Such is the interest in their important temporary exhibitions these days, that the custodians of our great public galleries may be forgiven — well, almost forgiven — for coming to believe their primary duty rests with such exercises, rather than with their care for the great collections in their charge.
Tate Britain, our national repository of art in Britain — in England effectively — from the 16th century to today, is currently suffering severe constraint, with most of the galleries to the right of the main entrance off Millbank closed for extensive redevelopment. But difficult times can themselves be an opportunity. So how is Tate Britain coping?
Two special exhibitions are open, for which entrance is charged: Picasso and Modern British Art, an exemplary show, the Tate at its best; and the more dubious Migrations.
Several of the remaining galleries also hold thematic displays, for which, mercifully, no charge is made. The photographer, Don McCullin, is given an exhibition to himself. Why is this not at the V&A? Another room is given over to optical and kinetic works by Latin American artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Again, why here? Why now?
Another display, Thin Black Line(s), shows work by a campaigning group of immigrant female artists. It is interesting enough in its way. Its argument, though, is predictable socio-political special-pleading. And there is Atlantic Britain, which seeks to “illuminate a different history — that of the Atlantic World which connected Africa, Europe and the Americas”. It shows paintings and prints from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and caption after tendentious caption hammers home the iniquity of class divisions and colonial exploitation.
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So what space is left to give the expectant visitor any coherent sense of English art through the centuries? Not a lot, and, for the most part, it is wasted. Priority is given to the 20th century, weighted heavily towards the contemporary, and with many gaps. The pattern is of the usual indulgently spare hang, with a mere dozen or so token works at any turn.
The exception is the one gallery entrusted with the remaining 400 years of British art history, with a clutch of six or so paintings, double hung, to represent any one period. So short shrift for the likes of Dobson and Van Dyck, Gainsborough and Reynolds, Millais and Burne Jones, Hogarth and Stubbs.
The Clore Gallery, by way of partial compensation, offers Romantics, a display which grafts 19th-century landscape, narrative and genre painting onto the bones of the Turner collection. Here at least is something of Constable, Cox, Crome, Wilkie, Bonington, Fuseli, Linnell, Palmer and so forth, with a cast forward to the neoRomanticism of the 1930s and 40s — Piper, Sutherland et al. But it is a muddle, and it doesn’t work.
So what could have been done? I would have made a virtue of necessity and cleared every available gallery to take what I thought merited a moment in the light. I would have arranged more or less chronologically what emerged from the storeroom, and, with appropriate judgment, disregarded the tyranny of the single line, white-walled hang. If it is good enough for Reynolds and Gainsborough to be hung high and close, within reason I would have done the same throughout. There would have been any number of surprises and rediscoveries: and the walls of the Tate would have been, for a while at least, what they ought to be — full.