In 1824, the first iteration of The National Gallery opened in Pall Mall, just around the corner from where it is now at the edge of London’s Trafalgar Square. With Italy’s Uffizi Gallery opening in 1789 and the Louvre debuting in France four years later, the British government had been behind the curve when it came to setting up accessible art collections. Now, though, the country had caught up, and the gallery’s founders proudly announced the building would connect with the people by providing free access to its collection. To mark its bicentenary, the National Gallery has embarked on a series of modernizations, as well as staging the “NG Stories: Making A National Gallery” exhibition, all under the NG200 banner.
There are more than 2,300 paintings in the National Gallery, covering periods from the thirteenth century to 1900 (London’s Tate galleries look after periods after, in an agreement between the organizations). The collection is owned by the British government on behalf of the British people and among the paintings are some of the world’s more important artworks. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks from 1508 is here, as are Claude Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond (1899), Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884), Diego Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1647-1651, aka The Rokeby Venus) and an 1888 painting from Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series.
Staged downstairs in the gallery, the “NG Stories” exhibition is entirely digital and sets out to tell the tale of the National Gallery’s founding and development. A huge video projection that takes up two sides of one room splices together digitized photos of patrons, artists and paintings. Augmented by classical music, narrators explain the gallery’s back story. There’s an interactive wall in another room where visitors can jump up and down and wave at themselves as their shadows are outlined against shifting primary colors. The silhouettes are intercut with video clips of the gallery’s team working behind the scenes to care for paintings from the collection and keep the space functioning. The whole thing is charming and fun, although, given it only takes up two rooms, visitors might want to treat the exhibit as a stop-over on the way through the gallery, rather than a standalone experience.
But there’s a gap in the exhibition’s narrative. Since the early 20th Century, the National Gallery’s locale and prominence in U.K. culture have led to the site becoming a magnet for protests. Do something attention-grabbing there, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to make the news. So where are the exhibition’s visual discussions around these rich stories of human interest?
In 1914, for example, activist Mary Richardson ran into the National Gallery and slashed The Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver in protest at fellow Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst’s ongoing series of arrests. In 1968, protesters chose the gallery’s steps for their demonstration against the Vietnam War, and the site was used for similar protests against the Gulf War and Iraq War in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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More recently, Greenpeace activists climbed on the gallery’s roof in 2012 to protest against fossil fuel firm Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. Shell had been a keen sponsor of the National Gallery since 2006 and, in 2014, the launch of the gallery’s “Rembrandt: The Late Works” exhibition was interrupted by musicians and performers protesting the place’s ongoing relationship with the company. (Shell ended its sponsorship of the National Gallery in 2018). In two separate incidents in 2022, Just Stop Oil activists threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and glued themselves to John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain. Earlier this year, more Just Stop Oil protestors stood in front of the same Sunflowers painting to unfurl a banner demanding the release of the two activists recently imprisoned for the soup-throwing incident. Days earlier, the gallery had introduced new security measures that included walk-through metal detectors at all entrances, bag searches and a ban on visitors bringing liquids into the building as a result of Just Stop Oil’s actions.
There have been protests against the National Gallery itself, too. The 2015 100-day strike by the gallery’s own workers drew attention to management plans to make them redundant and outsource their jobs. In 2020, Black Lives Matter gathered outside the gallery to protest against the lack of work by Black and POC artists in national institutions. And last year, the gallery attracted criticism for the lack of female artists in its “After Impressionism” exhibition.
Following the Black Lives Matter protest, the National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, said, “Silence was now perceived as being complicit.” But what has happened under his leadership since? In the meantime, Bristol’s M Shed museum has taken the statue of seventeenth-century slaver Edward Colston toppled by Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020 and created an exhibit around it, including placards carried during the protest. The Box museum in Plymouth has photographs showing a local statue of Sir Francis Drake (a British slave trader in the 1560s) covered in chains and a sign reading ’decolonise history’ after it was targeted by protestors the same year.
So, yes, the National Gallery has continued with its stated aim of connecting with the public. More than three million people passed through the place last year. It is the fourth most-visited art museum in the world. Given its prominence as a protest site as well as an international art destination, then, the “NG Stories” exhibition would have been the perfect platform to acknowledge the protests staged in and around the building (and perhaps even celebrate free expression) and to illustrate how the institution is listening to the thoughts of the people it’s so keen to attract.
“NG Stories: Making A National Gallery” at the National Gallery in London runs through January 12. Entrance is free.
