Antoon in Scotland!
July 25 2017
Video: AHN
The National Portrait Gallery's Van Dyck self-portrait has finally made it up here to Scotland, on the last leg of its three year UK-wide tour. And poor Antoon, for he has been slotted into a very curious little show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, called 'Looking Good - the Male Gaze from Van Dyck to Lucian Freud'. The blurb tells us that the exhibition:
[...] considers the theme of male image, identity and appearance from the 16th century to the present day. The selection of portraits, from the National Galleries of Scotland and National Portrait Gallery, London collections will explore the elaborate hairstyles and fashions of the courtiers and cavaliers of the 16th and 17th centuries; the emergence of the dandy in the early 18th century; the rise of celebrity and the interest in male beauty and personal grooming; and representations of gender and sexuality.
But alas it doesn't really work. The aim, and the wordy exhibition texts, try to tick every right-on box under the sun, but the finished result doesn't deliver. For a start the exhibition is too small, with only 28 objects of multiple media spread over five centuries, and cannot begin to 'explore' all the themes that have been wedged into its remit. It's hung in one of the SNPG's smaller rooms, used for minor displays, and everything feels too scattergun; Grayson Perry is predictably wheeled out as a transvestite, and there's David Beckham with great hair. Worst of all, there's an oppressively terrible 'soundscape' blaring out, whether you want to hear it or not. In the video above you can hear the blessed moment of silence when the room warden came to switch the music off (we visited just before closing time).
This exhibition feels like the result of museum group-think - but nobody has thought of the poor visitor. If you're in Scotland, and wanted to come and see the Van Dyck self-portrait, learn more about the artist, the time in which he lived and worked, and how he painted and why, then you would leave this show none the wiser. Finally, the lighting is dreadful, as you can see with the darkened full-length Mytens in the above video. The National Portrait Gallery's £10m Van Dyck deserves better.
The show is open till 1st October. More here.
Update - there's a more enthusiastic review of the show in Apollo, here.
