At last. After a three-year rebuild and rehang that felt like ten years, Britain’s chief treasure house of old master art, the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, is ready for visitors again. The 200th anniversary facelift is complete. And the results are a shock.
I was expecting change. But not this much. The most significant shift is the rehang of the entire collection and the journey on which it takes us. But the first thing visitors will see and feel is the tinkering that has taken place in the Sainsbury Wing, the 1990s extension to the main building, which has been promoted to principal entrance.
In an effort to make it lighter, brighter and bigger, the Sainsbury foyer has been reshaped. A sizeable slab of the ceiling has been cut away to create more height; the windows on to Trafalgar Square have been opened out; and what was once a restaurant on the floor above is now a restaurant on a mezzanine hanging over the foyer, by the art-loving chef Giorgio Locatelli.
In practical terms it all makes sense. In today’s art galleries it’s no longer enough to exit through the gift shop, you need also to enter through the restaurant. What’s been lost in the resculpting is that elusive architectural quality: gracefulness. Like all big architectural conversions it feels like a big architectural conversion.
The stairs leading up to the galleries have, however, been improved by the opening up of their big picture windows: they feel more uplifting and dramatic. Less good is the Richard Long fresco at the top of the stairs, a huge circle of estuary mud covered with handmade zigzags. Long’s muddy scrawls, with their effortful modern primitivism, have the unique distinction of having provided Tate Modern with one of its low points when it opened in 2000, and of repeating the trick a quarter of a century later at the redirected National Gallery.
And so we reach the anniversary rehang, a floor-to-ceiling repositioning of pretty much every picture in the collection, to which has been given the fluffy management title of The Wonder of Art. When you rehang a national collection as radically as this, you’re not just fiddling with the order of the pictures, you’re prescribing a new journey. This, you are saying, is how we need to look at art.
The first space we enter has, on its left, the Wilton Diptych, that glowing medieval masterpiece of royal religiosity charged with representing the entire achievement of British art before the arrival of Holbein. It’s a tiny thing. But what a huge weight it has to carry. On the right is Leonardo da Vinci and his great The Virgin of the Rocks, accompanied by Michelangelo and a lofty Raphael looming in the distance. Thus, in 10ft, we leap 200 years. Which route to follow, left or right? Neither feels like the clear start of a journey.
If you go left you reach Flemish and then German art. If you go straight ahead you enter an exciting suite of galleries devoted to the evolution of the altarpiece. In a nice piece of gallery theatre, Segna di Bonaventura’s Sienese Crucifix has been hung from the ceiling in an approximation of its original ecclesiastical position. Somewhere at the bottom is the small chapel space devoted to Piero della Francesca that has always been there.
The paperwork for the radical rehang tells us that we are still following a basic chronology in the Sainsbury Wing that takes us from late medieval to early Renaissance. But that’s not how it feels. We seem instead to be jumping about all over the place.
Suddenly, there’s a lovely space devoted to the use of gold in art. Suddenly, there’s lots of Carlo Crivelli. Suddenly, in another room, there’s more Crivelli. The suite of galleries in which Paolo Uccello’s celebrated The Battle of San Romano hangs has been improved by a darkening of the walls that makes the art glow more fiercely. It works in bursts and no one can complain about the ingredients. What’s unclear is the recipe.
There are basically three ways to organise a national collection. You can hang the art chronologically, with early art followed by later work. You can hang it according to national schools, with French art followed by Spanish art etc. Or you can hang it thematically, with some spaces devoted to portraits, others to religious pictures, others to landscapes and so on. The Wonder of Art is attempting all three at once.
Thus the sense of chronology is recurrently undermined by a cavalier skipping backwards and forwards in time. National schools are blurred by leaping from nation to nation. Pockets of thematic examination pop up wherever they fancy. Instead of a satisfying three-course dinner, we have a tasting menu of little bits that delight, amuse and entertain in places but leave you hungry for something solid.
Over in the main gallery the relentless pursuit of jumpy diversity continues and manages once again to disguise any underlying sense of direction. Titian, Rembrandt and Monet have rooms to themselves, but where they actually fit in the story of art is as clear as a fog scene by Turner.
There’s something downright aggressive about the manner in which the old canon of art and its sense of order are being attacked. You see it most clearly perhaps in what used to be the section of the gallery devoted to the impressionists, which has now become an intangible 19th-century gathering of all-purpose French art. The new positioning makes us ask if impressionism ever actually happened? Not on this evidence.
Every notable movement has had its boundaries challenged. Mannerism blurs into Renaissance without a lurch. Holbein pops up in three separate places to involve himself in three different moments. There’s a room devoted to women in art. Another about outdoor landscape sketches. Turner hangs next to Claude in the big face-off across the ages that inspired the management here to skip about the centuries like a Mexican jumping bean.
Of course the masterpieces are still abundant. On a picture-by-picture basis it remains a glorious journey. If what you want from a national collection is 100 short stories rather than War and Peace this is the rehang for you. But it tells us more about ourselves and the modern attention span than it does about the progress of art.
The best news of all, however, is that it’s done and that there’s an end at last to builders banging, rooms closed, ugly scaffolds, temporary displays and all the other disruptions that accompany a giant rebuild. We’ve recently lived through the reshaping of the National Portrait Gallery, the rehang at Tate Britain, Tate Modern’s 25th birthday, and now we’ve survived the turmoil at the National. Enough! Can we please have a decade or two of peaceful gallery time in which we can do that old-fashioned thing and enjoy the art?