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Narratives of Display at the National Gallery, London

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Narratives of Display at the National Gallery, London NARRATIVES OF DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH When I was Director of the National Gallery, I was, for obvious reasons, interested in issues relating to the display of the collection: how the collection had been displayed in the past, what was the rationale for the display in the present and what should be the method of display in the future.1 Described thus baldly, identifying the methods of display at the National Gallery might seem a relatively straightforward, intellectual project, based on the description as to how the galleries looked in the past, how they look now, and how they might be made to look in the future. But, the task was not easy. The principal reason is that those involved in organizing displays in the past have often not bothered to describe why they have hung pictures in a particular way: they have presumed that the public and their fellow practitioners (in other words, those in the art world and curators) will recognize how and why pictures have been hung the way they have, without it needing to be explained. There are period orthodoxies in which there is an established consensus as to how galleries should look and on the relationship between the art and the display, which has militated against a clear description of aims and intentions. Methods of display are often loaded with a great deal of supplementary baggage about the power relations within the institution, who is permitted to undertake the display, and what their attitude is towards the public and to the relationship between the experience of art and the need for additional contextual information. But this intellectual freight is seldom discussed, except in private behind closed doors. It touches on sensitivities about how organizations are managed and who holds power within them. It is quite tricky to describe precisely because it has not been thought worth discussing in the past. So, what I aim to do in this paper is to provide a straightforward description of the history of display at the National Gallery since the early 1930s, while trying to draw out and describe the changing attitudes and ethos which lie behind it.2 HANGING BY EYE In 1934 the young Kenneth Clark (plate 10.1), later to be internationally well known as a popularizing art historian, became Director of the National Gallery, fresh from a spell working for Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in Florence and as Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He was full of zeal for shaking the dust ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 4 . SEPTEMBER 2007 pp 611-627 & Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 611 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. NARRATIVES OF DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON 10.1 Howard Coster, Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark, 1937. r National Portrait Gallery, London, www.npg.org.uk. 612 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 NARRATIVES OF DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON off the institution and the potted palms out of the entrance staircase. He inher- ited an institution which was old-fashioned and where the pictures had tradi- tionally been displayed densely, crowded on the walls like postage stamps in the late nineteenth century and still hung very tightly in a single line just above the skirting during the 1920s.3 Wanting to make his mark, Clark did so by re-hanging the collection in such a way as to earn the esteem of his Bloomsbury friends, moving Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback because it apparently overwhelmed the British display in Room XXV (now Room 9) and including a much stronger representation of work by Manet and Ce´zanne, still regarded as dangerously modern.4 As Helen Anrep wrote to him on 20 March 1935: At last I got a happy free afternoon to go to the National Gallery. I knew I would be glad to be there and looking at pictures again but I had no notion how exquisite and exciting it would be with your hanging – It isn’t that you have improved things, that this or that picture looks better. It’s a completely new Gallery – You have so changed the tenor and mood that one sees an old picture from such a different angle with such new associations that it is, if not a new picture, or new aspect of that artist – The whole place seems full of a new gaiety and fragrance and the individuality of minor men [has] acquired such a clear tone.5 Perhaps most importantly, she was able to report that Roger (i.e. Roger Fry) would have been thrilled. It is clear from his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, that Kenneth Clark had complete confidence in his ability to hang according to the judgement of his eye – an ability which he felt he had been born with and was conferred by his aesthetic judgement, which he always regarded as at least as important to the understanding and appreciation of works of art as a knowledge of their history. As he writes: From childhood onwards hanging pictures has been my favourite occupation. It has been a substitute for being a painter and a concrete illustration of my feelings as a critic. It is a curious art. One never knows what pictures are going to say to one another till they meet. Like two placid babies passing each other in their prams, they may either stretch out their arms in longing or scream with rage. People who hang galleries ‘on paper’, with measured squares representing the pictures, have never heard those cries of love or hate.6 In other words, his approach to the hanging of paintings was intuitive, based on the visual relationship between works of art and their formal values, rather than on a more strictly logical or historical sequence. His pleasure was akin to that of treating it as a semi-private collection and the comment about people who hang galleries ‘on paper’ was an implied criticism of the methods of his successor, Philip Hendy, who was known to have organized his hang by working with little, scaled-down reproductions of the paintings on graph paper. The surviving visual evidence of galleries during the 1930s, photographed after the installation of electric lighting, suggests that Clark hung quite sparsely on figured wallpaper with the occasional cassone to mitigate the institutional feel of the galleries. In a lecture which Clark delivered in the last year of the 1939–45 war, subsequently published in the Museums Journal, he extolled the virtues of smaller & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 613 NARRATIVES OF DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON museums and galleries, rather than the large municipal museums, describing how: These are galleries [he was referring to Dulwich and Bruges] for the contemplative person and the professed lover of art. How far such people should be indulged at the expense of a wider scheme of education is a question which I will turn to later on, but I would say that these small, quiet, perfect galleries with only a few masterpieces are something very important to the life of the State and the understanding of art. They are the real thing, whereas the busy, educational, go-getting sort of picture gallery very often, becomes, as it were, journalism compared with literature.7 This passage is indicative of the essential elitism of his approach. John Amis, the music critic, remembers him saying how he knew that his staff felt that he lacked the common touch, a slightly ironic assessment given that he was later to become one of the most populist exponents of art history through the medium of television. He wanted small rooms and side-lighting and was sensitive to the benefits of seeing pictures under natural daylight. He ended with a plea against popularization: During the last few years we really have done our best at the National Gallery to make it accessible, but I feel that there is a limit to popularisation beyond which one cannot go without cheapening works of art. We must not try to persuade people that art is a ripe plum ready to drop into their mouths, but that it offers such rewards as to justify strenuous individual efforts.8 ISOLATING MASTERPIECES Immediately after the 1939–45 war Philip Hendy, the newly appointed Director, who had come south from being Director of Leeds City Art Gallery, explained the logic of his hang (plate 10.2). He starts with the arrangement of the rooms: In its present form, truncated but more symmetrical than before, the Gallery has its centre no longer in Room I but in the Dome. In fact the Dome has come to dominate the building. The size and importance of the Italian altarpieces there have been increased; but I think I have made a mistake in following tradition and putting the finest of the large early Renaissance pictures in Room I, and not in the four rooms which radiate from the Dome. There they would support the altarpieces and make a still stronger centre, as well as filling the height of the rooms better.9 Here one sees an incoming Director grappling with the issues of the architecture of the building and what looks best where, as opposed to inherited traditions and public expectations which determined that Italian altarpieces should hang in Room I. Like Clark, Hendy believed that the look of the collection was at least as important as its intellectual logic. He went on to describe how: The traditional grouping by schools has been largely maintained; but a good many exceptions have been made, partly for the sake of a more harmonious and stimulating ensemble and partly for the sake of historical truth, to show that the spirit of the time is usually more important than national boundaries, and that ideas can transcend both.
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