A gamble worth taking
We achieve nothing if we sit on our hands for fear of what the future might bring
AT 11am today, after 111 days of complete closure, the National Gallery is re-opening to the public, the first national museum to do so since the lockdown began to ease. Athena greatly looks forward to renewing her acquaintance with the collection. In a professional capacity, she is also curious to see the practical arrangements put in place by the gallery to make visitors feel ‘safe and confident’. From what has been announced about the opening, the experience of visiting will certainly be novel.
The National Gallery remains free, but, to manage numbers, entrance will have to be booked online and in advance. New opening hours are seven days a week from 11am–4pm (11am–9pm on Fridays), to allow visitors and staff to travel outside rush hour. Staff will be issued with personal protective equipment and it’s recommended that visitors wear face masks. In order to enforce social distancing, there will be three one-way routes around the gallery, looking at different periods of art. One shop and a takeaway cafe will be open and all payments will be contactless.
Three new acquisitions—a portrait by Gainsborough of his daughter playing the theorbo, a pastel by Jean-etienne Liotard and a painting by Joaquín Sorolla—will be on display for the first time (Town & Country, May 27 and June 17). Visitors will also be able to see the central octagon, rehung with paintings by Turner and Claude, and what is now known as the Julia and Hans Rausing Room, one of Barry’s magnificent 1870s galleries that opens beyond it (which has been restored over the past two years).
The two paying exhibitions that were interrupted by lockdown, ‘Nicholas Maes:
Dutch Master of the Golden Age’ and ‘Titian: Love, Desire, Death’, have respectively been extended until September 20 this year and January 17, 2021.
News of the re-opening has encouraged other national museums into action. Threequarters of an hour after the National Gallery made its intentions public last week, for example, Tate put out a press release stating that all its galleries would open on July 27. That’s a full month earlier than was previously rumoured.
Athena is delighted to see the museum sector stirring. Culture has an important role to play in our lives, particularly at times of crisis, and it’s not enough merely to consume it through the internet.
That said, she’s acutely aware that this is a gamble. The news about similar openings in Europe has been mixed and the tourists that constitute the bulk of London museum visitors in the summer are presently non-existent. Re-openings, therefore, threaten to deplete the financial resources of the institutions involved. A second wave of the pandemic might compound the damage. We achieve nothing, however, if we sit on our hands for fear of what the future might bring. This is a gamble worth taking. Athena fervently hopes that—in every sense—it pays off.