Why 1900 Is About to Stop Being a Wall

For thirty years, a single number has quietly governed what you can and cannot see on the walls of two of Britain’s greatest museums. The number is 1900. Everything painted before it belongs, by agreement, to the National Gallery. Everything after belongs to Tate. That tidy arrangement is now coming apart, and the way it unravels will reshape a stretch of Trafalgar Square for a generation. Here is what is happening, and why it matters more than a boundary dispute between two institutions ought to.

The line drawn in 1996

The National Gallery and Tate are, between them, the custodians of what is loosely called “the national collection.” That has never been a comfortable partnership. Tate began life in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art, an offshoot rather than an equal, and the two spent much of the twentieth century treading on one another’s toes over who owned what. In 1996 the then directors, Neil MacGregor at the National and Nicholas Serota at Tate, finally thrashed out a division of labour. The National would run up to 1900; everything from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would go to Tate. Sixty-four paintings changed address as a result, thirteen leaving the National for Tate and fifty-one travelling the other way.

It was, from the start, a shaky truce. The agreement lapsed in 2007 and was only formally ratified in 2009 after long negotiations between the two boards. And 1900, for a gallery whose stated purpose is to tell the story of Western painting, has always been an awkward place to stop. As the National’s current director Gabriele Finaldi has put it, nothing very special actually happens in 1900. The 1880s and 1890s are one of the most fertile periods in the history of art, pushing toward Cubism only a few years later. To reach that threshold and then simply halt has felt, to the National, increasingly artificial.

Project Domani and a Japanese architect

The catalyst for change is a scheme the National calls Project Domani, Italian for “tomorrow.” It has two halves. The first is a new wing, to be built on the site of St Vincent House, an unlovely 1960s block behind the Sainsbury Wing that the gallery quietly bought in 1998 with exactly this kind of future in mind. In April this year, the Tokyo studio Kengo Kuma and Associates, working with the British practices BDP and MICA, won the international competition to design it, beating a shortlist that included Foster + Partners and Renzo Piano. The jury called Kuma’s submission “exemplary.” The building is expected to open in the early 2030s and the whole project carries a price tag of around £750 million.

The scale of the ambition is matched by the money already in hand. Finaldi had secured £375 million in pledges before the plan was even public, including two individual gifts of £150 million each, among the largest cash donations ever reported for a museum. This is not a wish list. It is going to be built.

The interesting part: after 1900

The second half of Project Domani is the one that has set nerves twitching. The National intends to extend its collecting remit past 1900 for the first time, making it, in its own words, the only museum in the world where a visitor can follow the entire history of Western painting under one roof, from medieval altarpieces through to the modern era.

If you have visited recently, you will know the National already flirts with the twentieth century. Around forty of its paintings were made after 1900, including a Monet water-lily canvas from 1917 and a Picasso Cubist still life from 1914, both by artists whose careers straddle the boundary. It has staged collaborations with living painters such as David Hockney and Paula Rego. What is new is the intention to collect modern work systematically rather than by happy accident.

Why Tate is watching closely

For visitors this is straightforwardly good news. More of the story told in one place, fewer artificial full stops, and the prospect of Impressionism flowing naturally into what came next. For Tate, the picture is more delicate. Its director Maria Balshaw has spoken warmly of loans and shared curatorial expertise, and a joint working group has been set up to further the national collection “as a whole.” But the language on both sides has a slightly gritted quality. Tate has faced redundancies, budget pressure and shrinking audiences while the National’s stock has risen, and it can hardly be thrilled at a neighbour expanding into territory it was promised three decades ago.

There is a practical squeeze, too. Modern masterpieces are staggeringly expensive, so the National will lean on loans, legacies and donations to keep its new displays at the quality its old ones set. Both directors will end up courting the same collectors. Somewhere down the line, the National may even come knocking to borrow back pictures it handed over in 1996.

None of this will be resolved quickly, and the wing itself is years away. But the next time you stand in front of an early Monet at the National and feel the collection straining at its own edge, know that the edge is about to move. The wall marked 1900 is coming down, and what replaces it could change how a whole city tells the story of modern art.