In celebration of its bicentenary, London’s National Gallery has announced a major rehang of its collection, alongside new acquisitions and loans.
C C Land: The Wonder of Art will mark the first time the gallery’s Titian holdings have been displayed in the same room as each other, and will include new acquisitions by Poussin, Degas, and the French impressionist and student of Manet, Eva Gonzalès.
The works will still be hung in a primarily chronological arrangement, starting with medieval art in the newly renovated Sainsbury Wing, which is due to reopen in May after a three-year redevelopment. But the new display will also place some works in an “artists looking at artists” format to show how they were inspired by their predecessors.
Other thematic, non-chronological formats will include rooms focusing on the use of gold in the medieval period, and on King Charles I as an art collector.
The revamp is named after the Hong Kong-based property investor C C Land Holdings, which has donated an undisclosed sum towards the project.
Christine Riding, director of collections and research, said: 'This is the first time in over 30 years that we have had such an exciting opportunity to rethink, and refresh, how we present one of the greatest art collections in the world, under one roof.”
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The gallery also plans to enhance its multimedia offering, with the Smartify app offering codes visitors can scan for more in-depth information about each work, as well as a new audio guide featuring a range of voices giving their perspectives on the collection.
Some rooms will be closed between now and May 2025 to facilitate the moving of paintings. The redisplay will open to the public from 10 May, as the culmination of a year of bicentenary celebrations.
Other initatives launched to celebrate the anniversary have included the Art Road Trip, an ongoing touring exhibit taking workshops inspired by the collection around the UK, and 200 Creators, a network of 200 social media creators collaborating with the gallery.
How odd, to give your museum’s entire display the name of the sponsor. And to not even call it something like ‘The CC Land redisplay’. I suppose we should be grateful the whole organisation isn’t now called the CC Land Gallery. (Although perhaps we’ve got too used to Tate, which started life by being named after a sugar baron.)
…or the BP Portrait award as was in the NPG. It’s the payoff for patronage but they could all give greater consideration to what the names communicate to visitors. I used to be fascinated by the name of the Sackler galleries in the V&A and my awareness grew as I discovered more art institutions they poured money into. It wasn’t until Nan Golding’s uncovering and publicity of the drug addiction and death scandal of Oxycontin that I came to know who they were though or indeed to realise how much of the art world is funded by big corporations legitimising their philanthropic donations. Learning about the art world is a different story to learning about art or art history.I often think I was better off before I took an interest in the actual lives of artists beyond their work, and so it goes with how the art world operates beyond what’s in the spaces and on the walls.
Hew Locke has done a brilliant job with the British Museums collections and links to slavery. Better to have it all out in the open rather than learning by lifting blankets in dark corners of history.