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Description: Winning paintings from the national open submission competition.
Phone: 0207312 2463
Website: www.npg.org.uk
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square; Rail: Charing Cross 
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Paul Emsley won first prize of the BP Award for his portrait of Martin Simpson
Johan Andersson's Tamara
Timothy Hyman's self-portrait
Hynek Martinec's Zuzana
David Lawton's Stephen
Antony Williams's Father and Sons
I no longer know the purpose of the annual BP Portrait Award. Twenty-eight years ago, when the National Portrait Gallery initiated it with John Player as the sponsor, its point was clear enough, born of dissatisfaction with the various professional bodies to which painters of portraits belong in hope of inclusion in their exhibitions and the commissions that might stem from them. These bodies had for years seemed trapped in doldrums of their own making, the genre of portraiture - the very thing to which they should have given life - lying in its deathbed, stultified by precedent and cliché. The Portrait Award was to be the remedy.
It was, if nothing else, an injection of young blood. With an age restriction that cut aspiring painters short before their 40th birthdays, the middle-aged and well-established painters of judges, military men, academics and chairmen of this, that and the other, were refused entry. We want no splendid uniforms and rows of medals, no robes and wigs, no gowns from academe, no suits from Savile Row and shirts from Jermyn Street, the rules implied; we want portraits painted by painters who paint other things - landscapes, townscapes, still life and the quotidian - who might bring to portraiture the energy and inspiration of these genres, who will see the portrait primarily as pure painting and not as a record, a document, a chart of features, and least of all as the highly priced (and therefore better) alternative to the photograph. It was an invitation to the young to renew and revive a genre that had been betrayed by the old.
In this the Award was immediately successful. One daring winner, Philip Harris, painted himself life-size, naked, fully frontal, lying in a ditch with all the detritus that the wayward chuck in ditches described with Ruskinian delight. Roxana Halls at 19 or 20 did not win, but nevertheless gave us the most accomplished nude portrait of herself, beautiful in its frank honesty. Antony Williams was both daring and subversive with a fine academic portrait that relied wholly on the forbidden formula of such things, but redeemed it with a hint of 17th-century subtlety. Year after year Peter Edwards gave us vigorous formal portraits with a fierce touch that lifted them from the rut of dull convention. These painters and a hundred others gave the Award a lively start and nourished its promise as the years wore on, making it one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the London calendar, one in which contributors, by virtue of the subject, could not visit the wilder shores of installation, video and abstract art, nor the new minimalism of, say, Martin Creed, but had to employ the low technology of paint on canvas.
In recent years, however, the standard of work included in the annual exhibitions has seemed to slide inexorably into dull incompetence and dependence on the camera; however much the conventions of historic portraiture have seemed to depress the genre, none has been as deadening as the new devices now already stale. I am heartily sick of painters' abject dependence on photography, of the grossly enlarged face looming from the canvas as though it were a dramatic close-up in the cinema, the heightened warts and all that is in part surreal, in part just plain old-fashioned tedious photo-realism.
All four portraits shortlisted for the prizes are, in essence, photographs, and all four are disgusting - yes, disgusting, that is distasteful, sickening and repulsive - and an offence to both painting and portraiture. Paul Emsley, the winner of the £25,000 First Prize, and the runners-up, are all, here, guilty men. At least 18 more exhibits are so close to photographs as to have required no other preparation than 10 minutes snapping with a Pentax, in all, more than a third of the 60 inclusions in the exhibition.
I am weary of self-taught painters - self-taught is not taught at all - and the handful here do nothing to support the notion that the virtue of innocence redeems the flaw of ignorance. And I am wearier still of shoddy little scraps, slapdash and unfinished, dishonestly attempting to seduce us with the impetuous charms of the preparatory sketch, so that with a wild impastose brush-stroke here and patches of blank canvas there, we mistake them for urgent and impatient works of genius. They are nothing of the kind; Augustus John and his contemporaries were doing this a century ago, and did it far better, with an honest sense that finish would obliterate immediacy. Maladroit, the current generation contrives a false immediacy as a camouflage for incapacity. Let me list the shoddy painters who depend on this effect - Maryanne Aytoun-Ellis, Polly Benford, Francis Corsham, Eileen Hogan, Susannah Massey, Perdita Sinclair, Steve Wilson and William Wright - for they deserve the shame, vile the only word for most of them. Scott Pohlschmidt is within a whisker of inclusion here, the drip-page running from the ill-drawn shoulders of his Tim a mannered irrelevance, but the characterisation of his sitter just (but only just) redeems the shoddiness. Diamuid Kelley has, of course, made such unfinish a trademark of his work, but now, more than a decade into a successful commercial career, he risks its being seen as only a tedious and lazy affectation.
