January 2009

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At a press conference at the National Gallery, London, yesterday to announce its exhibition programme for 2009, the director, Nicholas Penny, revealed that he was unhappy with the 12-year-old agreement between the National and Tate Galleries that takes 1900 as the dividing point between their collections. This point is being reinforced by the gallery’s major exhibition for next year, ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past’ (25 February-7 June), which examines the artist’s engagement with Old Masters, an idea memorably pioneered in an exhibition at the Prado in 2006. Historians’ relatively new interest in modernism as a development from the art of the past rather than a terminal break with it must make it frustrating for the National Gallery that it ends the story of art just as modernism is beginning.

The question is a vexed one, not least because rolling the date line forward to 1914, 1930 or even 1939 inevitably means gains for the National Gallery and losses for Tate, unless they decide to overlap their date remits, precisely the situation that everyone found so unsatisfactory before the dateline was drawn. When the decision to divide at 1900 was made in 1996, Tate benefited by the National Gallery handing over post-1900 works, most notably its Monet ‘Waterlilies’; what could it offer under a new agreement?

One possibility is its English paintings. It has always seemed incongruous to me that the Tate functions as our national gallery of British art, yet the National Gallery has a substantial collection of British pictures. I have never been convinced by the argument that this allows British art to be seen at Trafalgar Square in the context of international art, simply because the collection of British art is so restricted in its chronological scope, with nothing of any note later than 1850. If the National Gallery did send its British pictures to Millbank, it would then have the space to develop its 19th-century collections away from their overwhelmingly French bias. There would be plenty of precedents for such a move: in the past the National Gallery has given drawings to the British Museum, portraits to the National Portrait Gallery and miniatures to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The dateline division may displease curators, but is there really any evidence that it bothers visitors? The National Gallery can extend its remit with temporary loans and exhibitions (like ‘Picasso’). Does it really need to acquire post-1900 art? The dateline division is quite common: think for example of the 1910 division between the Musée d’Orsay and the Pompidou Centre or the late 19th-century break between the Prado and the Reina Sofia. Visitors are more likely to be disturbed by overlap, which makes it difficult to know where particular works may be found. It is not always clear, for example, whether a particular modern or contemporary British work will be found in Tate Britain or Tate Modern, although now that Tate hangs its modern collections in regularly changed themed-displays the question is not as pressing as it would be if it followed more conventional museum practice of keeping the most significant part of its permanent collection on permanent display.

If Tate and the National Gallery do start discussing the dateline formally it should be made part of a larger discussion about divisions between the national collections. The last but one director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, did not like displaying sculpture with paintings, and so a programme of loans from the Victoria and Albert museum came to an end. Might Nicholas Penny, an expert on sculpture, re-examine that prejudice? It has always seemed regrettable to me that for historic reasons the nation’s collections of drawings and prints are in the British Museum rather than the National Gallery. The successful way that recent exhibitions, such as ‘Raphael’ and ‘Renaissance Siena’ integrated drawings and paintings might make that particular division worth re-examining.

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