The fascination though is not all one way. While the Queen has inspired both Jamie Reid's iconoclastic album cover for the Sex Pistols and Chris Levine's holographic portrait (which required hundreds of shots, each with an eight-second exposure), she herself seems intrigued by what artists make of her. She is not confined by conventional tastes: the Freud portrait, which is not flattering, is in the Royal Collection and she liked Justin Mortimer's 1998 deconstructed picture — which shows her head floating free of her body — enough to commission him to paint her Lord Chamberlain. She continues to sit too for unlikely royal portraitists, including the celebrity snapper Annie Leibovitz — who in 2007 produced an updated version of Annigoni's picture.
One can't help but wonder if there is some part of her that enjoys the rare sensation of ceding all control to someone else or perhaps her fabled sense of duty simply extends to making herself available as an artist's model too.
If the NPG exhibition is also a record of how British society has changed in the postwar period, the new show at the Barbican, Bauhaus: Art as Life, examines a movement that actively set out both to foment and direct change in Germany. Under its founder, the architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was an art school with a mission. When he established it in Weimar in 1919 its aims were threefold: to unite the different branches of arts and crafts; to raise the status of the crafts; and to link creativity with industry.
The roll-call of teachers includes many of the great names of Modernism, among them Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, and they fostered in their students the ideals of experimentation and collaboration. Despite this the Bauhaus had a troubled history. It moved first to Dessau and then Berlin, where it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, although it reopened in 1990, after reunification, as a design institution.
The exhibition is the largest here for 40 years and takes in every aspect of Bauhaus design and its utopian vision. The International Style precepts of absence of ornament and the necessity of form following function marked its output in everything from architecture and furniture to fabrics and photography. Although it lasted only 14 years the school was hugely influential: a geometrical and industrial aesthetic lay at the heart of the Bauhaus Gesamtkunstwerk which offered then — and still does — a blueprint for modern living. The 400 pieces in the exhibition are testament not just to the school's fecundity but to the seriousness of the project that has been watered down to mere style along the way.
