The recently acquired Portrait of an Unknown Lady, 1650–55, a luminous full-length depiction of a woman in a landscape by Joan Carlile, one of the earliest professional female artists to work in Britain, neighbors two soft, sensuous likenesses by Mary Beale (including one of her husband, Charles, who managed her studio and accounts), another distaff painter of the seventeenth century who found success as a portraitist.
#Butt painting on canvas full
This is often, predictably (it’s Britain), a tale of commerce and wealth, inequality and exploitation, empire and war but it is also a complicated long durée of technology, industry, travel, migration, accessibility, education, entertainment, protest, and critique.Įach of the forty spaces is given a title and a set of dates, e.g., “Exiles and Dynasties, 1545–1640,” “Troubled Glamour, 1760–1830,” “Modern Times, 1910–1920,” “In Full Colour, 1960–1970.” Opening rooms make new attempts to foreground the deep-rooted diversity of the nation’s artists and subjects. Eight years in the making, it is, Farquharson stresses, a collective enterprise, one invested in offering “an account of British art within its historic context, rather than some hermetically sealed, detached offering.” The display, which includes over 800 works by more than 350 artists, renounces the museum’s formerly minimal interpretive style for an emphasis on “storytelling”-about why and how art was made, and how and by whom it was paid for. Overseen by Alex Farquharson, who was appointed director of Tate Britain in 2015, and director of exhibitions and displays Andrea Schlieker (with whom Farquharson curated the sixth edition of the quinquennial British Art Show in 2005–2006), the rehang was collaboratively undertaken by the institution’s team, with curators working solo or in pairs across suites of thematically organized rooms. You can walk any which way, as you could through former director Penelope Curtis’s likewise chronological 2013 rehang, but if you start at the beginning, as I did, three overarching themes are writ large, literally, on the gold-hued entrance wall in white script: “Britain & the World,” “Art & Society,” and “History & the Present.” To the east, art from 1940 to today is set against cool shades of gray and white. Divided by the three-hundred-foot-long Duveen Galleries (which are always devoted to temporary commissions or displays), rooms to the west, whose walls are sumptuously colored in hues of deep blue, mahogany, emerald, purple, scarlet, indigo, span from 1545 to 1940. At Tate Britain, a rehang of the biggest collection of the nation’s cultural patrimony, from the Tudor period to the present, unfolds chronologically across thirty-nine rooms.
THERE ARE MANY FORKING PATHS, in life as in art, through the social and political construct that is Britain.
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