{"id":14054,"date":"2025-09-13T15:08:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T15:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/14054\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T15:08:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T15:08:06","slug":"national-gallerys-modern-art-push-is-a-disaster-for-the-tate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/14054\/","title":{"rendered":"National Gallery\u2019s modern art push is a disaster for the Tate"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the National Gallery made an eye-popping announcement<\/a> that it has secured \u00a3375 million of philanthropic funding to launch a hugely ambitious expansion of its site on Trafalgar Square. But \u201cProject Domani\u201d 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\u2019s toes.<\/p>\n

The National Gallery\u2019s director, Gabriele Finaldi, wants the institution to tell the story of modern art. \u201cThe story of painting is a continuum,\u201d the gallery announcement declares, \u201cand that is why it is necessary for the National Gallery to continue to evolve and extend the story it tells.\u201d The National Gallery and the Tate, we\u2019re told, have established a historic new partnership which will see the two galleries \u201cworking together to build and further develop the UK\u2019s world-leading national collection for the benefit of everyone\u201d.<\/p>\n

Senior cultural establishment figures tend not to have arguments in public about each others\u2019 institutions, of course. Speaking on the BBC\u2019s Today programme earlier this week, Finaldi was at pains to emphasise that, really, there\u2019s overlap between the two collections, that the 1900 cut-off isn\u2019t so hard-and-fast. But the National Gallery\u2019s 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\u2019s changing relationship to art in the digital age.<\/p>\n

The Tate\u2019s recent visitor number troubles are much argued over \u2014 it\u2019s really Brexit and Covid\u2019s fault, says<\/a> the institution. But in terms of raw visitor numbers the National Gallery, even with its classical and Renaissance and painting-only remit, mostly matched<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

So, for all the back-patting and talk of collaboration, the National Gallery\u2019s move is significant and, undeniably, self-interested. But it also raises sincere questions that modern Britain hasn\u2019t 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 \u201cBritish\u201d and \u201cforeign\u201d art, and which ought we to prefer?<\/p>\n

Unlike the National Gallery\u2019s more coherent map of European painting to 1900, the Tate\u2019s collection is the mixed-up outcome of a hundred years of trying to platform modern British art as a thing distinct from \u201cmodern art\u201d as a whole. At first the \u201cNational Gallery of British Art\u201d, in 1926 the Tate became the place to show the \u201cmodern foreign art\u201d embodied by the French Impressionists. Postwar, the Tate \u2014 by then independent of the National Gallery, which had previously run it \u2014 collected a lot of modern British art, the foreign stuff less so, continuing this insular outlook until Nicholas Serota<\/a>, ardent advocate of European and American contemporary art, started to backfill the gaps during his long tenure.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cBritish\u201d. 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: \u201cnothing much\u201d.<\/p>\n

And now that the 20th century is ancient history, the National Gallery clearly no longer sees the Tate\u2019s claim to \u201cmodern\u201d 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 \u00a3375 million in the bank is always likely to prevail over the one running a deficit<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, the National Gallery made an eye-popping announcement that it has secured \u00a3375 million of philanthropic funding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,1503,438,146,85,46,11018,5869,14215,14216,6546,14214,443],"class_list":{"0":"post-14054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-culture","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-il","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-modern-art","18":"tag-national-gallery","19":"tag-non-classifiu00e9e","20":"tag-optional","21":"tag-tate","22":"tag-tate-britain","23":"tag-uk"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}