Only Connect: Unconventional New Display at the National Portrait Gallery in London

LONDON.- Opening this weekend, Only Connect is an unconventional new display at the National Portrait Gallery presenting a web of portraits connecting sitters across three centuries. Comprising paintings, sculpture, photographs, engravings, drawings, miniatures and works in other media from the National Portrait Gallery’s holdings, the display uses musical connections to explore new ways of looking at the Collection.

The display proposes a network of threads connecting singers, composers, artists, doctors, sculptors, poets, engineers, ambassadors and many others. As a result, everyone in the display is linked in one way or another. The connections range from the profound and the personal to the accidental and the incidental. Some were friends and some were lovers, several wrote about each other or had similar ideas, others were enemies or simply met on the street. For example, composer Benjamin Britten and violinist and conductor, Yehudi Menuhin performed at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation in 1945. Yehudi Menuhin gave ground-breaking performances of composer Michael Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia. The sets and costumes for Tippett’s opera Midsummer Marriage were designed by sculptor Barbara Hepworth. An alternative route is formed by writer George Bernard Shaw who corresponded with the pianist Harriet Cohen. She premiered Elgar’s Piano Quintet and Elgar made his most famous recording of his Violin Concerto with the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin. Such links evoke an invisible layer of human interconnectedness, a ‘six degrees of separation’ through the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

The choice of pictures reflects a ‘reading’ of the National Portrait Gallery Collection in the light of interaction and connectedness. Any sense of hierarchy, whether between creative or interpretative artists, musicians or great engineers has been avoided. This is reflected in the choice of works in the display, which purposefully presents mass-produced material such as engravings alongside masterworks. The title of the display, Only Connect, is taken from E M Forster’s novel, Howard’s End, which is concerned with the difficulties, troubles and benefits of relationships between members of different social classes. The display, Only Connect, presents one possible reading: it is open to the viewer to make other connections.

The display has been devised by Peter Sheppard Skærved in collaboration with Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Peter Sheppard Skærved is the dedicatee of over 200 works for solo violin, and has appeared as soloist in over thirty countries. One of very few people to perform on Paganini’s violin, il Cannone, Peter regularly performs in, and works with, museums worldwide.

Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator says: ‘People rarely exist in isolation but are connected with each other. Only Connect offers a new way of looking at portraits by focusing on the connections – in this case musical connections – that link all the individuals featured in the display. It may look unusual at first, but we hope our visitors will enjoy this alternative way of thinking about portraiture.’