A hectoring, history-obsessed slog that betrays a gallery embarrassed by its own collection
Tate Britain rehang London SW1 ★★★★★
‘Nothing but facts!” cries Thomas Gradgrind, the dry, dictatorial school proprietor in the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times. Perhaps Tate Britain’s director, Alex Farquharson, has been reading it because his vision of art history, which underpins the new rehang of Tate Britain’s permanent collection, is so stubbornly obsessed with historical facts that it seemingly regards artworks as little more than dusty sources about traumatic past events.
There are other problems with this rehang, such as the demotion to the stores of, by my count, dozens of works that Tate surely has a duty to display – including John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott, The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke by Richard Dadd, The Mud Bath by David Bomberg, and Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning. (Believe me, I could go on.) But this wretched historical-mindedness is, I think, its cardinal sin.
You’ll still find John Everett Millais’s Ophelia on the walls but that dark river in which she’s drowning has become a deluge of factual detail and information. Who, though, visits a gallery, heart-a-skipping, to slog through a textbook?
Why was a rehang necessary? The last one, under Farquharson’s predecessor Penelope Curtis, occurred only a decade ago and looked good, unlike the new rehang, which, aside from an impressive gallery of 18thcentury pictures piled high against green walls, has few moments of visual flair, and several botched jobs.
While retaining chronology as its organising principle, Farquharson’s rehang overcorrects, to the point of monomania, the one big criticism of Curtis’s: that there was insufficient context. Accordingly, in several galleries, there are now vitrines filled with material from each period. Yet, the history that’s provided is really today’s preoccupation: namely, the exculpatory desire to distance ourselves from our imperial past. Visitors to Tate Britain will hear a lot about the transatlantic slave trade, but they’ll be damned if they can find much discussion of any qualities unique to visual art.
At times, the labelling even feels knottily disconnected. According to the introduction to a room about the so-called golden age of British painting, the “glamorous image of 18thcentury society” on display glosses over “underlying tensions of the time” – a view that diminishes supremely talented artists such as Thomas Gainsborough to power’s lackeys, and implies that fine art is, essentially, a varnished lie.
Moreover, the distracting new “interventions” by contemporary artists are, almost to a tee, remonstrating and confrontational, cocksure yet boorish, uninspired and trite. In another gallery hung with 18th-century art, for instance, Sonia E Barrett presents a smashed-up “Georgian-style chair” – apparently because, a label informs us, “English furniture in the 18th century was often made from mahogany produced by enslaved people in the Caribbean”. The V-sign it flicks at its surroundings is unmistakable, and encapsulates the antagonistic spirit of the rehang generally. Later, we encounter an explicit “confrontation” between two antithetical 20th-century artists: Francis Bacon and Henry Moore.
Where does this spirit come from? The answer is revealed, I believe, in the penultimate contemporary room, “The State We’re In”, named after a vast, forbidding photograph of a gun-metal-grey sea by Wolfgang Tillmans. Here, curators enumerate a “recent history” of “crises, ruptures and social justice movements”, from Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic to BLM and Donald Trump. (Engrossing and provocative, the contemporary galleries are, as it happens, a rare success.)
Despite its infatuation with history, then, Tate Britain’s new rehang really reflects the instability and pessimism of our age.
Of course, there’s a place in museums for confrontational moments that challenge the accepted narrative, but do we need them back-to-back? After spending almost five hours inside the gallery last week, I left convinced that Tate Britain’s bosses feel uneasy, even embarrassed, about the pictures in their charge, and wish they could tell an alternative, saintlier history of art. “Art isn’t made in a vacuum,” argues Farquharson. Sure, but where’s the love? For now, any sense of savouring fine art’s subtle, special visual pleasures has, sadly, been suppressed. History lessons needn’t be this hectoring and fancy-free.