“All portraiture is a lie,” observes Kim Sajet, standing before the revered Lansdowne portrait of George Washington. Artist Gilbert Stuart painted only Washington’s face from life; the body was a stand-in. The canvas is also replete with symbols: a rainbow, an inkwell shaped like Noah’s Ark, books about the American revolution and constitution.
Portraits are a four-way fabrication, argues Sajet, director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, an oasis of calm in the maelstrom of modern Washington. There is the subject: the more famous they are, the stronger their opinion. There is the artist, striving to be true to their own aesthetic. There is the patron, often with a strong, very particular view of their own. And finally there is the one party that constantly evolves: the audience.
“The most immediate portrait you can imagine today is a selfie or snapshot on your phone,” the 59-year-old says. “But even then we manipulate how we take those pictures constantly; particularly now with filters, you can do all sorts of things to make yourself look good. Portraiture is always just a moment in time and those moments are becoming shorter and shorter in terms of what actually constitutes the reality.”
Sajet is the first female director of the National Portrait Gallery, founded by Congress in 1962 and now home to a collection of about 26,000 objects that attracts about 2 million visitors a year. She is also uniquely cosmopolitan: the daughter of Dutch immigrants, she was born in Nigeria, raised in Australia and is a citizen of the Netherlands.
The back story is that after the second world war her mother, who had been interned in a Japanese camp in Indonesia, and her father, who had been sent with his family to the Dutch countryside because of air raids, decided to emigrate. “My father was completely driven by where he could sail. He’d been in the merchant marines in the Netherlands so we ended up in Australia because he wanted to get a boat.”
Sajet’s father arrived without a job but started a successful paper business that took the family to Nigeria for a few years. Her mother, who had been a social worker in the Netherlands, studied for a master’s degree in psychology and found work placing children in shelters.
Sajet maintains her Dutch citizenship and still travels there regularly to help care for a severely disabled brother who is deaf and highly autistic. “That coloured everything. One of the reasons that I went into the arts was because I was working every weekend with children with disabilities and completely surrounded by the disabilities community.
“There was a certain point where I thought to myself that, I know I can do this but what else am I especially interested in. That’s when the arts appealed to me.”
Growing up in Melbourne, she had fallen in love with art at 15 when, on a school trip to the Adelaide arts festival, she saw the Edward Hopper’s Soir Bleu, which depicts a sad clown smoking a cigarette. She trained as an art historian and, at 24, became Australia’s youngest museum director, heading the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.
Sajet recalls fondly: “It was great because it’s a small museum but you have to do everything. I used to go shopping and say to the lady, can I wear this frock at a cocktail party but then also change the lights? And she was like, what do you do?!
“I recommend people going into the arts – whether it’s theatre or writing or museums – consider working in a small institution first ’cos you get to play multiple roles and be a big fish in a little pond for a while.”
Arriving in the US with her family in 1997, she held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2013.
The gallery’s collection includes portraits of influential Americans ranging from sports stars and entertainers to poets and civil rights leaders. Located less than a mile from the White House, it also houses 1,700 portraits of presidents including about 270 of George Washington alone.
Visitors flock to the America’s Presidents exhibition, which contains pictures of every US president with bilingual (English and Spanish) labels that aim to sum up their mark on history in just 140 words.
Sajet comments: “I will get emails saying, ‘I can’t believe that you said this about President so-and-so’ or ‘Oh, and you left out X, Y, Z’. Whenever we get a comment, whether it’s presidents or anything else, we take it back, we look at it and we say, do we agree or do we disagree?
“We try very much not to editorialise. I don’t want by reading the label to get a sense of what the curator’s opinion is about that person. I want someone reading the label to understand that it’s based on historical fact.”
Sajet is in no doubt that all portraits have an agenda. But in an ever more polarised political environment, the gallery, which shares a historic building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, strives to remain above the fray.
“What you say, how you choose to say it, what you feature more than what you may not feature – I know these are all decisions made by individuals but we try very hard to be even-handed when we talk about people and that’s the key. Everyone has an opinion about American presidents, good, bad and indifferent. We hear it all but generally I think we’ve done pretty well.
