The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is at the centre of a “nepotism” row following reports that a photographer currently exhibiting works at the London gallery was also a donor to its recent £41m makeover.
In late November 2024 the NPG launched Legends, a show by Zoë Law, a makeup artist turned photographer and the ex-wife of Andrew Law, the chairman and chief executive of the hedge fund Caxton Associates. Zoë Law was previously a trustee of the Law Family Charitable Foundation but, according to the foundation’s website, resigned during her divorce from Andrew Law in early 2024.
As first reported by The Guardian, the former couple’s trust was a “large donor” to the NPG’s recent three-year refurbishment project, Inspiring People. The gallery’s annual report (2023-24) outlines that it also received support from the Law Family Charitable Foundation to extend the Law Photography Programme, a photography initiative for students from state-sponsored schools.
The foundation has also made donations to the gallery’s learning programme and learning centre, while Law herself gifted a portrait of the Oasis singer Noel Gallagher to the NPG last year. The amount received by the gallery in donations from the Law Family Charitable Foundation is undisclosed.
The controversy around the Legends exhibition prompted cultural consultant Maurice Davies of Cultural Associates Oxford, to comment to The Art Newspaper: “The scope of [museum] ethics committees perhaps needs to extend to look in some detail at precisely what is acceptable in relation to major donors and their families… It’s a basic principle of public life that it’s important to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest as well as conflicts themselves. Museum ethics committees play a valuable and often sensitive role in deciding which potential donations should be accepted.”
Davies continued: “It can be difficult for museums to respond to the expectations of major donors, who may informally anticipate favours in return for their generous gift. A routine example in some places is children or other relatives of major donors being given work-experience internships in ways that bypass the museum or gallery’s normal open and transparent procedures for selecting interns, giving them an unfair advantage in their early career.”
A former UK museum curator commenting anonymously raised a different concern. The curator alleged: “Law presumably had good access to big names in pop culture, which may have been one of the reasons—leave aside the donation—for doing the exhibition.”
A spokesperson for the NPG confirmed that its ethics committee was consulted regarding the donation from The Law Family Charitable Foundation, and that it had been approved. “[We] followed our processes as outlined in our grants and donations policy, which are designed to ensure due diligence via an appropriately documented process,” a statement said.
Online, the NPG also states: “the UK Bribery Act 2010 requires the institution to ensure that the receipt of a donation is not related to some inappropriate advantage that be afforded to the donor, such as the award of a contract”. Meanwhile, the Code of Ethics for museums published by the UK Museums Association says that galleries should “avoid any private activity or pursuit of a personal interest that may conflict or be perceived to conflict with the public interest”.
The row shines the spotlight again on how national collections are funded in the UK in the face of dwindling public subsidies. The Belgian collector Alain Servais told The Telegraph: “Nobody in the art world likes to talk about money but the truth is that not a single solo exhibition can happen without the support of the artist’s gallery or a sponsor.”
The Telegraph also reports that Zoë Law: Legends was first discussed back in 2019, under the gallery’s former director Nicholas Cullinan, now director of the British Museum. Law is credited as the photographer behind a publicity portrait of Cullinan that was distributed by the museum alongside its announcement of Cullinan’s appointment in March 2023. The image is dated 2018.
Law’s website says that she began her evolving Legends series in 2017, “celebrating over 100 influential figures from the worlds of art, fashion, business, and entertainment”. Her work is on display until 2 March in the NPG’s Studio Gallery and Spotlight Space.
Zoë Law and the Law Family Charitable Foundation were contacted for comment. Nicholas Cullinan declined to comment.
