National Gallery announces £400m extension

The National Gallery has announced its plans for a £400m extension, for which it has already raised £375m. The new building will house paintings from the late 19th century and, in a radical shift in the museum’s approach to collecting, across the 20th century. In 1996 the National Gallery signed an agreement with the Tate that stated that the National Gallery’s collection would not include works from after 1900. Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, told the Art Newspaper that this boundary ‘looks more and more artificial as time passes’ and, in an interview with the New York Times, said that ‘1900 is a long, long time ago, and we’re very conscious that painting didn’t stop then; there’s a desire to continue telling that story’. He pointed out that ‘when we were encouraged to acquire works by Van Gogh, those had only been painted some 30 or 40 years earlier. So that sense of the gallery being able to show things that are not so far in the past has always been there.’ Trustees from both museums recently held a joint meeting and set up a working group to ‘further the national collection as a whole’. Finaldi is hoping to have an agreement with the Tate in place by the end of this year and, for what is called ‘Project Domani’, is envisaging a collection of modern art from around the world that begins with French Impressionism and extends to the end of the 20th century. Of the funds already raised for the new wing, £150m has been pledged by Crankstart, a foundation established by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, and £150m by the Julia Rausing Trust, established by the Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing and his late wife, Julia Delves Broughton. The new wing will replace St Vincent House, a 1960s building adjacent to the Sainsbury Wing that has been owned by the National Gallery since 1998 and is currently leased to a Thistle Hotel. This building is scheduled for demolition and the new wing is due to open in the early 2030s.