This week, the National Gallery made an eye-popping announcement that it has secured £375 million of philanthropic funding to launch a hugely ambitious expansion of its site on Trafalgar Square. But “Project Domani” is not just an architectural expansion. Breaking a previously unwritten rule established in the Nineties, the new wing will host art created after 1900 in a move that steps on the Tate’s toes.
The National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, wants the institution to tell the story of modern art. “The story of painting is a continuum,” the gallery announcement declares, “and that is why it is necessary for the National Gallery to continue to evolve and extend the story it tells.” The National Gallery and the Tate, we’re told, have established a historic new partnership which will see the two galleries “working together to build and further develop the UK’s world-leading national collection for the benefit of everyone”.
Senior cultural establishment figures tend not to have arguments in public about each others’ institutions, of course. Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme earlier this week, Finaldi was at pains to emphasise that, really, there’s overlap between the two collections, that the 1900 cut-off isn’t so hard-and-fast. But the National Gallery’s new project is inevitably a power play over who is going to lead the way in the national collections of visual art, at a moment when the institutions are grappling with the public’s changing relationship to art in the digital age.
The Tate’s recent visitor number troubles are much argued over — it’s really Brexit and Covid’s fault, says the institution. But in terms of raw visitor numbers the National Gallery, even with its classical and Renaissance and painting-only remit, mostly matched Tate Modern year-on-year until the pandemic. People like the old stuff as much as the new. Meanwhile, Tate Britain has seen a long-term decline in visitors to its Millbank site, its take on the story of British art having become a downbeat lecture on decolonisation.
So, for all the back-patting and talk of collaboration, the National Gallery’s move is significant and, undeniably, self-interested. But it also raises sincere questions that modern Britain hasn’t had an explicit conversation about. How should our collections and taxpayer funds be used to keep them be divided between historical and contemporary art? What is the difference between “British” and “foreign” art, and which ought we to prefer?
Unlike the National Gallery’s more coherent map of European painting to 1900, the Tate’s collection is the mixed-up outcome of a hundred years of trying to platform modern British art as a thing distinct from “modern art” as a whole. At first the “National Gallery of British Art”, in 1926 the Tate became the place to show the “modern foreign art” embodied by the French Impressionists. Postwar, the Tate — by then independent of the National Gallery, which had previously run it — collected a lot of modern British art, the foreign stuff less so, continuing this insular outlook until Nicholas Serota, ardent advocate of European and American contemporary art, started to backfill the gaps during his long tenure.
Trying to sort out this bolted-together, confused remit, Serota split the collection between the new Tate Modern and the renamed Tate Britain at Millbank. But the split never quite worked. During the years of ever-increasing globalisation from around the turn of the century to Brexit, the global contemporary art-friendly Tate Modern was a raging success, while Tate Britain languished as the underdog, its curators increasingly embarrassed by the old stuff. Hip British artists were not always too keen to be labelled as boring old “British”. The question that has haunted Tate Britain since is: what is so important about British art anymore? In a Left-leaning art world filled with the guilt of Empire, that answer has usually been: “nothing much”.
And now that the 20th century is ancient history, the National Gallery clearly no longer sees the Tate’s claim to “modern” as exclusive. Behind the cordial words of collaboration, one institution is making a play to be the home of all art in Britain. The one with £375 million in the bank is always likely to prevail over the one running a deficit.