The National Gallery and the Tate are to swap more than sixty pictures, ending a long period of uncertainty over the dividing line between the two collections. The crucial year is to be 1900. European paintings before that date will be at the National Gallery, while twentieth-century works will be at the Tate (British art of all periods will continue to be shown at the Tate).
Next April the National Gallery will put thirteen post-1900 European pictures on long-term loan to the Tate, with fifty-one pre-1900 works moving from the Tate to the National Gallery. The 1900 date is arbitrary and does not represent an art-historical divide (the start of Impressionism in the early 1870s or World War I might have marked stronger turning points). But it is a convenient cut-off which will be simple for the public to remember. Inevitably, the careers of certain artists, such as Monet,will be split.
Two factors led to the timing of the announcement. When the major loan of Heinz Berggruen’s pictures to the National Gallery went to a permanent resting place in Berlin (The Art Newspaper No.60, June 1996) it became obvious that the expansion of a classic Modern art section was not the route for the National Gallery. The other significant development is the Tate’s future gallery at Bankside, which, when it opens in 2000, will offer a full display of twentieth-century international art.
The paintings moving from the Tate to the National are Cézanne’s “Grounds of the Château noir” (1900-1904), Klimt’s “Portrait of Hermine Gallia” (1904), Matisse’s “Portrait of Greta Moll” (1908), Monet’s “Waterlilies” (after 1916), Picasso’s “Fruit dish, bottle and violin” (1914), Pissarro’s “The Louvre under snow” (1902), Renoir’s “Misia Sert”, (1904) and pair of “Dancing girls” (1909) and four works by Harpignies, Redon and Vuillard. Originally Vuillard’s “Madame Andrew Wormser and her children” (1927) was to have gone to the Tate, but this is now to stay at the National, at the request of the donor’s family.
Fifty-one loans from the Tate to the National include pictures by Cézanne (2), Degas (30), Fantin-Latour, Gauguin (2), Goeneutte, Van Gogh, Liebermann, Manet, Monet (3), Morisot, Pissarro (4), Seurat (2), Sisley (3) and Toulouse-Lautrec (3). National Gallery director Neil MacGregor points out that with this substantial transfer, visitors will soon be able to see “the full extent of the nation’s nineteenth-century French collections and to discover how very rich they are”.
The financial value of the pictures is irrelevant and was not considered when the loan was negotiated. The exchange will initially be a four-year arrangement, but if all goes well, then ownership is likely to be transferred.