Tate Britain’s rehang puts politics before art

No one familiar with Tate Britain’s recent exhibitions — from the joyful Caribbean-British panorama Life Between Islands to the ideologically heavy-handed Hogarth and Europe — will be surprised that the museum’s rehang of its collection, completed this week, defiantly claims art as primarily social and political history. What are unexpected are the extreme gains coexisting with the downsides: the delights of revelatory 21st-century acquisitions, inspired juxtapositions, a collection refreshed and rethought, set against problematic selections prioritising subject over quality and a self-righteousness regarding the past, infuriating in the commentaries and disastrously infiltrating some of the contemporary works.

Replacing Penelope Curtis’s studiedly neutral, decade-by-decade hang of 2013, the new display remains broadly chronological but is studded with thematic interventions, according to director Alex Farquharson’s guiding principle of “relating art to society, Britain to the world and the past to the present”.

It’s an outward-bound approach delivering some stunning results. In a daybright gallery, late Turner’s dissolving forms (“Sunrise with Sea Monsters”; “Norham Castle, Sunrise”) are radiant alongside Mark Rothko’s abstraction. (The American Rothko gave works to Tate because he admired its Turner connection.) A postwar highlight is Henry Moore and Francis Bacon battling sensibilities of societal healing against lonely existential anguish. A superb room of William Blake’s and Chris Ofili’s iridescent, mysterious watercolours absorbingly converges formal and intellectual concerns — blending figure and background, popular culture segueing into classical and African-Caribbean myth — shared across different epochs. Each is a small, finely tuned exhibition in itself, alone worth a visit.

That British art’s strength, openness and eclecticism come from a mesh of influences, driven by immigrant energy, is Farquharson’s chief, optimistic strand. It shapes the opening gallery, Exiles and Dynasties, tracing how émigré artists, led by Van Dyck — his satiny extravaganza “A Lady of the Spencer Family”, attended by a spaniel darting off to chase a lizard, is a new exhibit — devised the visual language of Tudor and Stuart pomp and might. Four centuries later, looking back to royal iconography, the triumph of the final room is a lushly painted gilded throne standing sinister and empty, a reference to corridors of invisible, repressive power, in “Electric Chair” (2020) by Mohammed Sami, an Iraqi refugee now living and working in the UK.

Along the way Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman’s “Portrait of a Lady” dazzles in a Georgian Salon; American John Singer Sargent’s Impressionist “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, the children with lanterns painted in summer twilight, is the Victorian standout; and Colombian-born Oscar Murillo reinvigorates paint as dissent with “Manifestation” (2019-20). This turbulent collage of stitched and broken canvas, weighty impasto, waves of bright and obscured colour, alludes to protest movements and implies in its overlapping, contested forms the urgency of different voices breaking through.

For whom do paintings speak? At least until the 19th century, works entering the canon, like history itself, told the victor’s story, and Farquharson’s attempt to challenge this determines his provocative historical hang. A lovely intervention in the baroque gallery, 1640-1720, is Nils Norman’s installation “Sparkles of Glory” (2022), sprinkled across the undistinguished portraits of Civil War politicians and royalist grandees. Reproductions of pamphlets by journeymen protesters the Levellers and Ranters line the walls; their texts blare from a miniature model city — church, tavern, Banqueting House with the scaffold where Charles I lost his head — which comically (and comfortably) doubles as visitor seating, pulling us into the working-class experience of the Civil War world turned upside down.

But when you hit the 18th century, humour vanishes. Captions admonishing Gainsborough’s and Reynolds’ white subjects, enriched by colonial trade, become relentlessly hectoring, and Tate has not learnt from its misjudged Hogarth show. The crassest caption there was artist Sonia Barrett’s suggestion that Hogarth’s chair, “made from timbers shipped from the colonies”, stood for “all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity”. Here that is made solid with an actual mahogany chair smashed up by Barrett and placed centrally in the gallery devoted to Hogarth’s and Canaletto’s London — nonsense insulting to pioneering, democratic painters and to audiences.

Where the display does excel is in giving prominence to early works which appear ambiguous towards the status quo. Is John Simpson’s “Head of a Man”, depicting African-American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, a romantic image of black interiority or a controlling attempt to impose European ideals of beauty on a black figure? Does Johann Zoffany’s “Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match”, teeming vista of Anglo-Indian society in Lucknow, document cultural fusion or British dominance?

John Opie’s tender “The School Mistress”, a new acquisition, claims the tradition of grand Georgian portraiture for an anonymous workaday subject. Pauline Boty’s “The Only Blonde in the World”, depicting Marilyn Monroe in a boa as fleeting, feathery, squeezed and isolated between huge panels, distils both the glamour and the costs of the sexual revolution. It looks fantastic alongside David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” poster-painting for 1960s freedoms.

The 20th-century galleries tilt towards public rather than private statements: dedicated rooms for feminist campaigner Annie Swynnerton and political radical Richard Hamilton, rather than Lucien Freud or Leon Kossoff, for example. It is encouraging that half the modern works are by women, but the selection bafflingly excludes great, beloved pieces from the museum’s collection, while money has been squandered on the inept. A feeble nude trailing a bouquet is “Flora’s Cloak” by Gluck — bought with funds provided by betting magnate Denise Coates — but absent are Cornelia Parker’s “Thirty Pieces of Silver”, metal crushed and suspended into trembling new life, and Paula Rego’s “The Dance”, the lone, tragic dancer among the whirling groups, painted after her husband’s death. Are these haunting metaphysical works insufficiently political to win space here?

The most recent purchases, Lubaina Himid’s formulaic reworking with black figures of Tissot’s “The Gallery of HMS Calcutta”, and thoroughly banal photographs by non-binary artist Rene Matić, seem to me quota-ticking, though it’s notoriously difficult for museums to get contemporary acquisitions right. But sometimes they do, and as a result the 1990s gallery is thrilling: Peter Doig’s enigmatic, menacingly beautiful “Echo Lake” faces Chris Ofili’s glitter and elephant dung canvas of mourning “No Woman No Cry”. How marvellous that at the time, amid the YBA conceptual noise, Tate had the insight to purchase the monumental paintings which became the icons of that decade.

Doig’s, sourced from the horror film Friday the 13th, is about memory and unease though carries no discernible message. Ofili’s portrait of weeping Doreen Lawrence, whose teenage son was murdered, is Britain’s most significant painting about race. Equally moving, seen together they remind us that, although it is appropriate that in 2023 Tate’s British collection is staged to reflect tensions of Brexit, Black Lives Matter, the migrant crisis, it is not politics but artistic conviction and imaginative invention that enduringly enthral.

tate.org.uk

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