Art: Changing picture of women

By T.J. McNAMARA art critic

The National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square, houses historic portraits of Britain's most famous people. Although it has offered good, solid, historic shows of painting by artists as important as Raeburn and Eakins, it has never been noted for imaginative temporary exhibitions.

Nevertheless, the gallery has achieved something very special by way of celebrating its new extensions. The exhibition Painting the Century presents a portrait for each year of the 20th century. The images are chosen to highlight some aspect of culture or history, so not all are the highest quality as works of art, yet most of them are paintings of striking power.

Because the 20th century was a time of pluralism and because many major artists from Picasso through Andy Warhol to Lucien Freud are included, the exhibition offers a potted history of 1900s art and a line on the huge diversity of styles used in the past 100 years.

Every visitor will come away with different impressions but one outstanding aspect that emerges is the changing portrayal of women.

Near the entrance to the show but not part of it, is what must be one of the most striking portraits done in Britain in the past 10 years.

The painter is Paula Rego and the subject is Germaine Greer. Rego is a British/Portuguese artist who is considered the outstanding woman painter in Britain today. Her image of Greer shows her sitting casually in a favourite loose red dress with old, comfortable shoes on her feet. It conveys Greer's relaxed sense of self as well as the force of her personality and strength of her inquiring mind.

With this picture of a doughty fighter for women's rights, whose scholarly work put a floor under the historical study of women artists, we see the exhibition in a special light.

Representing 1900 is an official portrait of Queen Victoria while the painting for 1901 shows a Victorian woman, the stay-at-home woman waiting for news. The painting by Byam Shaw is done in the detailed, Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite manner. It depicts a lonely, distressed woman in a garden and the title, The Boer War, and the letter in her hand explain her distress.

The year 1903 shows a confidence and a spirit that will be swept away by the next war, the Great War to end all wars. It is represented by a large painting, once enormously popular and much reproduced. It is called Diana of the Uplands. A beautiful young woman is shown clutching her hat against the wind in a hill setting. Her long dress, cream touched with blue, is swept by the wind. Her gloved hand holds the leads of two greyhounds as slim, fine and aristocratically bred as she is.

This captivating image has been singled out for execration as sentimental junk by some newspaper critics yet it is an unforgettable painting.

The painter was Charles Wellington Furze and the woman was his wife. He died young but she went on to become a prominent skier and world director of the Girl Guides.

In the same room as this work is Girl in a Chemise, painted by in 1905 by Pablo Picasso during his Blue Period.

Here the model is intense, urban and angry. Her painfully thin arms and shoulders suggest the kind of figure that is to become de rigueur for fashion models. Her knowing eyes, sharp profile and twitch of lip conveyed by the artist's superb draughtsmanship reveal a complete character: attractive, intelligent but tense and difficult: a new, 20th-century type.

Significantly, the painting for 1925 shows a woman in a motorcar. The woman wears the cloche hat of the 20s like a helmet and its design is all of a piece with the car and the well-made-up features of the woman. All are blended in a streamlined art deco design. Even more significantly, the painting is a self-portrait by Tamara de Lempicka. The masculine citadel that was art has been well and truly stormed.

The year 1992 is represented by an even more potent work which addresses the same causes as Germaine Greer struggled for.

Branded, a self-portrait by Jenny Saville, defies all the imposed stereotypes of what a woman should be in the eyes of fashion.

She shows herself as an exceptionally large woman with her flesh emphasised by the way she grasps a roll of skin across the expanse of her belly. Her hands are strong and her gaze is uncompromising. Her body is branded defiantly with slogans contradicting the assertion of her presence.

It is an unforgettable image, startlingly modern, but there is a certain irony that it comes from the Saatchi Collection whose patronage is made possible by fashion and advertising.

So the whole exhibition goes from the angel in the house to the woman in your face.