For the past three years the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square in London, has been closed to the public while it undergoes a major transformation. This month it finally reopens, returning to the City with a complete re-presentation of the Collection, as well as a significant refurbishment which covers both the building itself as well as new public spaces.
 
To celebrate the much-anticipated reopening, a special Portrait Mode programme is taking place across the City, with galleries and institutions staging special events and special exhibitions in honour of the Portrait Gallery’s re-birth.

To help navigate everything that’s going on, GalleriesNow has created a special GalleriesNow x Portrait Mode map, and below we have also put together a walk in the west end to take in three of the highlights on offer, three exhibitions that give a fantastic survey of Portraiture today.
 

 

We start out at auction house Sotheby’s, who have a special loan exhibition as well as a truly landmark auction and talks programme.
 

The exhibition is Portraits from Chatsworth, which provides an opportunity to see a remarkable selection of works, collected and commissioned by the Devonshire family over five centuries. Featuring Dutch, British and Italian masters from Rembrandt to Reynolds, and extending through to the twentieth-century giant Lucian Freud, many of the portraits - perhaps unsurprisingly - feature members of the Devonshire family, adding an extra level of interest and connection to this most personal of art forms. (You can take a virtual visit of the exhibition here).

The talks programme includes an in-depth look at Portraits from Chatsworth with the Director of the National Portrait Gallery and Trustee of the Chatsworth House Trust, Nicholas Cullinan talking to Bella Freud, Lucian Freud’s daughter - watch online here. There is also an examination of portraits and the zeitgeist in the panel discussion “Capturing the Moment: Fashion, Portraiture and Taste”. And finally historian Simon Schama, Eleanor Nairne, curator at Barbican Art Gallery in London, and Sotheby’s Europe chairman Helena Newman discuss “Facing Now: Why Portraits Still Matter”.
 

Sotheby’s promises another highlight in their offering of the remarkable star attraction in this season’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction [read more about what happened at the auction here]. Gustav Klimt’s “Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan)” has been described as “Klimt’s Phoenix” - the painting was still on an easel in his studio at the time of his unexpected and untimely death in 1918, and despite being his last portrait it shows a talent that was still in the process of evolving.

Billed as one of the finest and most valuable works of art ever to be offered at auction in Europe, “Lady with a Fan” is nevertheless only the highlight of a equally remarkable opening to the auction - titled Face to Face: A Celebration of Portraiture, with other works including those by Magritte, Monet, as well as post-war masters Hepworth, Auerbach, and Twombly, and late twentieth-century stars Basquiat, Richter and Sherman.
 

Meanwhile, Omer Tiroche Gallery - just around the corner from Sotheby’s in Conduit Street - has a special exhibition to celebrate both portraiture and the new Portrait Gallery. Covering over one hundred years of portrait works, the exhibition includes pieces by artists including Frank Auerbach, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Kees van Dongen, Jean Dubuffet, Zeng Fanzhi, Lucian Freud, Yoshitomo Nara, Julian Opie, and Richard Prince. (We have a virtual visit of the exhibition here).

The Omer Tiroche exhibition provides a survey guide to the continued fascination, and importance, of portraiture itself, exposing how it has evolved over the ages from overwhelmingly formal, status-driven and flatteringly idealised to embracing an appetite for realism and contemporaneity.
 

Continuing on around one more corner we come to Ordovas in Savile Row, whose exhibition Drawn: 30 Portraits takes advantage of the Portrait Gallery events to combine a celebration of the portrait with the second in their series of exhibitions looking at techniques and mediums in twentieth-century and contemporary art - following the first iteration Stitched in 2022. (There is a virtual visit of the current exhibition here).
 

Ordovas brings together artists spanning almost a century - from a Matisse study of c.1924 all the way through to a 2023 work by Glenn Brown - including Alberto Giacometti, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Henry Moore and Paula Rego to delve into the highly personal nature both of drawing and of portraiture in general.

Included in the exhibition are three Picasso etchings, hung on the first wall they are widely considered to be amongst his most important prints and are rarely seen together. The three were executed in 1937 against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and carry the literally lachrymose title “La femme qui pleure”.

Finally, returning to Sotheby’s for the final destination in our walk, you can stop for refreshments at their cafe, which is currently exhibiting across its walls Modern Goddesses. Referencing “Yevonde: Life and Colour”, part of the Portrait Gallery’s re-opening programme, society magazine Tatler commissioned Luc Braquet to photograph contemporary members of “society” in Yevonde’s dream-like style, paying homage to the pioneering London photographer and her redical use of colour in the 1930s.

And don’t forget to download your copy of the GalleriesNow x Portrait Mode map - here!