This year the rules were changed to open the Award to painters of any age beyond 17 and submissions rose by 70 per cent or so, to 1,870. As the 60 paintings we are allowed to see are skimpier, smaller, sloppier and more slovenly and slipshod than ever before, lacking courage and conviction, I question the benefit of removing the age limit - certainly Daphne Todd, the only nationally established portrait painter to exhibit under the new rule, is, with her embarrassingly mannered blocks of timber and rough and ready portrayal on it of William Packer, a tired old hack. Of Packer, esteemed art critic and a subtle painter in his own right, I would much have preferred a self-portrait. Another artist-cum-critic and a curator too, Timothy Hyman, has indeed submitted a portrait of himself, supposedly inspired by one of Rembrandt's prints but in effect an ugly mockery of Grosz; it is a thing so ghastly and incompetent as to suggest that Hyman should never have paraded before the public in any of his roles, for here he emerges as wholly lacking in judgment and discretion, wholly unself-critical, a man of overweening vanity.
A few unambitious paintings are modest in their honesty - self-portraits by Jaemi Hardy, Ingolf Helland, Jill Hooper, Jason Walker and Paula Wilson (whose meticulous double portrait of herself is disturbingly effective), and portraits of friends by Rupert Alexander and Anastasia Pollard, too, seem very able. It is among these that I would have found at least two winners of the prizes; I commend them all as worthy of the risks of patronage, though I think none capable of swagger portraiture, yet. The most substantial portrait and the obvious candidate for the biggest prize is Father and Sons, by Antony Williams, a consistently sound painter, here perhaps a shade too close to early Freud with a hint of German New Realism between the wars and late Hodler lurking in the wings. It is scarcely original, but nevertheless shrewdly observed, true, monumental, fully realised and workmanlike. I do not like it, but it absolutely trounces the paintings on the official shortlist.
The overwhelming impression given by the award this year is of ghastliness and intellectual dis-honesty, no pictures more deserving of contempt than the four that have won prizes. Had I not two years ago been a judge on the Award, in the exhilarating company of Maggi Hambling, whose response to paintings is as direct and honest as my own, I could not have understood how this year's exhibition came to be so bad, but from that experience I gleaned the notion that the award has a sub-text, indeed a super-text, in that its function is primarily to advertise the sponsor, BP. In reviewing it, critics and their editors give BP column inches, pages indeed, beyond price. In the course of judgment, however, judges are driven to select pictures that the BP representative considers suitable for publicity and advertisement, to choose pictures by artists of black and ethnic origin (and if not artists, then sitters), and any judge who proves recalcitrant is reminded of the award's dependence on BP's generosity. Judges must thus think and choose far outside the simple box of quality.
It is my belief that no business sponsor should be represented among the judges of any prize or award and should be in no position to influence the results. Influence there certainly was in the year that I judged the BP Award, and I have no doubt that I shall not again be asked to serve.
The only thing that should matter to BP is quality, for only quality will give them a fine exhibition and secure more and better cover in the press and media. Quality one year will draw in more quality the next - but once the quality begins to slide it will fall further and faster, as is evident this year, sucking in such company as no sane artist would wish to keep. Two years ago I warned that the award needed to be rejigged a little, tightened, sharpened, given the clear focus that it originally had; but opening it to older painters has not improved the quality, and with young painters discouraged by their competition, it may well descend to the level of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the very body whose eye it was supposed to poke with a sharp stick. Nor has opening it to painters of any nationality given it new life - the self-portrait by Kwang-Sik Im is worse than any melting ice-cream rubbish by Marie Laurençin. As for amateur painters, the place for them is not in the National Portrait Gallery but on the railings of Green Park.
The one purpose vested in the annual BP Portrait Award should be, not the promotion of BP, nor the promotion of the NPG, but to encourage the promotion of portraiture among the few young artists who still paint, who still see themselves as the inheritors of an ancestral tradition, who still see virtue in discovering the soul through the imagery of body language and the face, and have the skill and ambition to respond.
• BP Portrait Award 2007 is at the National Portrait Gallery (020 7306 0055) until 16 September. Open Sat-Weds 10am-6pm, Thurs and Fri 10am-9pm. www.npg.org.uk.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Great.
I agree completely with your response to the 'short-list' and I too would have found winners in those entries you listed instead.
I heard about the BP award a couple of years ago while I was in school and had forgotten about it until recently. In researching the competition I found several references to the tune of "paintings should be from life, not photographs" yet these winners are so very obviously photo-referenced and likely even painted with the aid of a projector.
As an observational painter who works strictly from life, I am constantly confronted with this trend of short-cutting and a general lack of dedication to the art of painting.
I remain brief, and semi-anonymous, because I intend on submitting next year. But I felt compelled to comment and applaud your astute observations.
- Thomas, USA
