JULY/AUGUST 2025
Every visual arts hack has chipped in their sixpennorth about the re-opening of the Sainsbury Wing and the rehang it has caused throughout the rest of the National Gallery, parts of which have been visible for many months if only they’d bothered investigating. This is claimed as a major event to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the gallery’s opening. Perhaps. Praise from the critics has been so wildly enthusiastic one is left wondering if many of them had actually been there before. But none of the plaudits, concerns or quibbles of these jobbing commentators matters at all to the wider public. For who really gives a stuff about the rehang? How many will even notice? Certainly not the four million tourists who come each year and make up the bulk of the attendance: most of these will be visiting for the first and probably last time. They couldn’t give a monkey’s in which order pictures are hung. You could shuffle the paintings like playing cards then hang them at random and tell them they are in chronological, thematic, genre or nationality order, whatever, and they’d believe you. It wouldn’t make any difference to them in their two-hour traipse providing they got their Sunflower selfie. No, they won’t notice any difference – not least because they haven’t been here before – and the curators’ nose-tapping historical juxtapositions here or clever-clever comparisons there will fly way over their heads. They are here because it is a free central attraction and has some famous pictures worthy of recording on their phones … which in a few days they’ll have forgotten they’ve seen.
The rehang certainly won’t matter to art students and the usual suspects and eagles of official Contemporary Art, most of whose knowledge of art history extends no further back than the week before last. For such is the rupture of Contemporary Art from the work of its antecedents.
Those who will notice that the pack has been cut are regular visitors, those increasingly deterred nowadays by queues and charges for everything, who will have to get used to a newish lay-out. These more informed regulars don’t process around the gallery from start to finish but pick and choose and sample and re-acquaint. They might enter to see only one picture and be in the gallery for a few minutes. Curators’ nifty games and speculations will probably interest them only in passing, if they notice at all.
So who benefits from this much trumpeted rehang? The curators and the director obviously. They have imposed their will and little theories over art history with a few fashionable ‘signals’ thrown in. This momentous attempt to impress their professional colleagues at home and abroad will become a bullet point on their CVs, a legacy item in an obituary – “They oversaw a magnificent, universally applauded rehang of the national Old Master collection while introducing a posh restaurant for rich folk.” Maybe not that last bit.
Did the gallery need a rehang? Not as far as I could see, but an opportunity for career enhancement presented itself when one wing (only just over 30 years old!) required a structural redesign causing a three-year closure … so why not? Regular visitors will know anyway that this gallery is in a permanent state of modified alteration. Pictures constantly change places: new loans or acquisitions are added; works are sent for exhibition abroad while others are touring the country; a new work may have arrived courtesy of the Exchequer; swathes of paintings might be moved downstairs for inclusion in a paying show … all these possibilities require re-arrangement to fill gaps. This is how a modern gallery must operate. Even the most frequent visitors can be surprised. The new rehang might be presented as permanent, set in stone, but it won’t be many weeks before tinkering starts all over again, if it hasn’t already.
For my own part, all I want from the National Gallery (and the Tate) is that the works I partly own are where I’m more or less used to finding them without having to ask or search high and low.