'Room A' (ctd.)
June 4 2014
Pictures: Guardian/NY Times
The National Gallery's new 'Room A' (above) is, alas, a disappointment. The trendy wooden floor, white walls and focused lights are impressive enough - it feels like White Cube with Old Masters - but there's vastly fewer paintings on display (as our website-scouring reader suspected in my post below).
The joy of the National Gallery's old Room A (as seen below) was that pretty much everything in the collection could be seen by the public (at least one day a week). It was little more than an accessible store room, with the good stuff liberally interspersed with the bad (or what they thought was bad), the fun being that it was up to you to decide which was which.
But now, with significant pictures now consigned to some far off, closed picture store, it's the curators who are in charge again. And interesting puzzle pictures, like the double full-length below included in the Van Dyck catalogue raisonne as 'Van Dyck', but called 'Style of Van Dyck' by the gallery, are nowhere to be seen. I remember hearing the NG's director, Nick Penny, arguing against deaccessioning on the grounds that galleries need bad pictures to compare with good ones. So it's a puzzle as to why this new arrangement has been implemented.
It would be better if the NG simply hung more pictures more closely together, and crammed everything in. But the new Room A has evidently been designed as a 'space', not a store, with fittings and a paint scheme that won't be easy to rearrange. A retrograde step, I think.
Update - a reader writes:
I visited the newly refurbished room A at the National Gallery today (didn't see you there Bendor). It's good to see it open again, better lighting, some seating & a more fitting place to see art in one of the world's great galleries. What's missing are many of the paintings...the tasteful hang means there are far fewer paintings, the rag bag hang of the old galleries did mean you could see the good the bad & the frankly ugly. There is something romantic about basement galleries with their unrecognised gems.
