Date: 10-07-1990
Owning Institution: The national gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century        

IT MIGHT be described as the first Euro-hang of modern times. A few days ago Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery, announced what have been billed as the most sweeping changes to his museum in its 150-year history: the existing hang, in which paintings are grouped by nationality, is to be replaced by a mixed hang governed by chronology. Passport controls, so to speak, are to be lifted, the boundaries between the art of different European nations to be defined less rigidly. The timing seems peculiarly appropriate: the revised and rehung National Gallery is scheduled for completion in 1992.

The changes have been under discussion, according to Neil MacGregor, for more than a year. ''The first thing the curators and I had to decide was how we would hang the collection once the Sainsbury Wing had opened. The obvious question was whether we should hang just the early Italians there or whether we should hang the early Italians and the early Netherlandish. The next question was whether they should be hung separately, as they always have been in this gallery - where they are currently to be seen as separate traditions in separate parts of the building - or whether we should try to present them as intermeshing traditions that actually illuminate each other.''

Art history, MacGregor argues, is on his side: ''I think it's now an academic commonplace that the development of painting in Italy and the North was really one development, with a great deal of interchange - innovations were made in one place and then taken up in the other. If you are going to understand, either visually or intellectually, why Italian paintings look the way they do by 1450 or 1500 you really have to know what's been going on in the North, in the Low Countries and in Germany. Now that's something that is particularly easy for us to emphasise, given our collection; we happen to be one of the rare galleries in the world where you can show Italy and the North walking in step, so the hang of the Sainsbury Wing will play to our particular strength.''

''Once we had decided to change from a linear presentation of the national schools in the Sainsbury Wing, we wanted to see whether the same approach might work for the rest of the collection. I think it is appropriate, because it's fair to say that the National Gallery's collection is uniquely balanced - it's the only museum in the world where virtually all the major schools in the history of European art are present at the highest level.''
MacGregor's proposals, still evidently at the planning stage, inevitably invite speculation. To what extent does he plan to juxtapose the art of different countries? Doesn't the new hang open the way for some fairly startling visual dissonances? It raises the possibility, for instance, of seventeenth-century Dutch painting neighbouring Poussin: low life in the Low Countries next to high-flown allegory in Arcadia.

MacGregor insists that ''our intention is only in rare cases actually to mix paintings by artists from different countries in the same room. The disposition in the Sainsbury Wing and the rest of the gallery will still consist very largely, in any one room, of pictures painted either by the same artist or by artists working in the same place. That's largely because in visual terms they will be better neighbours to each other. What I'm hoping we will be able to make better in the reorganisation, or to change, is the audience's perception of the development of Western art. You will be able to see, as you walk from one room to the next, changing country but not changing period, the sort of connections that artists themselves would have been aware of, and that their contemporaries would certainly have recognised.

''At the moment, for example, the paintings of Rubens, Poussin and Velazquez are separated both from each other and from the Italian art of the seventeenth century. Yet they all three went to Italy, they all drew on the Italian tradition of painting, so to think of them as primarily determined by earlier painting in the Low Countries, France and Spain is very misleading. The existence of disparate traditions in Western painting - the gulf, say, between certain aspects of Italian and Dutch painting - will continue to be apparent, perhaps in an even more arresting way than it is now.''
MacGregor contrasts his own plans with those of his counterpart at the Louvre, which has embarked on its own, pounds 600 million programme of building and rehanging. ''The French paintings at the Louvre have already been taken out of the grand gallery and are being grouped in a self-contained sequence. What that means is that the links between Poussin and his Italian contemporaries, or between Philippe de Champaigne and his Flemish contemporaries, will not be visible. That seems to me the great disadvantage of the nineteenth-century habit of hanging pictures by nationality.''

It is an evident truth that artists have always been influenced by the work of other artists from other countries. Turner made the point when he bequeathed his own Dido Building Carthage to the nation on condition that it hang beside Claude's Seaport with the Embarcation of the Queen of Sheba, painted nearly two centuries earlier. The paintings still neighbour each other, and must always do so. Turner's condition is also a reminder, however, that there is no perfect solution to the display of a great art collection. MacGregor's hang may allow him to juxtapose paintings by artists of different nationalities, but it will also prevent him from suggesting links between the art of different periods: Goya, presumably, will be separated from Velazquez under the new dispensation.

In a few cases, MacGregor hopes that ''it might be possible to hang paintings by artists of different national schools side by side, but only where they speak to each other visually in a particularly forceful way. Obviously we are limited in any proposed hang by the nature of the collection - it would be fascinating, although more the stuff of a temporary display than a permanent hang, to see Velazquez's Rokeby Venus beside one of the great Titian nudes, but since we don't have such a painting by Titian the possibility doesn't arise. The sort of area we would want to examine for the permanent hang would be perhaps the seventeenth-century Italian landscapes of Domenichino, which might look very interesting, and appropriate, hung next to the landscapes of Claude. I think that some of the landscapes of the Dutch Italianates, the paintings of Jan Both or Aelbert Cuyp's large River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants, which we recently acquired, should also be nearby - not perhaps on the same wall, but certainly in the vicinity. A hang such as that would be able to show, in a way that the present one cannot do, that there's a specific tradition of landscape painting there that crosses national boundaries - there was a French Italianate tradition and a Dutch Italianate tradition, and it's a question of making that apparent.''

The philosophy behind MacGregor's changes seems, on the face of it, relatively straightforward. ''Our starting point is that from the thirteenth or fourteenth century onwards painting is really a European phenomenon. Artists in the various national centres know what is going on elsewhere, they absorb outside influences and in turn influence artists at often quite considerable geographical removes. It seems to me one of the paradoxes of art history, and of museum display, that while art can be said to represent an international language, a sort of visual Esperanto, it should for so long have been represented in rigidly national terms.'' The reunification of Europe, he concludes, is at hand: ''When we rehang the collection we will be trying - and we are one of the few museums where the attempt is possible - to reveal the wholeness of the European tradition.''