1968 and all that: The Founding of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
Author(s)
Pointon, Marcia
Abstract
National portrait galleries are understood to enshrine national identity through the representation of national heroes (and very rarely heroines). Who should be included is a crucial question. To open a national portrait gallery in 1968 seems on the surface to have been an extraordinarily rearguard and retrogressive piece of cultural management. The national portrait gallery as concept was mobilized at one and the same time both to protect the state against revolutionary social change and to symbolize the progress of culture in a nation perceived as owing its origins to revolutionary social transformation. In this chapter I shall look at how portraiture is deployed to maintain a status quo against the threat of revolutionary social transformation in the late 1960s.
