Romantics at Tate Britain, review

JMW Turner, Sun Setting over a Lake circa 1840

The re-hang of Tate Britain’s Clore Galleries is an infuriating shambles. Rating: *
 
By Richard Dorment

It will be interesting to see whether Tate Britain’s new director, Penelope Curtis, can do anything about the curse of the Clore Gallery. This museum-within-a-museum housing Turner’s bequest to the nation of 300 oil paintings and more than 20,000 works on paper opened in 1987 to a chorus of boos from the critics. In fact, the building itself isn’t too bad; the problem is that the architect, James Stirling, put the bloomin’ thing in exactly the wrong place – to the side of the original 1897 gallery set back from the front entrance.

The positioning of the new building destroyed the integrity of the rest of collection by hamstringing the Tate’s ability to tell the story of British art in chronological order. However you hang the permanent collection, it is now impossible to place Turner where he belongs – smack in the middle, surrounded by the work of the artists he imitated, competed with and inspired.
So I was sympathetic to the idea of a major re-hang of the Clore Galleries that placed Turner alongside contemporaries such as David Wilkie, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd and William Etty. Had the new displays been organised by people with the smallest interest in art as a visual experience, it could have worked beautifully. As it is, Romantics is a complete shambles.