TAITMAIL The democratisation of the National Gallery
The National Gallery has shifted to the left, or at least its main entrance has. What used to be the main entrance, under the neo-classical portico, is now just one of several ways out, while the once designated annexe becomes the main way in. A people’s portal.
The Sainsbury Wing, controversial for its ugly orthodoxy when it was erected on a former bomb site 34 years ago, was sombre thanks to the tinted glass of its plate windows. And its purpose was slightly baffling, cluttered as it was with pillars, security warders, a cloakroom, information stands and a rambling shop.
But it has emerged naked and unadorned, the tinted mystique lifted, through an £85m reinvention, with the wing’s new role announced boldly over its entrance in classic serif capitals. This is The National Gallery.
“We wanted to make it clear, in large letters” said Gabriele Finaldi, celebrating his tenth year as its director and his recent knighthood. “What we are delivering is what we want the National Gallery to be, welcoming to people, a place of warmth, light and space. The gallery is yours” as he has said before and repeats now. “The paintings belong to you.”
Marking the end of a year of celebrating the gallery’s 200th anniversary, the new open redesign is the work of a German architect based in New York, Annabelle Selldorf, whose watchword seems to be subtlety: subtle colours, subtle lighting, subtle space. Technical developments in glass-making mean more natural light can be allowed into an expanded foyer through what seem to be much larger windows, so that from a place of comparative tranquility now there is an immediate connection with the bustle of Trafalgar Square outside. Gone are the cluttering pillars, much of the concrete ceiling, the cloakroom, the walls hiding the broad staircase to the galleries, the great rambling shop - which always seemed an odd thing to find at the start of a museum visit rather than at the end. Selldorf has shifted stuff you didn’t know was there till it was gone.
There are no search tables now, all that’s done electronically and remotely from slender pillars, to the right the stairs to the collection, to the left a new coffee bar. Where a ceiling once was is a balcony revealing a new Giorgio Locatelli restaurant that overlooks Trafalgar Square. And ahead as you enter is a 12m wide media wall showing enlargements of some of the most loved paintings in the collection – Raphael, Van Eyck, Gainsborough, Vermeer just in the few minutes I stood there - in very high-resolution with detail you couldn’t make out on the painting itself with the naked eye.
Halfway down towards the temporary exhibition gallery there are new toilets and cloakrooms where a tunnel has been half-dug between the Sainsbury and the old Wilkins building, allowing for a new gather space beside the 320-seat lecture theatre.
What isn’t here, however, is the long argued for extended temporary exhibition space, that remains in the basement, cramped and without natural light: it wasn’t, said the deputy director, Paul Gray, unhelpfully, in the brief. The permanent collection is the focus.
The birth of the National Gallery wasn’t easy. Towards the end of the 18th century there was a feverish yearning for a national collection of paintings to match those sprouting up over Europe, and the outstanding holding of Sir Robert Walpole was offered to the nation. The government dithered, and by the time it had decided graciously to accept it, it had already been snapped up by Catherine the Great to be the core of what is The Hermitage
As the century turned there was a growing clamour from artists bemoaning the lack of access to European art which would allow the British school to flourish. A group of connoisseurs formed a British Institution aimed at creating a national gallery to tell the story of European art (still its mission).
It wasn’t until 1823, however, that the die was cast when the collection of a recently deceased banker, John Julius Angerstein, came on the market with works by Raphael, Rembrandt and Titian, and six months after Angerstein’s death the House of Commons voted to buy his collection. At first, said Finaldi, it was thought to consign it to the British Museum, but it opened in Angerstein’s house in Pall Mall as the National Gallery on 19 May 1824.
But Angerstein’s house was too pokey, unfavourably compared with Paris’s palatial Louvre, so in 1832 a new building designed by William Wilkins was growing on the site of the royal mews at Charing Cross and, despite fears that pollution from the foul air of central London might ruin the pictures, the National Gallery duly moved in.
In the Second World War the paintings disappeared to safety in Welsh caves the slate quarry near Blaenau Ffestiniog, while Wilkins’s building became better known for Myra Hess’s free concerts, and after their return there was tinkering with the Wilkins building, until in the 1980s the three grocer Sainsbury brothers made a donation to create a new wing. There was controversy over the first choice, ABH, whose proposal was scorned by the then Prince Charles as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. There was a new competition, won by Robert Venturi working with Denise Scott Brown, and it opened in 1991.
Its Selldorf renaissance is a revelation on many levels, and there is still phase II to be done, starting next year, to finish the tunnel and establish new archive, research and library facilities, as well as a grand Supporters’ House.
But this is not a complete surrender to visitor comfort at the expense of the art. There is also a complete rehang with more paintings on show than before, 1,000 as against 700, with feature rooms for individual artists such as Titian, Rembrandt and Monet, tracing the development of European art form the 13th century to today, signified by Richard Long’s new commission, Mud Sun, that dominates as you climb the staircase. Some favourites, like the Wilton Diptych, have returned to where you would expect to find them. New works acquired as part of NG200 are up. And themes have been devised to engage visitors, such as one gallery devoted to pastels.
So this is a democratisation of publicly owned art, less about worship, more about engagement. It has always had free admission, but the remarkable fact about the achievement of this greatest change to the National Gallery in 35 years is that it has been accomplished entirely by fundraising from a host of trusts and foundations, led by Sainsbury charities, and individuals. The public owns it, but has had to pay nothing for its 21st century re-presentation. A different kind of democratisation.
https://www.artsindustry.co.uk/news/3378-85m-national-gallery-new-entrance-opens-2