Cappuccino art at the National Portrait Gallery
In the first part of our new series on reviewing the eateries at London’s galleries and museums, Connor Harrison enjoys a quick coffee at the Audrey Green where customer satisfaction has been variable
Among the 70-odd Google reviews of Audrey Green, the National Portrait Gallery’s gleaming white strip of a café, is a one-star review from a Mrs. Beaver. ‘It is called latte art,’ she writes, giving it priority over thoughts on the bad staff, food and temperature, ‘as you do it on a latte NOT a cappuccino.’ Prewarned, then, I managed to remain relatively calm when my own cappuccino was offered up with a leaf on its face — ‘Waiter waiter, there’s some art on my coffee!’ ‘Well keep it down, or everyone will want some.’
Frivolous adornments aside, the coffee at Audrey Green is good. Perhaps this is of little surprise as it is produced in Australia, where they know their caffeine better than the English are willing to admit. I drank it perched at the bar table that runs along the café’s flank, back to the counter, face to the wall, Audrey Hepburn watching me eat banana bread from above. When I had opportunity to turn, and the queue between me and the baristas wasn’t busy, and there were no visitors using the narrow passage to reach the proper tables or the side exit, and staff weren’t having to navigate the same passage with trolleys and trays of dirty plates, I was able to look out through the café windows, onto the spring light and leafless plane trees and St Martin’s Place.
But to turn back to the banana bread, and portraiture. Award-winning according to its label, the bread is close to perfect; soft, shrapnelled with walnuts, and hefty enough in the hand for those concerned about the country’s oil consumption. However, with each caloric bite, surrounded by faces in paint and photograph, I was reminded of the threat my own portrait posed. As a viewer, I probably enjoy portraits more than any other field of art. As a subject, I am about as comfortable in front of a camera as a dog crossing a bridge over the motorway. I duck my head, avert my eyes, and lie flat to the ground until someone agrees to carry me home.
Walking through the National Portrait Gallery, my own relationship between food and self-image is reflected back. Because unless your tastes run parallel to Hannibal Lecter’s — Marc Quinn’s Self, a portrait of the artist moulded from his own blood, is kept chilled just for the occasion — food rarely (if at all) appears in the NPG’s permanent collection. I can’t decide if this is surprising or not (‘Waiter waiter, there’s no food in my art’), especially since, if I were held at camera-point over dinner, I know the last thing I’d want is a mouthful of burger (see Miliband, Ed; bacon sandwich). Instead, food is present only as an absence. Hans Holbein the Younger does not paint a banquet in among Henry’s jewels and fabric, but what gives the portrait its stature, if not the size of the king? The royal weight. What might have been considered greed becomes abundance.
Or how about a portrait from the next century, of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, and a young slave girl, painted by Pierre Mignard. Here the unnamed girl, ignored by the duchess, offers up what might at first glance be mistaken for food: sugared bon bons in a bowl, maybe, and that favourite seventeenth-century treat, Twizzlers. But no, it turns out to be a large seashell filled with pearls, and a branch of red coral. And yet in their colour and placement, there is something edible. In these corridors, all actual food would suggest is an admission of bodily need. And rot. And if fresh fruit and veal spoil, what of the human painted beside it? Look on my dinner plate, ye mighty, and despair. Instead, greed, that cardinal sin, transubstantiates into power: the seas, and in her turn the African girl, delivered to the duchess for easy consumption.
But to return to Mrs. Beaver and her review. Besides the decorated coffee, the only place I came across any literal examples of food/art or vice versa, was in one of the gallery’s bathroom cubicles. There, damp and scattered under the hand dryer, were small multicoloured sweets, each one with a printed message – ‘I LOVE YOU’ and ‘BEST MUM’, bought only recently from the M&M’s Store on Leicester Square. Where, only a few metres away, you can pay £20 to be insulted with a drawing of your own face.
Connor Harrison is a freelance journalist who has written for LA Review of Books, Literary Review of Canada and Evergreen Review, among others