Another Tate Britain re-hang
January 18 2018
Picture: Tate
In an interview in The Art Newspaper, Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson reveals that he's going to re-hang the entire gallery. This is just five years after the previous director, Penelope Curtis, unveiled a much vaunted chronological rehang, which did away with the previous social and thematic one. Now - guess what - Tate Britain is going back to a thematic and social hang.
We must wait to see the finished result (in 2020), but this seems to me reflective of an institution which doesn't really know what it's about. Shackled to the mother ship of Tate Modern, Tate Britain seems to see itself not as a museum, but a giant exhibition space, one that's almost embarrassed by what it has to show. Consequently, the exhibition space - and what goes in it - must be changed every five years or so. A museum which was comfortable in itself, and happy to celebrate its collection, wouldn't do this.
There is of course one thing a new re-hang could achieve, and that is a significant addition to the hanging space by making use of the central Duveen Galleries. These walls are just left empty, above. A similar space exists at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which is used much more effectively. Given the amount of great art Tate Britain has in store, the under-use of the Duveen galleries is a shocking waste of hanging space.
