Meet 500 years of British Art

Haunted galleries are usually the stuff of Agatha Christie novels or Hollywood movies, Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum being an obvious example. But, Tate Britain is currently experiencing a particularly evocative haunting of its own. The Millbank building is undergoing a grand refurbishment, opening up the front entrance and restoring its original glory. I blogged about this when I visited the re-hung Turner collection back in 2011.

I visited again this weekend as the major permanent galleries have recently re-opened to quite a fanfare. They have been returned to a chronological hang with the ‘BP Walk through British Art,’ which takes the visitor on a circuit around the enfilade of galleries from 1500 to 2000. The galleries therefore circle the central Duveen Galleries, which is closeted and dark thanks to the work blocking the front entrance. It is currently also echoing to the sights and sounds of Simon Starling’s film installation Phantom Ride which recreates past exhibitions in the hall to the eerie sound of the motion-control camera as it swoops around the space. The screen floats at one end of the hall, leaving a dark, quiet space at the centre of the Tate, from which the new warmly-lit, pale grey, permanent galleries glow.

The galleries themselves have been put together with some new and interesting ideas. As well as returning to a chronological hang, aimed at giving the visitor a long view of the history of British art, the curators have chosen a very light touch with interpretation. Gold dates on the floor show how you are moving through time, but otherwise, only a smattering of small interpretation panels orientate each room. I am all for allowing the art to speak for itself but wonder if this touch is rather too light, making visitors unclear how to approach the rooms and leaving them precisely 'walking through' rather than stopping to engage. This is especially as the first 400 of the 500 years featured are squeezed into fewer than half of the rooms, the whole of 1500-1700 in only two. This means that the complex and fascinating stories of how British art developed are rather simplified and truncated. Hogarth still gets a good look in, so it could be worse, but poor Van Dyck and Singer Sargent haven't faired so well.

There are some interesting ‘Spotlight’ shows to run alongside the hang, currently including The Image of the British School, on the self-fashioning of British artists through portraiture, and a larger exhibition Looking at the View, which pulls together art from the whole 500 years to consider attitudes to landscape. This is more the kind of thematic approach we have come to expect in Tate Modern but is an effective and visually stimulating counterpart to the chronological galleries.

With such a preponderance of space given to post-1900 art, however, I was left wondering (as in my previous post from 2011) what Tate Modern is for, and whether what is really left haunting Tate Britain is the history?