“The big advantage of the America’s Presidents gallery is that you see American history through the arc of a long timeframe going all the way back and keep everything in perspective. We’re all so caught up in the moment but it behooves us to also cast our thoughts back and ask, how did we get here in the first place? What acts were taken by individuals that got us to the first place? Portraiture makes history personal and it’s not about just memorising names and dates.”
The exhibition maps the history of art, from Victorian portraits of bearded men to the abstract expressionism of Elaine de Kooning’s rendering of John F Kennedy (De Kooning is the only female artist currently represented). When Lyndon Johnson saw his portrait by Peter Hurd, he declared it “the ugliest thing I ever saw”. Artist Norman Rockwell admitted that, finding Richard Nixon’s appearance elusive, he decided to err on the side of flattery.
America’s Presidents concludes with Barack Obama (a hugely popular work painted by Kehinde Wiley in 2018) and Donald Trump (photographed by Matt McClain in 2017) separated by the thickness of a wall and facing in opposite directions. (Sajet, who tries to match presidents with suitable artists, hopes that Joe and Jill Biden will sit for their portraits soon.)
The delicately crafted 161-word caption for Trump includes the following: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”
One day the Trump photo will make way for the official Trump painting. It has already been completed: the gallery found an artist who visited his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and hit it off with him. Had Trump lost the election in November, the work would have been unveiled next year. But his return to the White House means that the portrait will remain in storage until 2029.
Sajet is not giving anything away about the artist’s identity or the painting’s current whereabouts but feels confident that Trump and his supporters will like it and find it suitably presidential. Still, does she find that the current Trump photo – and its caption – provoke strong and divided reactions?
“It’s a little bit like, get in line,” she muses. “We have the Elaine de Kooning portrait of John Kennedy. It’s very abstract. It was painted well over 50 years ago and I get a lot of people saying, ‘This is disrespectful.’ They expect a traditional president in a suit behind the desk and this is not that.
“We have in the gallery right now a fabulous loan from the National Gallery of Art, a Chuck Close portrait of [Bill] Clinton and again, people are like, this is not what they expect to see. I wouldn’t say the Trump has had more attention than others; I’d say it’s probably about the same.”
Naturally, presidents who are still in living memory attract more such attention. “We get less critique about Millard Fillmore, for example, because no one can remember that. Where you get the critique is the people that they remember growing up: Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Trump because they lived through it.
“Americans measure time by who’s in the Oval Office and that really comes out. People have an opinion because they grew up under those presidencies or their parents did or their grandparents did and they would talk about what life was like when so-and-so was in the Oval Office.”
When former president George HW Bush died in 2018, the gallery draped his picture in black velvet and visitors came to pay their respects. This week it is doing the same for ex-president Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday aged 100. There have also been homages to prominent Americans such as Senator John McCain, the basketball player Kobe Bryant, the actor Robin Williams, and the singers Aretha Franklin and Prince.
Sajet explains: “When somebody passes away and we have their portrait, we put it up on the first floor and people line up to be first in the museum because they grew up with these people. We often put a condolence book out so they can sign it because they’ve got nowhere else to take their grief or show their respect.”
Pablo Picasso was quoted as saying “art is a lie that makes us realise truth,” and the portrait gallery embraces paradox. It is surely fitting that this most American of institutions is run by a Nigerian-born Dutchwoman who speaks with an Australian accent (familiar to fans of the Portraits podcast she has hosted since 2019). Sajet has come to think of this global perspective as her “superpower”.
“I have a great love for the United States and it’s home for me but I do think that there is a real advantage in also being able to stand back. If anything, I don’t think Americans realise how much impact they have across the globe. When I grew up in Australia I was watching I Love Lucy on television and we listened to American pop music and we followed American fashion. Sometimes I think Americans look inward so much and they fail to see what an impact they have across the world.
“Maybe part of my advantage is to say actually what began in the United States has this ripple effect. Reminding Americans of the tremendous gift that they’ve given to all of us is always a good thing. I’m very proud of being at the portrait gallery of the United States because there are such remarkable people that have shifted the needle not just within the US but across the globe.”
