Text copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times, London. The pre-edit version of the article published 30th April 2000 as "Old faces seen in a fresh light". Photos by Dennis Gilbert/View unless otherwise stated.
Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery was getting worried a few weeks back. Nobody seemed to have noticed his excellent new £16m Lottery-funded extension. With the gargantuan Tate Modern hogging the headlines and a raft of other galleries and theatres opening since the start of the year, it looked as if the new NPG might to fall victim to media culture fatigue. Saumarez Smith badly needed controversy, and the architecture wasn't providing it. Then he happened to move Margaret Thatcher upstairs. Job done.
Now, following an outcry from the more blimpish end of the media spectrum, everyone knows what the new NPG, launched on Thursday May 4, 2000, is about. It's the place where they kicked Thatcher upstairs, and replaced her downstairs with David Beckham, a soccer player. This is nonsense, of course - the small photo of Beckham (with his old floppy haircut) is almost lost in a little room filled with sportspeople, while the enormous Helmut Newton portrait of Thatcher Gloriana
The big event downstairs now is the new painting of Jonathan Miller by the young Scottish artist Stephen Conroy. This is huge - it can hold its own against Gilbert and George's naked double self-portrait "In the Piss" alongside, and that's saying something. It is elegiac - Miller sits broodingly in his chair, mournful head on hand, caught in patrician profile. And it is there because - although you could chronologise him in any decade from the 1960s - Miller is still an active figure in contemporary culture. It makes sense to me.
But back to the architecture. The National Portrait Gallery was always an awkward place, jammed up against the back of the National Gallery in the 1890s when national and imperial pride demanded a collection of mugshots of the Great and Good to be gathered into one place. Despite various alterations and extensions over time, and despite a certain modishness that has settled upon the gallery in recent years - its image is no longer fuddy-duddy - the awkwardness remained. You went up the grand stairs and then had to do a dog-leg to the right in order to get to the galleries. Straight ahead of you - though you did not know this because a wall stood in your way - was a gloomy rectangular lightwell separating the two buildings. So the obvious processional axis of the building was missing.
