ART
reopening of the Courtauld
Gallery, Britain’s finest
collection of post-
impressionist art?
Consider the sequence.
The gods send down the
Covid crisis. It messes up theplans of every gallery in
the country. Except the
Courtauld, which had just
closed for a big rebuild. While
all the other galleries were
dealing with crippling closure
issues, the Courtauld
continued as planned. Now,
with the coast relatively clear,
it has reopened. Simples.
I am not generally a fan of
big gallery rebuilds — they are
too often driven by vanity,
fashion and directorial
egotism — but the Courtauld
definitely had problems. The
pine flooring put in at the
last rebuild made it feel like
a Norwegian sauna. The
lighting was unhelpful. The
furnishings were clunky and
old-fashioned. And the route
through the collection made
no sense. Squeezed into tight
Georgian spaces in an
18th-century corner of
Somerset House, it was more
of a dodgem ride than a
journey of enlightenment.
So there was lots to sort
out, and I went along to this
week’s unveiling expecting
change. What I wasn’t
expecting was a complete
repositioning of the gallery’s
identity and status: a
profound rethink.
The two-year restoration
cost a few quid short of
£60 million. The first signs of
it strike you the moment you
enter. Where previously there
was a sense of clutter, with a
ticket desk somewhere in the
middle, there is now an airy
vestibule that says hello
calmly and elegantly. The
doorway on the right leads to
the gubbins: ticket desk,
lockers, loos, café. The stairs
in front lead up to the art.
Mounting the stairs at the
Courtauld has always had
a symbolic frisson to it. The
original architecture was
determined to make you
feel as if you were heading
somewhere special — in those
days it was up to the Royal
Academy, housed at the top
— and the rebuild has made
this sense of ascent feel more
tangible again. (There are, of
course, lifts for wheelchair
users and mums now).
The first gallery you come
to didn’t exist in the oldlayout. It has been fashioned
out of a space in which the
security men had their tea. It
now displays a selection of
early Renaissance art that was
previously holed up in a dark
room downstairs: Bernardo
Daddi’s 1348 Crucifixion with
Saints; three predella panels
from the 1420s by Fra
Angelico; Robert Campin’s
gorgeously detailed
Entombment from 1425.
These rare fragments from
the first moments of the
Renaissance aren’t just
beautifully displayed, they
feel much more present.
Downstairs they were difficult
to see, let alone love. Now
they start you off on a new
journey through a different
type of Courtauld: a gallery
filled not just with
masterpieces of post-
impressionism, but with all
this other stuff as well.
The rearranged galleries,
numbered from 1 to 12,
have been positioned
chronologically to trace
a passage from the early
Renaissance to the early 20th
century. Room 3, where the
Van Goghs and Renoirs used
to hang, continues the story
of the Renaissance’s
beginnings. Room 4, where
the Cézannes and the
Gauguins were, is now
devoted to the Renaissance
proper, and especially to
Botticelli’s great altarpiece of
The Trinity with John the
Baptist and Mary Magdalene.
I am ashamed to admit that
I used to amble casually past
this enormous picture
without fully realising what
a masterwork it is. Newly
restored, given pride of place
in the room, it stands revealed
as one of the great Renaissance
altarpieces in Britain.
Thus the new arrangement
seeks to highlight works in the
collection that were easy toThe gods must be fans of
post-impressionism. They
must love Van Gogh, Gauguin,
Cézanne, Seurat, Toulouse-
Lautrec. How else to explain
the timescale that has
governed the closure andWALDEMAR
JANUSZCZAK
Our finest post-impressionist collection was a secret for too long — it won’t be now
Simply a masterpiece
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