The National Gallery’s £750m new wing has reignited London’s art turf war

“When should painters become old masters?” Former National Gallery director Philip Hendy put that question to then Tate director John Rothenstein almost 70 years ago. Founded in 1897 as the National Gallery’s annexe for British Art, by the 1950s Tate had developed into a gallery of modern as well as British art. Rothenstein wanted it to emerge from its parent’s shadow. Any move towards independence, however, required agreement between the National Gallery and Tate on how to divide the collection they shared.

Now that same question, of where one collection ends and the other begins, is getting another airing. The National Gallery has announced the winner of a competition to design “Project Domani”, a £750 million expansion. A new building by architect firm Kengo Kuma and Associates will replace the 1960s office block that currently stands on Orange Street, behind the gallery’s Sainsbury Wing. According to the National Gallery, the annexe will allow Trafalgar Square to show the “continuum” of “the history of painting in the western tradition”.

That phrase, “the western tradition”, is itself something of a land grab. Until fairly recently the National Gallery was understood to be a collection of western European painting. In 2014, however, it paid £18.6 million for Men of the Docks, a painting by American artist George Bellows. Unlike his fellow countrymen John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, Bellows had never travelled to Europe and could not be considered an honorary Englishman.

According to the gallery, the purchase represented “a new direction in its acquisition policy”. They now sought to “represent paintings in the western European tradition, rather than solely those made by artists working in western Europe”. Men of the Docks dated to 1912, close to the chronological border between the National Gallery and Tate collections. For those fond of viewing London’s museums as a turf war, it was a shot across Tate’s bows.

Rather than fighting over this or that patch of art history, surely London’s museums can agree that all art is a “continuum”?

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“To me there will always be only one national collection,” noted Hendy in 1953, “and I don’t believe that carving it up in this rigid way is in anybody’s interest.”

Despite the gallery’s rhetoric of give-and-take, over the years Tate was repeatedly left feeling bruised, after being obliged to let the National Gallery take back British paintings that the Tate had come to consider its own. In 1863, this included one of the highlights from the National Gallery’s Joseph Wright of Derby show: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump was given to the National Gallery by the politician Edward Tyrrell. The National Gallery later passed it to Tate, only to take it back in 1986.

The history of the gallery turf war

Under an influential model developed in late 19th-century Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg served as purgatory for modern French painters. After a decent interval, after any initial controversy as well as the artist had died, works that passed the test of time were promoted to the heaven of the Louvre.

For much of Tate’s history, it has been viewed as the Luxembourg to Trafalgar Square’s Louvre. In 1935, National Gallery director Kenneth Clark opposed the idea that Tate might achieve complete independence from his institution. It “would deprive us of the purgatorial function of the Tate”. It would also force Tate to decide whether it was a “National Gallery of British Art” or a “modern art gallery”.

Worse of all, Clark noted, if Tate did decide it was a modern art gallery, the two institutions would have to agree a historical date at which modern painters became old masters. In 1954, the National Gallery and Tate Act appeared to grant Tate the independence it craved, while ordaining that the two galleries should periodically consult each other about loans and transfers, in order to ensure that all paintings were “on view in the best context”.

In 1957 Hendy suggested that all paintings “graduate” to Trafalgar Square when they reached their 100th birthday. Rothenstein refused such a rigid rule. The history of art was not “a regular and predictable process”, he insisted. As the “founding fathers of the modern movement”, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Seurat would have to remain at Tate, regardless of how much time had passed.

Under Nicholas Serota’s directorship Tate blossomed into a constellation of galleries in the 1990s. Tate Liverpool demonstrated how a contemporary art space could regenerate post-industrial cities. In 2016 Tate Modern opened its own, £220 million annexe. Meanwhile it seemed that the National Gallery was happy (Sainsbury Wing aside) to expand within its existing footprint.

If Project Domani treads on Tate toes, there will be repercussions. When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the gift of Leonard Lauder’s collection of Cubist paintings in 2013 and later opened the Met Breuer as a temporary annexe for contemporary art, New York’s Whitney and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) were concerned. Fearing that relationships with “their” funders, collectors and critics were under threat, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was told to keep their hands off their patch.

Compared to the Met Breuer’s Madison Avenue site, that of the National Gallery’s proposed new wing is low-profile. Architects Kengo Kuma and Associates say that their building will create a new pedestrian artery between Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. But similar assurances were made about the Sainsbury Wing, which opened over 30 years ago, so this might be equally impossible to deliver.

A new building will create space for temporary exhibitions and artist residencies, replacing the poky and unloved Sainsbury Wing basement and Sunley Room. Knitting three gallery buildings into a continuum, however, will be as difficult as finding a new answer to an old question, one that has always set the National Gallery and Tate at odds. When should painters become old masters?