The Nationwide Gallery has just lately rehung its complete assortment. Taking loads of art work off the wall and changing them in a brand new association calls for really extensive psychological and bodily labour at the a part of curators, conservators and technicians.
A rehang has a tendency to elicit sturdy reactions from someone with a stake within the assortment – and when it comes to a public gallery, “anyone” method “everyone”.
Unsurprisingly then, it has simplest been accomplished two times on the Nationwide Gallery since the second one international struggle.
Remaining month, I attended a release birthday celebration for the gallery’s new Sainsbury Wing front. It marked the tip of NG200, a year-long programme of occasions celebrating the gallery’s two hundredth birthday. Because the writer of the gallery’s approved bicentenary historical past, I had written concerning the refurbishment, albeit with simplest computer-generated impressions of what it could appear to be. Now I may just see for myself.
Within the release birthday celebration for the gallery’s new Sainsbury Wing front.
Jonathan Conlin, CC BY-SA
Again in 1946, the director of the Nationwide Gallery used to be keen to provide each reassurance about his rehang and the promise of placing new juxtapositions. “The traditional grouping by schools has been largely maintained,” Sir Philip Hendy famous, “but a good many exceptions have been made, partly for the sake of a more harmonious and stimulating ensemble and partly for the sake of historical truth.”
The rehang, Hendy argued, would display how “the spirit of the time is usually more important than national boundaries, and that ideas can transcend both”. A placing instance used to be Hendy placing Bronzino’s An Allegory With Venus and Cupid (1545) subsequent to Holbein’s The Ambassadors, painted simply 12 years previous.
“I enjoyed the intellectual shocks provided, lavishly, in the juxtaposition of unexpected artists,” wrote one common customer from Godalming in Surrey. However she quickly discovered herself questioning if there used to be “some subtle plan” at the back of “having the Botticellis all in different rooms, the Venetians just anywhere, and the Rembrandts torn asunder?”
Evacuation of art work from the Nationwide Gallery all the way through the second one international struggle, in a while earlier than the closing rehang.
Imperial Struggle Museum
The Bronzino and the Holbein have been break up up relatively briefly, possibly according to grievance from different at a loss for words guests. Whilst they have got now not been reunited at the similar wall, as I stood again from The Ambassadors in room 4, I may just flip my head to the left and notice Venus and Cupid smartly framed by means of the door to neighbouring room two.
A minimum of, I can have noticed it, had Neil MacGregor now not been status in entrance of it. The Nationwide Gallery’s director from 1987 to 2002, MacGregor oversaw the closing whole rehang in addition to the development of the Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991.
This text is a part of our State of the Arts sequence. Those articles take on the demanding situations of the humanities and heritage business – and have a good time the wins, too.
At the moment, the gallery’s then-head of exhibitions, Michael Wilson, changed the standard grouping by means of faculties with the wing machine, which organised the hang out 3 huge pan-Ecu epochs. It used to be a profound shift, possibly connected to broader pan-Ecu political visions that will result in the advent of a not unusual Ecu forex in 1999.
Former Nationwide Gallery trustee Robert Benson (as drawn by means of John Singer Sargent) believed artwork must be hung chronologically.
Wiki Commons
This used to be a global clear of the former association. “Pictures must be hung in historical sequence,” trustee Robert Benson famous in 1914. “A salon carré, or a Tribuna, of masterpieces of all schools is an objective far ahead.”
For Benson, it used to be transparent that the gathering may just simplest be understood “school by school”. Each and every painter “must be appreciated and judged in relation to the chef d’école of whose artistic lineage, or entourage, he forms part”. Accumulating works from the “period of eclecticism and decadence” that adopted each and every chef d’école (the initiator or chief of a college of portray) used to be of secondary significance.
However in consequence, within the Nationwide Gallery that Benson (a wannabe gallery director) helped create and that MacGregor inherited, there have been shocks aplenty because the customer jumped from one faculty to any other.
Having adopted the French faculty via from Corneille de Lyon’s Guy in a Black Biretta (c. 1538-61) via Jacques-Louis David’s Jacobus Blauw (1795) to Cézanne’s Hillside in Provence (c. 1890-1912), then you jumped 4 or extra centuries again to start out yet again with the Dutch or the Italians.
The redesigned wing
Those shocks have been compounded by means of gestures against duration interiors: terrazzo tile for the Italians, darkish wooden panelling for the Dutch. Opened in 1975, the northern extension’s carpet, suspended ceilings and floating partitions have been hailed as “a model of discretion and reticence in comparison to the grandeur of the Victorian interiors”.
Below MacGregor’s wing machine, “the spirit of the time” got here first – nowhere extra so than within the Sainsbury Wing, designed to arrange a dialog between the artists of the Northern Renaissance and the Italian Renaissance. The machine recognised that the Alps had now not been a barrier to the trade of inventive concepts, and were criss-crossed by means of many Renaissance artists, together with Albrecht Dürer.
The postmodern American architects selected to design the Sainsbury Wing, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, larded their design with a sequence of realizing, infrequently mannered quotations from a lot older constructions.
The redesign of this Grade I-listed development by means of the American architect Annabelle Selldorf has now spread out Venturi and Scott Brown’s darkish, crypt-like flooring flooring lobby. Squat columns at the start meant to create a way of anticipation had been thinned and in some circumstances got rid of. Because the 20th Century Society famous in its making plans objection, “the key sense of compression” (launched upon mountaineering the stair) has been misplaced.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria has now not been hung in a particular girls artists room.
Nationwide Gallery
A ‘tamer’ rehang
Upstairs within the galleries, theme rooms had been offered, scattered some of the in a different way chronological grasp. The collection of issues is tamer than the 2023 rehang of Ecu art work on the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the place one of the crucial issues really feel compelled – reminiscent of “Tiepolo and multiracial Europe”.
The Nationwide Gallery has resisted the temptation to dedicate a gallery to girls artists: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1615-17) hangs between Caravaggios in room 3, now not subsequent to Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) in room 15.
Those that admired the best way through which MacGregor invited non-believers to interact with Christian artwork on an emotional degree would possibly nevertheless really feel that a chance has been misplaced. It is a rehang that can have stunned greater than it did.
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