Hang it all – they've hidden everything

 

A lot of effort for nothing: Tate Britain's re-hang is not worth it

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Some years ago, angered by a particularly meagre annual re-hang of Tate Britain, sponsored by BP, I stood at its door and asked 100 visitors, on the point of leaving, two simple questions. How long, deducting time spent in the café and the cloakroom, have you spent in the gallery? And how long did you expect to spend? To the second the answers varied from a couple of hours to a full day. To the first the average was 45 minutes. That was a year when fewer than 500 exhibits were on view, many of them absorbed and understood at the first glance, many not even worthy of that one glance. Since then the re-hangs have been a little more substantial, but this year the offering again seems wretchedly thin and again I am inclined to question whether this annual merry-go-round is of any value to the public.

To BP, of course, it is of inestimable value, for its arts sponsorship, generous though it may seem, is entirely for its own advantage, not for the benefit of the sponsored institutions. As a judge on the BP Portrait Award a year or two ago I was disgusted by the manipulations and demands of the judge representing BP in the interest of the firm's advertising and perceived political correctitude, and I wonder what part these may play in the choices made by the Tate's curators in re-hanging. Whatever the case, we shall see in all sorts of quarters over the next few months the gallery's paintings (ours) reproduced as advertisements for BP, the texts discreetly casuist to prove that the firm that fills our petrol tanks also nourishes our cultural stomachs and aesthetic souls.

My argument against the annual re-hang is not, however, primarily against the uses BP may make of it for its crude commercial purposes — for I am Jesuitical enough to recognise that an end may justify a means — but that in this case the end is not worthwhile. Tate Britain owns some masterpieces and other works that are of national and international interest; these are few enough always to be on view for the benefit of visitors from Manchester and Moscow, and on view they should be. The merry-go-round demands that they are not. “All change” is the curator's cry, and they disappear, to be replaced by trivia. A whole room this year is devoted to the British response to collage — trivia indeed. A whole room is devoted to Robyn Denny, a slight and meretricious painter, now of well-deserved obscurity; perhaps in some too diligent survey of the Sixties or Seventies it might just be worth exhuming him, but to so expose him to solitary scrutiny is cruel to him and tedious to the passer-by.

If we turn to 18th-century British paintings then it is at once obvious that the National Gallery, not the Tate, has far the finer things on view — the greatest Stubbs, the most Enlightened Wright, the magnificently precocious Lawrence, the best of Hogarth's narratives, the most noble and naive of Gainsboroughs, and portraits by Reynolds that avoid all the pitfalls into which he so often tumbled. All these are bravely the equal of their European peers but in the Tate, such painters are reduced to the hapless backwater level so vociferously damned by Roger Fry.

In the new hang the 19th century does reasonably well, the pictures comfortably close without the pretentious acres of bare wall that make the hang so thin in other rooms — but has Tate Britain the finest selections of Pre-Raphaelites and Olympian Victorians? As for the 20th century, this year it hardly tells the tale at all — a handful of Bacons (the Dog of 1952 is marvellous), another of Burras, a homage to Pasmore, and photographs of a skewbald Fiat 500 by Simon Starling.

With such meagre stuff we have another year of the 45-minute scamper. And one last point — the gallery really should get its lighting in order. To have blazing glare in one room and Stygian gloom in the next (for no obvious conservation reason) makes no sense to the visitor compelled to squint and peer.

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