Hello, 2025. And, in particular, hello, the new National Gallery, which has been completing a controversial rebuild for what feels like a couple of decades but has really been only three years or so. Rooms closed. Pictures missing. Scaffolding everywhere. They’ve managed to stay open, but it’s been an annoying place to visit. Now, at last, it’s over. Or rather, it will be in May.
Opened in 1824, with a national agenda to tell the story of art to the British people, free of charge, the old lady of Trafalgar Square has been celebrating 200 years of enlightenment with an enticing list of shows, culminating in the crazily busy Van Gogh exhibition. A drumbeat of accompanying announcements has simultaneously insisted on the importance of the 200-year beano, and promised lots more when it’s finished. In May.
Meanwhile, another drumbeat, emanating from outside the gallery, has been lamenting events at the main site of the rebuild, the Sainsbury Wing. If you look at the gallery from Trafalgar Square, it’s the bit on the far left with the scaffolding round it.
Opened in 1991, the Sainsbury Wing is the newest addition to the gallery and, you would have thought, the last part that needed a refit. But no. From the start there were issues. Those of us old enough to remember its beleaguered opening will recall the role played in the kerfuffle by the King in the days when he was still a mouthy prince railing against modernity.
The original plan was to build a striking tower of glass and steel on the corner, designed by Peter Ahrends. But Charles was displeased. His snippy comment that the extension would be “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” sealed its fate. Something quieter had to be found. Enter the postmodern architectural pairing of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who came up with a pastiche of Georgian forms so exquisitely reverential and sensitive you could barely notice the new building. Say what you like about the Sainsbury Wing, but no one can accuse it of not feeling like an extension.
That’s the outside. The inside was more problematic. Cramped by an overhanging roof and darkened glass windows, packed with enough columns to fill the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Venturi Scott Brown interior always felt too low. I’m not tall, but even I always felt as if I was scraping my head on the roof of the exhibition spaces. Large paintings looked as if they had to be wedged between the floor and the ceiling. The upstairs galleries were fine — delightful — but downstairs didn’t work.
It’s here, then, that most of the rebuilding has been focused. From reading the runes — nothing has been officially unveiled — it seems that much of the mezzanine has been cut away to create a double-height foyer; windows have been undarkened; air and light have been allowed into the entrance. The same angry architecture press that railed against Prince Charles’s “monstrous carbuncle” intervention is now complaining about the destruction of Venturi Scott Brown’s claustrophobic foyer. I’m looking forward to the brightening.
So that’s the physical side of the rebuild. Accompanying it — and awaited just as eagerly, with just as many squeaks of concern — is a top-to-bottom rehang of the collection. Here things get really itchy.
Shifting the pictures at the National Gallery is a big deal. When you rehang an entire national collection you unveil a new national vision: a new storyline of art, with a new purpose and new ambitions for its audience. Architecture critics may fret about the Sainsbury Wing but the larger issue is what is happening to the paintings.
Fortunately, I was able to send smoke signals to the director of the National Gallery, the jovial Dr Gabriele Finaldi, and in between frantic anniversary comings and goings he returned my calls and illuminated his plans.
As a strapping and meaty six-footer, Finaldi would have felt the lowness of the Sainsbury basements more keenly than most. So that explains the brightening. But what about the rehang? He was busy and couldn’t luxuriate, but talked for long enough to paint a cheery picture.
First, and most importantly, his “once in a generation” rehang will remain broadly chronological, with early works in the Sainsbury Wing, continuing to modernity in the original Wilkins building. Phew. That’s a relief.
There’s a modern fashion in museum rehangs for dispensing with chronology and arranging the art according to vague notions of theory and correspondence. Basically, you play snap through the ages, and put this next to that because they share something. It’s a way of showing art that dispenses with the need to impart knowledge and replaces it with fuzzy hopes of creating a buzz. Museums that do it are telling their audience: “You have the attention span of a gnat. Let’s keep you amused.” The Alton Towers approach.
It’s not happening at the National. At least not in the main rehang. Finaldi, though, is too ambitious and determined a director to content himself with a quiet repositioning. As he expands on his plans it’s clear he has some startling moments up his sleeve.
The chronological hang will pause occasionally for some “cross-cultural” digression. Thus Rubens’s big-eyed portrayal of Susanna Lunden in a baroque sombrero known as Le Chapeau de Paille, from around 1622, will be shown next to the behatted self-portrait by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun that it inspired, in 1782. Titian’s A Man with a Quilted Sleeve will play ping-pong with a Rembrandt self-portrait in which he, too, sticks out his elbow.
Sensing disquiet at my end about these games of artistic snap, Finaldi throws Turner at me. Remember how Turner in his great bequest to the nation insisted that his Dido Building Carthage, from 1815, be hung in perpetuity next to Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, from 1648? That, Finaldi insists, is his justification: the permission he needs to do the same. It’s a fair rebuttal. In the case of the Vigée Le Brun and the Rembrandt, the point being made by the comparisons is genuinely useful.
Also in the new hang will be shows within a show devoted to artists in whose work the National collection is especially rich. Titian will have one of those. Monet another. Rembrandt a third. “Where the holdings are deep, we wanted to emphasise the depth of those holdings,” he expands.
Many gallery favourites, “the big beasts of the collection” — the Pieros, the Leonardo, the Uccello — have been conserved specially for the anniversary and will be unveiled in settings that show them at their best. Piero will be returned to his “chapel” in the Sainsbury Wing. Leonardo da Vinci’s gorgeous Madonna and St Anne will reclaim, at last, the private cubby-hole designed for it by Venturi Scott Brown.
There will also be thematic displays devoted to particular areas of artistic output. A special look at still lifes (“The still-life genre has always been an avant-garde genre.”) Another at flowers. The small “cabinet rooms” at the gallery will be filled with pintsize art from across the ages united not only by size but also by epochs.
It all sounds genuinely exciting. Thoughtful and reassuring, but full of surprises. Hurry up, May. We’re waiting.
