September 2010

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The new regime is getting into its stride at the National Gallery, London. On Tuesday, the director, Nicholas Penny, unveiled to the media plans for the gallery’s big autumn exhibition, ‘Renaissance Faces’, which opens on 15 October. It seems to have everything going for it – a popular subject with good academic credentials, starry loans, a partnership with another major museum, the Prado, and – importantly – sponsorship from a big player, Axa insurance. Since disputes about exhibitions that were under-performing in terms of visitor numbers are rumoured to have undermined the relationship between the last director, Charles Saumarez Smith, and the outgoing chairman of trustees, Peter Scott, more than usual attention is focusing on how popular the exhibition is likely to be. ‘Will it be a blockbuster?’, asked one journalist at the media launch. Dr Penny grimaced: ‘Some exhibitions are planned with the intention of being popular, and some are planned with the intention of being good. This is planned with the intention of being good.’

A quick read of the trustees’ reports over the past year reveals that in terms of being popular, exhibitions are often hard to predict. In 2007 ‘Dutch Portraits’ and ‘Renoir Landscapes’ both disappointed, but ‘Renaissance Siena’ – a contender for exhibition of the year, I thought – attracted 10,000 more visitors than had been budgeted for. To judge from the abbreviated minutes of the trustees’ meetings that are posted on the National Gallery’s website, the trustees seem frequently to have expressed a view that exhibitions would attract more visitors with a better choice of images for publicity purposes.

Can that have been, even subliminally, a factor in the choice of Mark Getty as the new chairman of trustees? To those of us in the media, his co-foundation of Getty Images means that the family name is now more closely associated with the world’s most successful picture agency than with Getty Oil, origin of the family’s great wealth. Of course the principal reason for the National Gallery choosing him must be a hope that he can attract more sponsorship and gifts: nothing attracts money like wealth. He was on the selection committee that recommended the appointment of Nicholas Penny, a good start for the men’s working relationship. Rich, popular, with a successful business and media background, and a family tradition of patronage – he is son of J. Paul Getty, Jr, one of the National Gallery’s greatest benefactors, and grandson of the founder of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles – Mark Getty promises to be a brilliant choice of chairman.

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