Nina Levy's Large Head, at the newly reopened NPG in Washington. Photograph: Chris Greenberg/Getty
The dead white men are still there, writes Suzanne Goldenberg. At Washington's National Portrait Gallery, opened to the public this week after a six-year renovation, presidential portraits retain pride of place: with Gilbert Stuart's full-length portrait of George Washington near the end of his presidency, and a last photograph of an exhausted looking Abraham Lincoln taken weeks before his assassination, with an eerie crack running across the top of his head from the broken glass negative. That's only fitting. The portrait gallery is housed in one of the most venerable buildings in Washington, a former patent office that did duty as a hospital during America's civil war, and as the headquarters of the civil service commission. But the living are now here too.
Before it reopened its doors in a gorgeously bright and airy refurbished premises, the gallery threw out its "10-year dead" rule. That made space on the wall for Ray Charles, who has a real set of Ray Bans set into the canvas, a regal looking Hillary Clinton, and an Andy Warhol portrait of Michael Jackson in his 20s looking strangely wholesome.
The gallery shares premises with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and together the museums are clearly meant to offer a vision of Americana. Amid the vast collection of works - some 19,000 - it's not entirely clear what that means. Is it a rather doleful Pocahontas in an Englishwoman's dress and the statuary of warlike native Americans, the stirring landscapes of an untamed West, Andres Serrano's large format photographs of working people, or Nina Levy's giant floating baby head? And how does a portrait of Mary Cassatt, the French impressionist, fit in? Especially when it is painted by Edgar Degas. Or maybe that is the point. It doesn't, and maybe, it doesn't have to.
