Everyone has a favourite. For some it might be John Singer Sargent’s luminous 1885-6 image of two young girls hanging paper lanterns in a summer evening garden. Well, don’t worry, despite all the fuss about Tate Britain’s radical reorganisation, that pretty painting is still on the wall of the popular London art gallery.
Detractors of the big new rehang, such as the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, are accusing the gallery of instructing art lovers what to think, while others, in contrast, are praising curators for shaking up conventional views of British art and what it can show us.
One thing is certain, though: a collection built up on the wealth of a colonial sugar merchant, and with a low proportion of women artists on show, had to find a fresh story to tell. So now, while Singer Sargent’s well-to-do girls in their white summer dresses are still there, another striking lantern picture has joined the parade. Marianne Stokes’s 1899 work, A Fisher Girl’s Light (A Pilgrim of Volendam Returning from Kevelaer), depicts a workaday scene in a poor girl’s life from a female artist’s perspective. What is more, the gallery is now boasting that, overall, half the contemporary works on show are by women.
The Tate rehang is one of a wave of important changes going on inside European and American art galleries and museums, as the heritage world shifts to reflect a wider range of contributors and address the glaring prejudices of the past. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, focus has moved over from Spanish master Diego Velázquez to the work of his enslaved Afro-Hispanic assistant, Juan de Pareja, an artist until now known largely only for the portrait painted of him. “The Met’s purchase of Velázquez’s painting in 1971 made headlines at the time, but scholars and the press said practically nothing about the man depicted,” said David Pullins, associate curator in the museum’s department of European paintings, when the show opened last month.
And at the Hunterian, the London surgical museum, a recent rethink has altered its displays of anatomical oddities. The notorious Irish Giant, the huge skeleton of Charles Byrne, has been removed after 200 years, and is now only glimpsed in the background of a portrait of Hunter, the man who bestowed the collection. From this autumn the museum is also to run a string of “Hunterian Provocations” designed “to explore issues around the display of human remains and the acquisition of specimens during British colonial expansion”.
Major museum rehangs, together with swings in emphasis, have always been staged periodically of course, sometimes controversially, but the decisions being taken now are inevitably seen in the light of the “culture wars”: the new ethical battles being waged even though no one claims to want to fight them.
The Financial Times welcomed the rehang of the Tate’s free-to-view collection, but noted that the result “defiantly claims art as primarily social and political history”. And among gallery visitors the debate also seems to centre on how blunt the social arguments should be. For Joy Francis, executive director of Words of Colour and co-curator at the Museum of Colour, a direct approach is a good thing. “Any attempt to redress inequity in arts and culture will get my attention,” she said. “I’m glad Tate Britain has taken the steps to reflect artists of colour in its rehang and hope they will continue to step into the future embracing the reality of intersectionality.
“But it’s also about what happens beyond the exhibition space in terms of Tate’s culture, approach to curation, commissioning and acquisition, which I hope will undergo its own radical revisioning and internal interrogation, so we hear different, bolder and less apologetic conversations about who is and isn’t being represented in the art world.”
Perhaps the most arresting changes at the Tate are the mini-interventions. Works by living artists have been dotted among the paintings from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, to highlight particular ideas and connections. A sculpture by Mona Hatoum points up the contribution of migrant and refugee artists in Tudor Britain, while a drawing by Pablo Bronstein deliberately “resurfaces” the existence of queer communities in Georgian London.
For Jones, writing last week, the Tate’s “worthy” efforts flow from the right set of principles but are “predictable and dull”. “To try to pretend it still matters, Tate Britain ostentatiously ‘rehangs’ its collection every few years,” he wrote. “Not a single such rehang has ever made a convincing, coherent case for British art – and the latest is no exception. Maybe it doesn’t want to promote British art, for it seems to disapprove of much of it.”
The use of Bronstein’s modern treatment of molly houses to set a new context for Georgian work is a clear abuse for Jones: “What, for instance, has Tate Britain got against William Hogarth’s pungent 18th-century satires that it has to ‘correct’ them with a contemporary piece by Pablo Bronstein celebrating Georgian London’s molly houses?” he asked.
It was, however, Hogarth’s 1748 painting, O the Roast Beef of Old England, which still held the attention of renowned historian and television presenter Simon Schama at a preview last week. Reserving judgment on the whole rehang, he pointed out the resonant nationalist politics on display in the famous image of The Gate of Calais, with its traditional side of beef apparently at the mercy of hungry Frenchmen and sympathisers, while Hogarth himself looks on.
Politics is always in the texture of art, whether overtly or in the choice of subject and style. But Jones is concerned that artists with something blatantly political to say are now being preferred to those with more oblique attitudes. He argues the newly included work of British women’s rights campaigner Annie Swynnerton, while laudable, is not groundbreaking art.
Any rehang questions the purpose of a gallery: is it most important to offer challenging perspectives, to accurately represent the world, or to showcase freewheeling talent? Such rival priorities are contested as much within the art world as by gallery-goers and probably always will be.
What we do get in the Tate rehang is a clear chronology. Not just in the progression of British art, but in an explicit timeline high on the wall of one gallery. The Grenadian uprising against British rule is marked up, nine years before the Battle of Trafalgar and 11 before the 1807 British ban on the trading of enslaved people.
Tim Marlow, chief executive of the Design Museum, is a fan of the Tate’s latest exhibitions and regards it as natural that the same criteria apply to the permanent collection.
“The passion and shrillness of some of the responses just shows that people do still care,” he said. “But looking at the past through the eyes of the present is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Some inclusions may jar, but anything that makes you look again seems an intelligent thing to do.
“The suggestion that it’s hectoring or that the labels are intrusive? Well, not at all. It’s a broadly chronological look and there’s a fluidity in the framework anyway that means that later sections can be added to or taken away from in the future.”
