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SIR BRIAN URQUHART
by Philip Pearlstein

Sir Brian Urquhart was Under-Secretary-General, United Nations, from 1974 until 1986. He has led an extraordinary life, much of which has been spent in and around the United Nations system. Over a 40-year career, and since, he has served or advised every UN Secretary-General from the organisation's inception. Since 1946, Sir Brian's professional life has been, in many respects, a history of the UN itself.

This portrait, by celebrated American artist Philip Pearlstein, has been commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery with the generous support of several private donors. Urquhart is depicted seated in the artist's Manhattan studio, holding the blue helmet of the UN Peace-keeping Force, with his years of service painted on it. The portrait was painted entirely from life in a series of two-hour sessions. Characteristically of Pearlstein's approach to his subject, the sitter is cropped and looms large in the composition.

Born in England in 1919, Brian Urquhart was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. After fighting with the British army's airborne forces in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during the war, he became Personal Assistant to Gladwyn Jebb and Executive Secretary to the Preparatory Commission which set up the United Nations in London from 1945 to 1946. With his early experience on the ground in the Middle East and the Congo, and his twelve years as Under-Secretary-General, he is widely regarded as the pioneer of the modern concept of international peace-keeping. Urquhart holds ten honorary degrees from universities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Yale and Oxford, and has written widely on the UN system, including a much admired biography of Dag Hammarskjold.

Philip Pearlstein (b.1924) is a master of American contemporary realism. Peter Schljeldahl, art critic of The New Yorker, referred to Pearlstein recently in a review of the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Tate; "Compare Freud with his American near-contemporary Philip Pearlstein, another painter of large, unprettified nudes. Versed in New York School abstraction, Pearlstein creates pictures that are formally as tight as drums, and that declare themselves completely and strongly from any distance. But Pearlstein's paintings are cold and dry. Hot moist Freuds are more fun, despite their incoherence." (The New Yorker, 7 July 2002) Since the 1960s, Pearlstein has painted monumental nudes, most recently juxtaposed with idiosyncratic props, from kitsch toys to brightly coloured textiles, which create a visual and psychological tension between human and inanimate forms. The completion of this portrait coincides with the publication of Philip Pearlstein since 1983 by American curator and art critic, Robert Storr (Published by Harry N. Abrams, New York 2002).

Sir Brian Urquhart by Philip Pearlstein is on display in Room 35.

For further press information please contact
Hazel Sutherland, Press Officer, Tel 020 7312 2452 Email hsutherland@npg.org.uk

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 08 August 2008