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- The "Troubled Glamour" room
at Tate Britain
Photo: Didier Rykner - See the image in its page
After writing our first news item about Tate Britain’s rehanging and acquisitions, we received the July issue of Burlington Magazine, whose editorial is devoted to precisely this subject. Those who read it - and we always encourage you to read this excellent magazine - will surely be struck by the proximity of our two articles, the Burlington’s obviously written well before ours, and the latter written before we had read the British newspaper’s opinion.
Like us, the Burlington appreciates the overall layout and the largely chronological approach. But it is equally critical of the approach. We can’t resist the pleasure of quoting a few sentences that echo our own observations. The first explains - something we were not aware of - that "he relentless moralising of the wall texts and captions, which emphasise the themes of colonialism, slavery, racism and misogyny to an ultimalely upsetting degreen gave ben criticised all shades of political opinion". Which is rather reassuring for the UK.
On the subject of Room 5 "Troubled Glamour", which we wrote about at length, the editorial points out that "the National Gallery does not remind admirers of Ucello of the hars lot of agricultural labourers in fifteenth-century Tuscany, nor does the Wallace Collection accompany Rubens’s Rainbow Landscape with labels referring to the migrant crisis caused by the Thirty Years’ War". In his view, this above all reflects a lack of humility on the part of Tate, which thus implies that "the present has much to teach the past".
The conclusion of his editorial is equally pertinent, and close to what we have written: "the main regret about the jejune historical and social narrative offered by Tate Britain is that it distracts attention from what in visual terms - the only terms that in this context ultimately matter - largely a beautiful and harmonious presentation of a great collection of works of art".