Tate Britain's rehang: “A journey of different perspectives”.

By Sophie Turner

The concept of a museum’s permanent collection is incongruent with its reality; while physically objects may remain in a gallery, as nations change so do the histories attached to these permanent collections. Throughout Britain, there is currently an air of change as municipal and national museums have increasingly grown conscious of their need to recontextualize their permanent collections to offer a more diverse view of British history. The Manchester Art Gallery has recently published its intention to rethink how the city is presented through its collection and, in London, The National Portrait Gallery last year opened its rehang, presenting sitters that speak to the varied values of British society today Considered repositories of a national history, these museums have the power to represent Britain’s heritage through the arrangement of objects on display. Further along the River Thames, Tate Britain has recently presented a complete rehang of its permanent collection of British art, that spans the past 500 years. Struggling with its place in modern society, Tate Britain’s previous rehangs have worked with a thematic presentation of the collection, that was criticised for its didacticism, and a strictly chronological approach, that stood back from making any strong claims about British society. The gallery’s curators have focused upon making the historical British collection relevant for modern visitors by offering a contextualised chronological approach that relates the collection’s past to visitors’ present.

Tate Britain’s rehang speaks of a desire to demarcate a space for its collection within British culture. At the turn of the millennium, the drama of the modern art collection and the fame of their international works were moved to Tate Modern; itself a far more innovative building than Tate Britain’s nineteenth century façade. Subsequently, the rehangs of Tate Britain’s collection represent a struggle to find its new role within the broader institution of the Tate institution. In 2000, works from the collection were curated thematically, allowing objects from different centuries to form relationships. In reaction to this display, in 2013, the current director Penelope Curtis rehung the collection through a strict room-by-room chronology. At the time the rehang was praised for its ‘neutral interpretation’ that offered very little contextual information, providing a place for any work made within the 500 years of history represented. However, in 2022 the gallery received only 913,395 visitors compared with Tate Modern’s 3.8 million; the gap being was even greater before the pandemic. This statistic that suggests there to be a lack of interest, and consequently perhaps a lack of current relevancy, within the British art upon display.

The recent rehang of Tate Britain’s collection reflects this crisis of identity, remodelling their collection to speak to the diverse experience of what it means to be British. Centred around social relevancy, the Director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson, argues that the gallery wishes to present ‘a more expansive story of British art in ways that resonate with us today’. Drawing upon aspects from the past rehangs, the opening wall label for the collection readies visitors to view a curated chronology that relates the historical British artworks to their ‘social, cultural, political, economic and technological contexts’. The rehang self-consciously recognises and challenges this history by situating objects within these broader contexts, with the titles of the rooms and the wall labels relating the paintings to broader social histories. Additionally, seventy new works acquired within the past five years are exhibited. Within the introductory wall label for the exhibition, the Tate addresses that these acquisitions are more modern; a fact that speaks to the difficulty of diversifying the early collections where the majority of works available represent a small sector of the British elite Where the recent acquisitions within the later rooms offer a more balanced and diverse presentation of history, contemporary artistic interventions are employed within the earlier rooms that waken and engage viewers, inviting them to recognise how our modern sensibilities and experiences find parallels in history. These interactions between the canonical and contemporary works engage with cross-historical narratives, repositioning the permanent collection as relevant for modern visitors. Thus, where the collection’s older paintings struggle to prove significant for a modern society, the rehangs focus upon contextualising the collection presents a broader and consequently more inclusive version of a British history that visitors can relate to.

Critics of the Farquharson’s rehang consider the contextualisation a token step in addressing the collection’s implicit histories, with Jonathan Jones from The Guardian arguing that the rehang presents ‘a veneer of current concerns with slavery, empire, sexual identity and gender onto displays that are otherwise familiar’. Whilst there is truth within Jones’s nihilism, the exhibition does reflect upon the contingent meaning of objects that change when new generations address them. Within the third room of the exhibition, titled ‘Metropolis’, paintings from the eighteenth century reflect upon Britain’s increasing urban identity. The gallery introduces a form of group portraiture known as ‘conversational pieces’, where families and friends were depicted together within domestic settings. These group portraits, such as The Strode Family and An English Family at Tea superficially appear unproblematic, reflecting ways in which families still gather now. In dialogue with each other, the paintings present a fixed view of a prosperous Britain. Yet, the contextualising wall label refers to a more complex history, highlighting how the representation of domesticities including tea, coffee, and porcelain implicitly refer to Britain’s involvement with the transatlantic slave trade that made these commodities accessible. The subjects presented within the ‘Metropolis’ room are restricted to what Farquharson names as ‘an island nation collection’ that does not offer a direct commentary upon colonialism. This concept of an island-centric approach to British history functions as synecdoche for Eurocentrism, that Walter D. Mignolo defines in the context of museums as structures that ‘project as universal their own world sense and worldview’ that renders other histories invisible and irrelevant. The room’s contextualizing wall label makes visitors aware of the duplicity of easy readings of these jovial conversation pieces; while the works highlight Britian’s developing commercial market, they fail to mention that this economic growth was built upon ‘the transatlantic slave trade’.

