![\"The](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/golden-syrup.jpg\")
<\/a>The Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin, still emblazoned with a line from Judges 14 – ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.<\/p><\/div>\n
The Tate was founded from a bequest of Henry Tate, of Tate & Lyle – who also did (and do) sugar and golden syrup.<\/p>\n
Like the Tate Modern, which was converted from a mid-century factory, the Tate Britain partially re-appropriates an earlier space. The Millbank Prison was originally going to be Jeremy Bentham’s pilot Panopticon, but it didn’t work out and the National Penitentary was demolished and replaced by the National Gallery of British Art – which then became the Tate.<\/p>\n
Built on Henry Tate’s sugar- (which in practice means ‘slave-‘) money, and sitting there on the site of Bentham’s prison overlooking the Thames, the Tate has always felt strangely emblematic to me.<\/p>\n
Unlike the National Gallery, which has a noble heritage more akin to the great educative state institutions – the Louvre, say, or the Uffizi – the Tate has an intrinsically London spirit and a capitalist soul, with something of the Protestant Work Ethic hanging about it.<\/p>\n
Indeed, today the Tate group as a whole earns over sixty percent of its
income – staggering when you consider the average equivalent for its
fellow UK museums is more like two to three percent.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n
Most of the painting interpretation has now been stripped out
entirely. I always read those explanations slavishly, but I have to
say I didn’t miss them at all – in fact, I barely noticed
they were gone.<\/p>\n Thoughts of
the Past (1859)<\/p><\/div>\n
But there is a little bit in one of my favourite new rooms of the
rehang – the drawing and prints room covering the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. On a preliminary drawing for John Roddam
Spencer Stanhope’s alt-Pre-Raphaelite
Thoughts of the Past<\/strong>, the curators comment on the
depicted ‘sex worker’ in her lodgings which (like the
Tate) overlook the Thames.<\/p>\n
Her industry is compared with that of the Thames itself, and its
corruption with the corrupt contemporary society the picture
implicitly comments upon.<\/p>\n
What was interesting for me here was not only the correct use of
the term ‘sex worker’ (I notice that the interpretation available for the final painting
on the Tate’s website<\/a> sticks to the more trad-Art
History ‘prostitute’) but also the connection between
her work and the city as a whole, its bustle, its trade, its work
ethic.<\/p>\n
This sits alongside the (for me, at least) unprecedented
acknowledgment of female artists and their productions through the
ages. We had Mary Beale – seventeenth century, claimed as
‘the first professional female English painter’
– Mary Sargent Florence, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington,
Georgina Macdonald, Mabel Nicholson and many others, all on
display.<\/p>\n
There was nothing of the tokenistic about this: you just casually
bumped into female names in much the same way you might casually
notice a few Raphaels in the Renaissance rooms at the National
Gallery. They were just there.<\/p>\n
Gwen
John – Self Portrait<\/p><\/div>\n
As an example of how ‘women’s painting’ was
displayed, one particularly interesting juxtaposition for me was
that of a self-portrait by Gwen John<\/a>. It sat atop
two paintings by male artists depicting female models – William Orpen’s
The Mirror<\/strong><\/a> and Philip Wilson Steer’s
Seated Nude<\/strong><\/a>. The choice of the John
self-portrait here seemed to me to comment implicitly on the
relationship between artist and model and, again, different
kinds of work.<\/p>\n
The Mirror<\/strong> shows a fully-clothed female model
in a large hat looking glumly out at us – except
she’s not looking at us, but at William Orpen, who
can be seen working at his painting in the Van Eykian
mirror above her.<\/p>\n
Wilson Steer’s painting shows a naked female
model, also in a large hat, sitting within roughly
sketched unfinished surroundings, in the process
drawing attention to painting’s backstage
elements, its construction.<\/p>\n
Gwen John shows herself fully clothed and looking at
the viewer, but she is of course painting herself
modelling herself.<\/p>\n
These kinds of juxtapositions really bring out some of
the nuances of the ‘History of British
Art’, and the rehang is full of them. I could
also go on about the new room of 1920s silent film
responding to two Pre-Raphaelite paintings; the sudden
influx of craft, sculpture and 3D works, and the
re-instatement of the glorious Blake
collection.<\/p>\n
And other reviewers have talked at length about the
choice to spread a single artist over multiple rooms,
so you see the same artist appearing and reappearing
at different points throughout the journey, depending
on where you are chronologically. I won’t talk
about it forever – I’ll just suggest that
you go and see it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A woman’s work is never done<\/h2>\n
<\/a>
The work of painting<\/h2>\n
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