The National Gallery in London, one of the most important museums in the world, is set to celebrate its 200th anniversary. Founded on May 10, 1824, with a modest collection of just 38 paintings in the private residence of banker John Julius Angerstein, it now stands proudly as the custodian of an esteemed collection featuring 2,300 works spanning nearly 1,000 years of art history (from the 13th to the 20th century), featuring masterpieces by masters like Bellini, Cézanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, van Dyck, van Gogh and Velázquez. It’s a memorable milestone that the London institution has decided to celebrate through a series of initiatives scheduled to run for an entire year, concluding in May 2025. The NG200 project, supported with a £95 million investment, will not only include major exhibitions and events throughout the United Kingdom, but also significant technical interventions and upgrades, including the renovation of several exhibition spaces and the creation of a state-of-the-art research center dedicated to the study of ancient paintings.
The Program
Among the cultural initiatives coming to life beyond the museum walls in Trafalgar Square is the ambitious exhibition National Treasures, engaging twelve partner museums and galleries. Here, a dialogue is created by physically lending each space a painting chosen from the collection, around which a series of events, exhibitions and digital interventions will be organized, further diffusing this priceless “national treasure”. The works featured include Constable’s The Hay Wain, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, and Monet’s The Water Lily Pond, traveling to cities like Bristol, Newcastle, and York, where they’ll remain on display from two to four months. For some works, including the Wilton Diptych and Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, it will be the first time leaving the Gallery since their acquisition. Within this broad-reaching program, there are also digital experiences to be found. This is the case for the “200 creators” initiative, providing unprecedented backstage access to the Gallery. In the form of an open call, it will include the selection and involvement of 200 digital users, 20 of whom — after a careful selection — will be hired as creative collaborators of the gallery and tasked with creating original content for social media, accessing special resources made available by the museum. The remaining participants, meanwhile, will enjoy free access to exhibitions, exclusive online events and exhibition preview days, along with an invitation to the 200 Creators launch event, overflowing with workshops, visits to the collections and insights from Gallery experts — even outside the typical visiting hours. Supporting it all is the documentary NG200: Behind the Scenes, which highlights key aspects of the program by offering the viewer an insider’s look at the backstage work of the National Gallery. Remaining in the digital realm, there’s also the new Virtual Gallery, a tool specifically designed to provide users visual access to a selection of 200 paintings that represent the museum’s 200-year history.
Vincent Van Gogh, Autoritratto, 1889
Two great retrospectives: Van Gogh and the Masters of Siena
Two retrospectives are also planned for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025: one dedicated to the visual culture of Siena in the 14th-century, and the other to the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh. The exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, curated by Cornelia Homburg, Christopher Riopelle and Julien Domercq, will open to the public in September 2024, presented as another significant and unprecedented step forward for the in-depth study of this artist. The showcase will be the first to focus on the artist’s imaginative influences related to the period spent in Arles and Saint-Rémy, in the south of France (1888-90), exploring how poetic imagination and ideas associated with love were central themes in the Dutch painter’s art. Exactly 100 years after the National Gallery’s acquisition of the famous paintings Chair and Sunflowers, this exhibition presents more than fifty works from private collections and museums around the world, investigating the role of portraits and the symbolic significance the artist attributed to his models, offering a new perspective on the creative process that defined his work.
The second exhibition, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350, will first take place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and, subsequently, at the National Gallery in London from March 8 to June 22, 2025. The first exhibition ever held outside Italy on the subject, the showcase will feature more than one hundred works, including paintings, sculptures, jewelry and textiles from around the world. In both museums, visitors can admire masterpieces by artists such as Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini, highlighting the importance of the Tuscan city in the 14th-century art scene. Among the 100 treasures on display, be sure to catch the panels of Duccio da Buoninsegna’s monumental “Majesty”, the first altarpiece in European history painted front to back, and later disassembled in the 18th century, now presented to the public in its entirety. Another long-awaited reunification is revealed in Simone Martini’s “Orsini Polyptych”, an ingenious folding composition in 6 panels designed for private worship, which visitors can admire in its compositional completeness, along with the entire iconographic development composed of scenes from the Annunciation and the Christ’s Passion.
Festival and Performances
Over the summer, the National Gallery will team up with the City of Westminster to host Summer on the Square, a program of free, daily creative sessions open to all with the intent to experiment with new art forms in a lively and stimulating environment. These will include artist Jeremy Deller, winner of the 2004 Turner Prize, who will celebrate the NG200 festival with a widespread performance entitled The Triumph of Art. Assisted by four specialized curators, each working with a partner, they will stage activities and performance events throughout the different locations, culminating in July 2025 with a major performance outside the Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
National Gallery, Londra
The Architectural Project
Also part of NG200 is the completion of work on the Trafalgar Square buildings, designed by Selldorf Architects. The intervention includes a series of targeted projects in the Sainsbury wing, reconfiguration of the ground-floor entrance, and new spaces designed to enhance the visitor experience and future-proof the gallery. The most significant part of the project, however, is the construction of a new research center within the historic Wilkins Building — a scholarly hub dedicated to the study, conservation and dissemination of ancient painting for all those interested. It’s an initiative set to make an even greater contribution to the understanding and preservation of its artistic heritage.