William Hogarth, The Strode Family, c.1738. Oil paint on canvas, 112.6 × 117.5 cm. Tate Britan, London.

Joseph Van Aken, An English Family at Tea, c.1720. Oil paint on canvas, 99.4 × 116.2 cm. Tate Britain, London.

Where the wall labels draw the viewers’ attention to the narratives invisible within the portraits, the contemporary interventions within the gallery space physically break with the visual history presented through the paintings. Placed centrally within the ‘Metropolis’ display is a contemporary intervention, titled Chair No.35 (Figure 4). Made by the Jamaican-English artist and former St Andrew’s student, Sonia Barret, the sculpture is constructed out of a broken eighteenth century chair, the legs of which connote the human form. The wall label refers the materiality of the sculpture that highlights how ‘English furniture in the 18th century was often made from mahogany produced by enslaved people in the Caribbean’. Consequently, the corpse like appearance of the broken chair breaks with the jovial conversation pieces, inviting viewers to consider the oppressive histories of colonialism and global trade hidden within the paintings. Functionally, chairs are made for sitters; symbolically, there is perhaps a commentary upon the hierarchy of who gets to sit within it and with this who is represented upon the walls.

Sonia E. Barret, *Chair No.35,* 2013. Wood, horsehair, upholstery, dimensions not published. Tate Britian, London. Short term loan

While the interventions offer a challenge to the selective histories within the paintings, the very nature of its interruption suggest that works, such as Chair No.35, stand outside the conventional narratives told by the museum. This is visually apparent throughout the displays as the object labels for the interventions are printed upon a black background, in contrast to the white of the labels for the historic works. With this in mind, the interventions can be viewed as ‘other’, standing in an awkward position in relation to the canonical works upon display. Barret’s intervention was not commissioned for the space but rather is borrowed upon a short term lease. This brevity of tenure reflects Stewart Hall’s assessment that, linked with the ideas of ‘preservation and conservation’, the canonisation of British art is ‘difficult to shift or revise’. On the other hand, where the display a historical chair typical of the eighteenth century might act as a pedagogical tool to further enhance visitors’ knowledge of the paintings’ history, taking a subordinate representative position, Barrett’s broken and purposefully manipulated chair does not directly reflect the furniture within the paintings but instead stands as its own object. In this way, viewers are reminded of the sculpture’s contemporary nature, inviting them to consider how their own present may relate to the past histories of the paintings.

The rehang appears to engage with two principles: the first as a means of diversifying the narratives told through the collection and, secondly, self-consciously highlighting the authoritative role that museum’s play in representing a British history. Yet, while the contextualisation acts as a step towards reframing British history it still indicates that, like the past two rehangs, the gallery is unwilling to fully reckon with Britain’s colonial past that a real exhibit upon Britain’s role with the transatlantic slave trade might achieve. Thus, the contextual framework which interrogates British art through modern perspectives delineates the central concern at the heart of Tate Britain’s rehang – how do these early works relate to a diverse British audience? Farquharson suggests the rehang to represent “a journey of different perspectives”; arguably Tate Britian is still upon this journey With the diverse make up of society, the issue of how to reflect upon the multiplicity of Britishness is felt within the rehang. Whilst the contextualisation and interventions offer new and inclusive perspectives, the canonisation of Britain’s heritage objects proves hard to alter.

Hall, Stuart. 1999. "Whose Heritage? Un‐Settling ‘the Heritage’, Re‐Imagining the Post‐Nation." Third Text 13, (49): 3-13

Jones, Jonathan. 2023. “Tate Britain rehang review – this is now the museum where art goes to sleep” The Guardian, 23rd May 2023. Accessed 14th June. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/23/tate-britain-rehang-review-this-is-now-the-museum-where-art-goes-to-sleep

Mignolo, Walter D. 2018. “Eurocentrism and Coloniality: The Question of the Totality of Knowledge.” In On Decoloniality. Concepts. Analytics. Praxis.,194–211. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Pes, Javier. 2013. “Praise for Tate Britain rehang.” The Art Newspaper, 1 June 2013. Accessed 14th June. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2013/06/01/praise-for-tate-britain-rehang.

Tate Britian. 2023. “Tate Britain unveils complete rehang of the world’s greatest collection of British art”. Tate Britian, 23 May 2023. Accessed 14th June. https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/tate-britain-unveils-complete-rehang-of-the-worlds-greatest-collection-of-british-art.