This by no means suggests that people shouldn’t visit. Our NPG is a must-visit place. It’s the only museum in the country dedicated to portraiture. Its currency is history and nostalgia, an appealing combination. It’s an evocative place and the keeper of memory, and it does this well.

One of the best and bravest art exhibitions I’ve ever seen, the Hide/Seek show, was hosted by the NPG in 2010. The show considered portraits of gay people and the development of the gay-rights movement. It landed the NPG in scalding hot water over a video by David Wojnarowicz that the Catholic League and House Speaker John Boehner didn’t like. Under orders from Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough, the NPG removed it, but the museum showed courage and dignity in doing a show it knew would be controversial but needed to be done in Washington.

That is one of the NPG’s many high points. It’s not a low point to observe that it seems muddled, even haphazard. This visit was no different, but I left happy. Here are the positives and negatives.

Pride of place at the NPG goes to the nation’s presidents, from Washington to Trump. This is an asset in that it reminds us who the 45 presidents are — it stops with President Trump since, and I’m not sure why, only the former presidents are there. It’s one way, a rough one, to run the course of American history.

When I wrote a very positive story in NR about the Obama portraits — Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherrald’s of Michelle Obama — I said the bar for presidential portraits was so low that anything good would be a marvel, and the Obama portraits are very good. Politicians, I noted, are unusually uncultured, and I think that’s true, so their portraits are bound to be mediocre. Politicians tend to value expedience, bottom lines, and actuality while art, or good art at least, is ambiguous, even mysterious, and ethereal. Art and politics don’t make a natural match.

During this last visit, I decided I’d sold the presidential portraits short as a collective. The NPG owns the Gibbs-Coolidge Set, Gilbert Stuart’s bust portraits of the first five presidents. The Smithsonian got them as a gift from the Boston family who’d owned them for years. These are splendid. That said, the 1820s, when Stuart, Trumbull, Allston, the Peales, and two or three other painters died, retired, or moved on, and the Gilded Age are not a black hole for American portraits, but it was a time when our best artists were doing landscapes and history scenes.

George Healy was the go-to, high-end portraitist and, to me, undazzling, but his portraits of Martin Van Buren and John Tyler are complex and dignified. The NPG has a dynamic, small portrait of Andrew Jackson by Thomas Sully on long-term loan. George Caleb Bingham’s portrait of John Quincy Adams is austere and direct, which was his style, and the style suited the subject. Even Healy’s portrait of Franklin Pierce is good. Pierce was an alcoholic, an incompetent, and our worst antebellum president, but Healy conveys his matinee-idol good looks.

Healy painted the NPG’s full-length portrait of Lincoln in 1887. He used photographs as models so, while grand enough, it’s a dull thing. Moving past Lincoln, the problem with the NPG’s portraits from Grant through Hoover is simple. Most were commissioned by the government, which hired artists on the cheap. Some presidents simply aren’t picturesque. Edmund Tarbell was a very good painter. Hoover looks seriously constipated in Tarbell’s 1921 portrait. I think the problem was the subject, not the artist. Carter, Eisenhower, and Ford look embalmed in their portraits. Elaine de Kooning’s portrait of John Kennedy is very ugly indeed.

Norman Rockwell painted Nixon, and Chuck Close did Bill Clinton. Both are good portraits, considering the age of portrait painting as a genre has long ago been supplanted by the photographic portrait. I think this is one of the NPG’s problems. Its presidential gallery is a large, endowed space and the museum’s centerpiece. The art’s just not, overall, good enough for star billing. It doesn’t have wall power. The wall texts are uncontroversial to the point of insipidity.

The NPG in London is chronological. Prime ministers, kings, and queens aren’t grouped but placed among their contemporaries. British portraiture always had heavy hitters, and a portrait commission from George III or Queen Victoria or one of the imperial age’s prime ministers was bound to attract the best. Aside from Queen Elizabeth, who’s front and center with the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, and even Princess Diana, the kings and queens reside in their time periods.

Moreover, in placing their portraits with not their equals but their contemporaries, there’s more context. Lincoln’s famous team of rivals strengthened him, and they enhance our understanding of Lincoln as a leader. The era of weak presidents such as Hayes, Arthur, and Harrison demands a look at the moguls who called the shots. I think a future rehang distributing the presidents among their peers, friends and enemies alike, makes sense.

Of course, what I’m proposing is the annihilation of the NPG’s core gallery. Rather than do this, there’s another way to exhibit the presidents. As images go, the presidential portraits on view are misleading since they’re not iconic images. They weren’t intended to promote these men as charismatic leaders or power centers. They’re afterthoughts, almost all done after their subjects retired or died.

