The National Portrait Gallery and BP have announced they will not extend their partnership beyond December 2022, when their contract comes to an end.
“The gallery is hugely grateful to BP for its long-term support of the BP portrait award,” said Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery. “Its funding for the award has fostered creativity, encouraged portrait painting for over 30 years and given a platform to artists from around the world, as well as providing inspiration and enjoyment for audiences across the UK.”
BP has sponsored the award for 30 years, but the partnership has been the subject of numerous protests as part of a protracted and high-profile campaign against big oil’s involvement in the arts.
Notably, in 2019, five past winners of the Turner prize – Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger – were among a group of almost 80 leading artists, including winners of the BP portrait award, who wrote to Cullinan calling on him to cut ties with BP.
They said it was necessary to ensure the gallery remained a “forward-looking institution that’s on the right side of history”.
The following year, BP was dropped from the judging panel of the £35,000 portrait award for the first time since 1997.
Louise Kingham, a BP senior vice-president, said on Tuesday: “We are immensely proud of our role in championing British arts and culture for over 30 years, but the BP of today is a very different company from when we first started our partnership with the National Portrait Gallery. As we transition to become net zero by 2050 and help the world get there too, we must look at new ways to best use our talent, experience and resources.”
The pressure group Culture Unstained said it believed the move was “clearly a vote of no confidence in BP’s business” by the gallery.
Jess Worth, a co-director of the group, said: “The company spent 30 years painting a picture of itself as a responsible philanthropist but it is rapidly running out of places to clean up its toxic image. Even now it continues to invest millions in finding new sources of oil and gas, which will only push the world deeper into climate breakdown.”
The campaign against fossil fuel corporations’ sponsorship of the arts has continued to escalate in recent years as concerns mount over the scale and severity of the climate crisis. When BP and Tate ended their 26-year sponsorship deal in 2017, the company blamed what it called an “extremely challenging business environment”.
In 2019, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company ended their sponsorship deals with Shell and BP respectively, after Mark Rylance resigned from the RSC in protest over their continued relationship, which he said allowed the oil company to “obscure the destructive reality of its activities”.
A month later, National Galleries Scotland said it would sever its ties to BP over climate concerns.
BP continues to sponsor the British Museum, now under the helm of its new chair, George Osborne. Last week, more than 300 archaeologists and historians wrote to the museum’s trustees calling on them to drop the company, while activists staged the latest in a string of protests by presenting fake “Stonehenge drilling plans” to visitors.
The relationship between the British Museum and BP has drawn condemnation from the museum’s own staff and led in part to the resignation of one of its trustees, the novelist Ahdaf Soueif.
Worth said: “The pressure is now on the British Museum, which is currently deciding whether to renew its own BP sponsorship deal, to get on the right side of history.”
