The delicate truce between Britain’s two most popular art galleries over who gets to show which paintings appears to have broken down.
The new director of the National Gallery has called into question a gentlemen’s agreement made with the Tate that restricts his organisation to showing only paintings created before 1900 in its permanent collection.
Gabriele Finaldi, who took up his post in August, is moving his tanks on to the Tate lawn after declaring that he is frustrated by the pact and wants to move the cut-off date “towards the Second World War”.
The galleries put aside their rivalry in 1996 when Sir Nicholas Serota, still director of Tate, reached a settlement with Neil MacGregor, then director of the National Gallery.
Tate Britain was entitled to all British art, Tate Modern would display international art created after 1900 and the National Gallery would show international art created before 1900.
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The agreement was reaffirmed in 2009 for ten years, but Dr Finaldi suggested that it was time to rewrite the rules. “As time moves on, 1900 seems increasingly remote and less related to how we think about periods of history and art history,” he told The Art Newspaper. “In artistic terms, nothing very special happens in 1900, but the 1880s and 90s are a remarkably fertile period that push forward new modes of expression, with Cubism very soon afterwards. It is slightly frustrating to reach 1900 and then not go on.”
Dr Finaldi said he has an understanding with Tate that his gallery can move into the 20th century provided Tate Modern retains its control of avant-garde and abstract art. “We could think of moving towards the Second World War and potentially collecting pictures from the 1930s, although this is something we would want to discuss.”
One divisive figure is Pablo Picasso, whose work bestrides the 19th and 20th centuries and is both figurative and abstract. The National Gallery owns the artist’s still life painting Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin (1914) but is expected to loan it to Tate, which is displaying it at Tate Liverpool.
Dr Finaldi would like to change the general prohibition on Picasso. “We do not currently show Picasso, but he is an artist who straddles the end of the 19th century and went through a remarkable series of transformations to become the towering figure of the 20th century. So we should show him. Picasso always had a deep relationship with the kind of art represented in the National Gallery.”
The gallery held a temporary exhibition devoted to Picasso in 2009 and Tate crossed into the 19th century in 2010 with its Gauguin show, but these did not affect the galleries’ permanent collections. The agreement specifically instructs the galleries not to seek bequests from wealthy collectors from outside their remit.
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Any change to the agreement risks upsetting the Tate, which loans far more of its paintings to the National Gallery than it receives, including works by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The National Gallery now holds 48 works from Tate in return for two from its collection.
Sir Nicholas has not publicly questioned the agreement, but said during a trustees meeting in 2005 that “the agreement [is] not in Tate’s favour in the short term because it [means] that 50 paintings were loaned to the National Gallery”.
Tension last flared in 2008 when Sir Nicholas Penny, Dr Finaldi’s predecessor, said his gallery was built to house contemporary art. “The idea is not to have an agreement,” he said. “We are not happy with 1900 as a final point of the end of the National Gallery.”
The start of the modern era has steadily been pushed forward since 1927, when an early attempt to split the collections settled on 1870 as the boundary because it heralded the impressionist movement.
A Tate spokeswoman said that 1900 was never an absolute cut-off date. “The agreement has always been and will continue to be around 1900 and working within this framework we are always in discussion about any plans to show work which crosses into earlier or later periods.” The National Gallery issued a similar statement that appeared to jar with its director’s opinion. It said: “The agreement has always been and will continue to be circa 1900.”
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It did not elaborate on whether the 1930s might reasonably be described as circa 1900.