All change please: Tate Britain and ‘The BP Walk Through British Art’

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Angela Summerfield takes a view of the new hang at Tate Britain

This May saw the launch of an unprecedented re-display of British art at London’s Tate Britain gallery, which aims to give a broad overview of art created from the 1540s to 2012. Each gallery room – some vast hall spaces,  others of a more intimate domestic scale – are given over to a single decade or several, covering paintings, sculpture and works on paper; look out for the gold numerals on the wood floors.  There are also new permanent rooms dedicated to William Blake and Henry Moore, alongside a changing programme of ‘spotlights’ focusing on individual artists, a single work (Constable’s Cornfield, 1817) or themes.

Loans from the National Gallery, the Royal Collections, other institutions and private collections go some way to meeting the demands of such an approach as  the Tate only received its first central government acquisitions grant in 1946.  Despite being granted its own board of trustees and director in 1915, the National Gallery of British Art, Millbank, as it became known, remained in effect a sub-division of the National Gallery and was still subject to the overriding collecting concerns of that institution and the interests of its own board of trustees until 1955.

Now gone is the previous minimalist hang, favoured by Sir Nicholas Serota,  in favour of close hangs and sculptures on plinths. The new arrangement, for the most part, also allows a careful study of more major works, or those whose surface qualities and subject matter demand closer scrutiny.  A slightly ‘retro’ gallery colour of the 1980s, ‘neutral’ grey, has been chosen, presumably as the visual equivalent of a conscious curatorial decision to stand back from didactic labelling. Gone too is the post-1945 sense that British art had to be carefully sieved and weighed against its immediate European counterparts and our cousins across the Atlantic; approaches pursued both by the pre-Serota directors, Sir Norman Reid (1964–79) and Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8). Here the dictates of academic modernism are ‘out’.  Looking at art is no longer an obscure chore but, as in a walk through London itself, we are all invited to explore, discover, be entertained, admire, reflect upon and ponder. 

Addressing the current issues of the ‘interactive’ rather than passive character of public exhibitions and the socially diverse audience for publicly funded galleries and museums, these new displays offer endless possibilities for future educational events, gallery talks and discussions. Instead of ‘masterpieces’, the publicity material carefully reminds us that we are being offered ‘highlights’, of which there are so many that I recommend you set aside an entire morning or afternoon for your first visit. To list just a few: the early 17th-century Cholmondeley Ladies (artist unknown);  Joshua Reynolds’ Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney: The Archers (1769); John Constable’s Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) (1816–17);   J.M.W. Turner’s view of Caligula’s Palace (c.1831), Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose  (1885–6), by John Singer Sargent; Sir Jacob Epstein’s ‘Torso in Metal’ from The Rock Drill (1913–14);  Pelagos(1948) by Barbara Hepworth; and Nataraja (1993) by Bridget Riley. 

Extended labels, of which there are not many, but dotted throughout the displays, give some information on the social, cultural or political nature of the times. Such colourful paintings as Colonel Mordant’s Cock Match explore Britain’s colonial past, for example. The rise of narrative art (Room 1810), described as having a distinctive moralizing or satirical tone, includes the glorious mayhem conjured up by Edward Francis Burney’s Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music c.1820.  In the 1840  room, previously given over to the dominance of the Pre-Raphaelites, the wild apocalyptic visions of  John Martin appear on an adjacent wall to the gentle climatic gem of Windy Day by David Cox, acquired through the important Salting Bequest of 1910.  The labelling also reminds us that the Chantrey Bequest (1840s) allowed the acquisition of contemporary British art, or rather art created in Britain (such as the Sargent painting); look out too for Walter Greaves’ fastidiously evocative Old Battersea Bridge (1874).  The re-assessment of artists’ careers also gets an airing with good examples: Dora Gordine’s  Javanese Head (1931); Eric Gill’s  Ecstasy (1910–11); and the Welsh colourist, J. D. Innes’ Arenig North Wales (1913). 

Some visitors may, from time to time, raise their eyebrows at the absence of certain artists. Bloomsbury only gets a nod through Vanessa Bell and one of its least-known artists, Dora Carrington   (Farm at Waterdlath) and we also left wondering what was really happening throughout the 1920s in general.  Winifred Nicholson’s link to this latter development and her own explorations of colour theory are absent, as  is Dame Laura Knight,  and perhaps, most surprising of all, no signs of the sculptor Elisabeth Frink, who remains the youngest-ever artist to be purchased by the Tate (under Bowness) in 1952, at the age of 22.  Nevertheless, one senses that this new presentation of British art has been carefully picked over, with each representation having to justify a particular role: a selection that would certainly not have been possible without the sophisticated computer cataloguing of public collections  now available to curators. The inclusion of Bombed Women and Search Lights (presumably Battersea during the Blitz), by the radical communist Clive Branson, shows just how far the new order at the Tate has come.