Tate's total rehang
Tate Britain will unveil a complete overhaul of its displays this May
Also in this edition
Osborne on-the-record
Manchester Museum unveiled
Smithsonian’s reality show
Hello - how have you been this week?
I have been recovering from the lurgi so it’s not been the most pleasant of weeks, and my museum visits have been sharply curtailed. I have lots to catch up on.
Today is a special anniversary in my career. It is exactly one year since the opening of the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum, which is likely to be the biggest blockbuster I’ll ever work on. On this day in 2022, I watched the Archdruid of Stonehenge and Great Britain bless the exhibition as it opened to the public, which was the culmination of months of work on the PR campaign that had taken me from the Winter Solistice in Wiltshire to the neolithic digs of Orkney, with thousands of pieces of media coverage in between. There are shows that capture the imagination, and then there’s the World of Stonehenge. I’ll be giving it a toast tonight.
Now onto the news!
Maxwell
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News from the UK
Chair of the British Museum, George Osborne, has made his first public comments about the ongoing negotiations with Greece over the Parthenon Sculptures. He confirmed to the BBC that the Museum is working to devise a deal that could see some of the sculptures which have been in the UK for 200 years, shared between London and Athens. He said he was looking for a way forward that “will be a win-win for Greece and for us.” But Osborne ruled out a scenario where the sculptures could be handed over permanently, saying it would need a change of UK law. None of this new and the arrangements being thrashed out have long since leaked, but it is hugely notable that these comments are on the record for the first time.
Osborne was on the radio to ostensibly talk about the British Museum’s new Partnership Gallery it has unveiled this week at Manchester Museum. The new South Asia Gallery has been created using the collections of the British Museum and the Manchester Museum, and was developed with with a collective of 30 community leaders, educators, artists, historians, journalists and musicians. It’s part of a £15 million transformation which saw the museum close for two years, and huge new wing constructed. There are two other new galleries: the the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery, and the, er, Belonging Gallery (which the Telegraph describes as the “slightly nebulous”). Also opening will be a new exhibition on ancient Egyptian mummies, which the Guardian has called “exquisite.” The revamped museum reopens to the public tomorrow.
Tate Britain is getting an entire rehang. The gallery announced this week that the first comprehensive rehang of its collections for 10 years will be unveiled on 23 May. More than 800 works by more than 350 artists will be displayed, with women artists better represented than ever before. Great female artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries – including some never seen at Tate before – will be given prominent positions, and half the contemporary artists on display will be women. The big secret in all this? Lots of it is already done and is open to see right now. Critic Waldemar Januszczak writing in the Sunday Times called it a “triumph” that is “exciting, uplifting, involving and deep.” That’s your weekend plans sorted then.
It’s been talked about for years (especially by the artists themselves) but Gilbert and George’s own museum is finally to open. The Gilbert & George Centre is a three-storey Georgian townhouse in Spitalfields, east London, that will be home to three exhibition spaces and a research centre. It’ll be free to visit, and is due to open on 1 April, presuming this isn’t some big April Fools’ joke.
A new Banksy artwork always seems to herald some form of farce, as authorities panic over how to look after it. The graffiti artist’s newest creation in Margate that was discovered on Valentine’s Day has faced just these same issues. The work — depicting a 1950's housewife with a swollen eye, who has seemingly disposed of her abusive partner, with his legs hanging out of an actual freezer — has seen the freezer removed twice now, the latest in the middle of the night. The first removal was by the local council in order to make the appliance safe. The second was by a gallery employed to preserve the work. “We can't have 24-hour security guards standing there” a gallery representative said.
News from around the world
Prolific museum-revamper Sir David Chipperfield has been picked to overhaul the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The construction will generate about 20,000 sq m of additional space, including two floors of subterranean galleries, a roof garden and a street-level entrance. The entrance has proved controversial, with some experts claiming that it will eclipse the original 19th century building. The media launch of the plans, attended by the Greek Prime Minister, saw riot police surround protesters who are against Greek government plans to cut a number of museums from state control. Several major museums in Greece closed this week as archaeologists in the country demonstrated at the proposed new laws.
Paris's Centre Pompidou has acquired 18 NFTs. The works are set to join France's national collection of modern and contemporary art, and it is the first acquisition of its kind by a major French public museum. The move has been hailed as “a great moment for the web3 and NFT ecosystem.” Presumably it should also be a great moment for the Pomidou, but I’m not sure anyone case muster much enthusiasm for NFTs with a straight face. The Museum has remained tight-lipped on how much the works cost.
Unlikely bedfellow news: the Smithsonain and MTV are teaming up. The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is entering the world of reality television with the competition show, The Exhibit: Finding The Next Great Artist. It’ll premiere this spring on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel, and will see seven artists compete for a solo exhibition at the museum, and a cool $100,000 prize. The Hirshhorn director, said the show would be “spotlighting the importance of artists in society and energizing the Hirshhorn’s art-for-all mission."
And finally
The crowds are (rightly) flocking to Amsterdam to get their Vermeer fix right now, but the artist’s actual home city is also putting on show this spring, literally and figuratively. Here, Telegraph Travel takes you on the trail of the Dutch Master in Delft, “one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.”
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