Romantics at Tate Britain, review

What’s more, it isn’t the first disaster we’ve seen there recently. Last year’s Turner-Rothko, which purported to highlight the similarities between the English landscape painter and the American Abstract Expressionist, misrepresented the aesthetic intentions of both artists.

At no point does Romantics rise even to the level of coherence. In the first gallery alone, dozens of paintings and works on paper by artists with little obvious visual similarities are grouped together under thematic headings so vague that they are virtually meaningless: “Hopes and Fears”, “Near and Far”, “Seeing Nature” and “Past and Present”. Within each section, visitors have to work hard to figure out what the works they are looking at have to do with each other.

Pictures are hung so close together that, at times, I couldn’t determine which section a work belonged in. Turner’s 1810 watercolour showing the Interior of a Prison, for example, hangs (I think) under the heading “Artist’s Life”. But surely it belongs in the adjacent section “Word and Image” since the artist used it to illustrate one of his lectures at the Royal Academy.

Later, large-scale pictures Turner painted for public display hang in close proximity to similar, highly finished works by his contemporaries. By this slenderest of threads Turner’s panoramic landscape London from Greenwich Park (1809) hangs diagonally opposite David Wilkie’s narrative painting The Peep-o-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West (1835-36).

Trying to make sense of it all was useless, so I walked through the galleries in a state of permanent irritation wondering why on earth the pictures had been placed where they were. It was also a mistake to end the show with two galleries devoted to 20th-century paintings and photographs. With no transition from the relatively dark 19th-century pictures, the change of gear is much too sudden, a violent jolt that has no visual connection with the other galleries.

As only happens in exhibitions at Tate, the wall texts are so lengthy you spend half your time reading them. And read them you must because, without some explanation, you’ll be at a loss to understand what’s going on.

The curators treat the exhibition as though it is a slide lecture in which real pictures are used to illustrate their ideas. That wouldn’t be so bad if the labels told us anything most of us didn’t already know. Was it really necessary to explain that Turner’s paintings of ancient Carthage are “a warning to the future of the eternal cycle of history”? On they come, one banality and cliché after another, until I couldn’t stand to read any more.

Although there is no excuse for Romantics, there may be an explanation. The fact that there were seven curators, and that each was responsible for a different section suggests to me that the whole thing was thrown together in hurry.

Over the past decade or so the changing displays of the permanent collection at Millbank have often come close to perfection, so let’s just hope that this disaster was a one off.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/7972999/Romantics-at-Tate-Britain-review.html