The only surprise about the National Gallery’s ‘Project Domani’ announcement is that it came as a surprise. Its two big ambitions – the building of a new wing on the site currently occupied by St Vincent House (currently a hotel and office space) and the gallery’s intention to extend its collecting remit beyond the 1900 cut-off date established in 1996 – have been hiding in plain sight for decades.
The real revelation was that the National’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, has already secured £375 million in pledges towards the project, including two individual gifts of £150 million: one from Crankstart, the charitable foundation established by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, the other from the Julia Rausing Trust – the largest cash donations ever reported for a museum. This means the project can and will be realised rather than existing in limbo until sufficient grants, sponsorships and donations have been gathered for something to happen. Given that the NG200 refurbishment cost £85 million, Finaldi and his trustees have clearly been busy.
St Vincent House, an unlovely 1960s building behind the Sainsbury Wing, was acquired by the gallery in 1998 ‘with a view to future development’. It is slated for demolition: an international architectural competition for the new, yet-to-be named wing has just opened and will run to 17 October, with the winner due to be announced in April 2026 and the building itself scheduled to open in the early 2030s. This scheme to turn St Vincent House into gallery space stepped out of the realm of fantasy with the creation of a masterplan in 2018.
Since the current building occupies 2,300 square metres of space, the wing that replaces it will allow for a significantly greater proportion of the National Gallery’s 2,600 paintings to go on public view than is possible at the moment, despite the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing and the gallery-wide rehang which meant that some 1,000 pictures are now on display. Finaldi has no preconceived ideas as to what the new gallery should look like, other than that it must be ‘distinguished and beautiful’. Whether he and Westminster City Council are in aesthetic agreement remains to be seen.
More controversial perhaps is the redefining of the chronological span of the collection. Between them, the National Gallery and the Tate are the custodians of the ‘national collection’ and the institutions have been in a sometimes uneasy relationship since the founding of the Tate Gallery – initially the National Gallery of British Art – in 1897. Who collects and displays what was formalised, after much treading on one another’s toes, in 1996. The arrangement, thrashed out between the two then directors, Neil MacGregor and Nicholas Serota respectively, meant that the National’s interest was to run up to 1900 and the Tate would display all 20th- and 21st-century art. Sixty-four paintings changed home as a result: 13 left the National for the Tate while 51 crossed London in the opposite direction.
This informal agreement lapsed in 2007 and was only ratified in 2009 after lengthy discussions between the boards of the two museums. It has always been a shaky truce: for the National, a gallery whose intention is to tell the story of the development of Western painting, the tidy but art-historically arbitrary cut-off point of 1900 has been profoundly frustrating. Finaldi pointed this out shortly after taking over the directorship: ‘As time moves on, 1900 seems increasingly remote and less related to how we think about periods of history and art history. In artistic terms, nothing very special happens in 1900, but the 1880s and 90s are a remarkably fertile period that push forward new modes of expression, with Cubism very soon afterwards. It is slightly frustrating to reach 1900 and then not go on.’
The National has, of course, already ventured into the 20th and 21st centuries through collaborations with Paula Rego, David Hockney, Kehinde Wiley and Richard Long, for example, while some 40 of its paintings were made after 1900. Water-Lilies by Monet – one of several artists whose careers fall on both sides of the boundary – was painted as late as 1917; Picasso’s Cubist Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin was made in 1914, and Édouard Vuillard’s Madame André Wormser and her Children was painted in 1926/27.
Some careful language is being used by both the National Gallery and the Tate about how the new remit will work. ‘This development offers an exciting opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues at Tate,’ ran the National’s official statement, while the galleries ‘recently held a joint meeting to develop new ways of working together more closely’, which rather suggests they don’t yet know what will happen. Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate, stressed how she ‘looks forward to working closely with colleagues at the National Gallery on loans, curatorial and conservational expertise to support the development of their new displays’. A working group with trustee and curatorial representatives from each gallery has been established, she said, ‘to determine the ways in which we can collaborate to further the national collection as a whole’.
There is a sense of gritted teeth here. Her institution finds itself in difficult times – redundancies, shrinking audiences, critical disquiet, controversial rehangs, budget deficits – while the National’s stock has been rising. Under such circumstances it is hard to see how the Tate can unequivocally welcome the National’s incursion into its territory.
Not that the National’s task will be easy: given the cost of modern paintings by major artists (the sale records for, say Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are respectively $300 million, $200 million and $186 million), it will rely on loans, legacies and donations if it wants to maintain the quality of its collection into the modern era. Finaldi and Balshaw will be schmoozing the same people to strengthen their respective holdings. Finaldi’s £375 million will only go so far, given the costs of design and construction, and Balshaw won’t be looking forward to the knock on the door and the National’s request to borrow back the pictures it handed over in 1996.
For the National Gallery, on the other hand, providing there are no ‘carbuncle’ interventions with the new building and Finaldi’s silver tongue remains operable, its glittering domani can’t come soon enough.