British prime ministers relied far less on the cult of personality than American presidents have. The president’s face and comportment were, from the time of Andrew Jackson, rallying points. Presidents ran for election. However much they campaigned from front porches until the time of McKinley, their image was ubiquitous. William Henry Harrison, our president-for-a-month, isn’t well captured in the crappy portrait on view. He’s the Washington of the West and Old Tippecanoe, the first presidential candidate whose image was relentlessly promoted in mass-produced prints and handouts. These are the images people ought to see. They’re the most instructive.

Of course, starting with Coolidge, our first radio president, the president was the most photographed and heard and watched man in America. I think Rockwell’s portrait of Nixon works in part because it dates from 1968, when Nixon was elected, and was commissioned by Look magazine. Reagan’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time after the 1980 election. The very good Trump photograph comes from Time, too. These images evoke the men as presidents, leaders, and media figures, not as retirees. I’m not against elegant studio paintings like the Obama portraits. Rather, I think a mix of portraiture and photography of presidents on the job or campaigning best conveys who they are.

My story on SAAM observed that its exhibition American Visionary: John F. Kennedy three or four years ago was a bad show. It was a panegyric circulated by the Kennedy Library as keeper of the Kennedy flame. The art recycled the old Camelot schmaltz. In an art exhibition, schmaltz is bad. At the NPG, both an art museum and a history museum, it would work. The art and story were all about branding.

Since Andrew Jackson, presidents have been brands. George Washington, if not a brand in his lifetime, became one soon after he died. Thinking about how these presidents were presented as brands would enliven this space and make it more relevant. This would involve plenty of photographs and campaign ephemera, which means light-sensitivity issues, but the gallery would work better.

The Struggle for Justice is the second marquee permanent-collection space. It’s next to the presidential galleries. It’s a tribute to civil-rights leaders and a very mixed bag. Some of the portraits are simply awful, among them George Washington Carver’s, Marian Anderson’s, and Martin Luther King’s. I see Paul Robeson as an opera singer first and as a minor civil-rights leader. Why is he there? Didn’t Ralph Abernathy and Malcolm X advance the civil-rights movement more than John Lewis, who, after all, spent most of his life as a D.C. pol? Why is Eleanor Roosevelt there? Her portrait’s on the other side of the wall in the president’s gallery. She doesn’t deserve a twofer.

Why is Dustin Lance Black’s portrait there? As leaders in the gay-rights movement go, he’s part of the third or fourth wave and a creature of Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for Milk. Marsha Johnson, James Dale, Edith Windsor, Cleve Jones, Frank Kameny, Larry Kramer, and the founders of the Mattachine Society put their heads on the metaphorical chopping block. Hell, I’d put a blown-up photograph of Judy Garland on the wall. Her wake at Frank Campbell’s funeral home, attended by 21,000 people, many overwrought, diva-loving gay men living downtown, fueled the Stonewall riot hours later.

Why is Albert Einstein there? Nice of him to have put Marian Anderson up for the night when she found all the hotels in Princeton were whites-only, but does that make him a civil-rights leader?

The randomness of it all makes the gallery far less powerful. And I’d suggest this as a starting point: Unless the portrait is a good work of art, keep it hidden in the vault. I’d make it the rule everywhere. I don’t think there’s a single bad portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Randomness is what I came to like in the Bravo and Champions galleries and in the 20th-century galleries in the building’s gorgeous, Victorian top floor. This was the Old Patent Office’s Great Hall, outfitted in deluxe tile and nicely turned into galleries. Champions stars athletes. I’ve never followed sports, but Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, and Billie Jean King were, in my youth, household names, as were the old trailblazers such as Gertrude Ederle, Wilma Rudolph, and Joe Lewis. I don’t expect much from sports portraiture, so the bar was very low. I was happy to think about these heroes and wonder why, aside from Tom Brady, I can’t name a single living, breathing, running, or jumping American athlete.

And why I despise the Olympics, which recycles professional athletes. Champions celebrates almost exclusively the paid athlete. Part of Mark Spitz’s heroism, aside from winning all those gold medals and his beefcake poster, is his retirement from the spotlight. Olympians like Spitz need to be represented.

Bravo shows portraits of entertainers, but it’s unclear where this section ends and galleries devoted to 20th-century figures begin. The art is spotty, and the selection, arbitrary as it is, might have bothered me. At that point, though, I’d put the welcome mat out for the gods of surprise and delight, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Oh, I haven’t thought of her in years” isn’t a bad way to approach a portrait.

I didn’t expect etiquette and manners expert Judith Martin to be among the movers and shakers of my lifetime, but there she is, and it’s a commanding portrait. Miss Manners would approve. Tallulah Bankhead’s portrait by Augustus Johns is lovely and sexy. Katharine Hepburn was thought by studio heads to be box-office poison. She played one part: herself. That said, I swooned at the case displaying her four Academy Awards. I’d never seen one, much less four. The NPG got them as a gift from her estate.

A William Glackens portrait of fellow artist George Luks is probably the best thing he did. Sargent painted Henry Cabot Lodge in 1890 when the Brahmin politician was only 40 and lean, hungry, and handsome rather than the geezer who bedeviled Woodrow Wilson. Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times and the head of the family that still owns the paper, was painted in 1926 by Philip de László, the best high-society portraitist of his day. He was the Healy of his day. His portraits are always good, done with European flair tempered by American suspicion of too much flair. The NPG owns a few László portraits, but this is the only one on view. Portraits of Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Marshall were both bland and bad. Again, if it’s not a good work of art for starters, ditch it.

I have no idea why Frida Kahlo’s portrait is there. Yes, she’s what the label calls “a cultural icon for feminists, gays, and Latinos, among others,” and I would say unwisely so since she’s a total piece o’ work. She’s Mexican, not American.

A single gallery displayed portraits of Lily Tomlin, the Apollo 11 astronauts, and the poet John Ashbery. At that point, I was goin’ with the flowin’ and happy to do it. A full-length painting of Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley was flanked by portraits of Leonard Bernstein and Benny Goodman. Merman’s portrait is bombastic, but so was she. It has wall power. I could hear her belting.

I didn’t see anyone who I thought shouldn’t be in the NPG, and there’s no point wondering why Benny Goodman’s portrait was there and not Artie Shaw’s or Tommy Dorsey’s. Over time, the NPG probably needs to develop more focused and inclusive galleries rather than jump from concept to concept. The museum has a very good collection. It’s got the space. Photography is a big part of this, as it should be. Americans are creatures of mass media, and photography, whether formal or news photography, creates the images we remember. Studio oil paintings don’t have the vibe.

There were two temporary exhibitions on view during my visit. I liked the survey of the work of Hung Liu (1948–2021), the Chinese-born American painter, though her work’s weepy and sentimental. I understand why the NPG’s doing the show. There are almost no Asian-American subjects anywhere else in the museum.

There’s also a small exhibition of photographs, cartoons, posters, and sculptures on the Watergate scandal. The 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is June 17. It’s a little mess of a show focusing on how President Nixon and the key players surrounding him in 1973 and 1974 were visually interpreted. It’s too random a selection of objects, ranging from cartoons ridiculing Nixon to the pathetic photograph of his final wave to his staff on the White House lawn before he went back to California in disgrace. Photographs of Mark Felt, the affair’s Deep Throat, and of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, are there but so many others aren’t.

No one’s going to learn anything new from it. The subject deserves a bigger exhibition. Given the proliferation of skunks and rats, I think it would be fascinating. Or, and this is a show I did when I was a museum director, the NPG could simply hang Richard Avedon’s The Family, 76 black-and-white portrait photographs of Washington movers and shakers in 1976, first published as a commission in Rolling Stone on October 21, 1976. Almost all the Watergate figures are there.

The NPG has some great exhibitions opening this summer. Its portrait triennial opens, surveying the state of American portraiture. Powerful Partnerships considers Civil War–era power couples such as John and Jessie Frémont. Washington is cursed today by couples such as Bruce Ohr, an associate deputy attorney general, and his wife, Nellie, chin-deep in Fusion GPS, the “research” group that first peddled the Russia hoax that destabilized the Trump White House — and the country — for more than three years. Ohr, in his Justice Department job, was part of the team investigating alleged Russian infiltration of political campaigns at the same time that his wife was promoting a fabricated infiltration.

Marriages like these existed in Washington in the 1850s and 1860s, too, creating romantic and political twists and turns. An exhibition of daguerreotypes of family groups is opening, too. All three will be well worth seeing.

The NPG is a great place. I was happy to see it filled with people, even during my late-afternoon visit. When I went back Saturday afternoon, it was packed. Americans are hungry for history and want to connect with the past. They’re looking for something real, empowering, and affirming, and the NPG certainly provides this.