Yet, for Finaldi, although providing context about the source of its sitter’s wealth is interesting, it is “not necessarily the most important thing to say” about the painting. Certainly, he tells me, “it’s not a reason for removing the picture”. He wants to make it “very clear” that, under his leadership, the National Gallery has “no intention of removing anything from display” based on the slave-ownership research project’s findings. Besides, he asks, “at what point do elements of a picture’s history require you to hide it away?” Some of the gallery’s paintings, he tells me, “are associated with other kinds of negative history. Caravaggio was a murderer.”
Another issue that comes up a lot, according to Finaldi, concerns the number of works by women artists at the National Gallery. “People say, ‘Are you going to ensure that there’s gender parity in your collection?’ We’re not. We’re a historically rooted collection. We’ve inherited the collection that we have.” At the same time, he adds, “incisive” acquisitions, such as a 17th-century self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi that the gallery recently obtained, “enable us to broaden our understanding”.
Today, says Finaldi, when “the interpretation of the past is perhaps more conflicted than it’s ever been, everything seems to have an immediate impact, and demand an instant response”. But Finaldi still believes “deeply”, for instance, in “academic competence” and “professional expertise”.
“There are people who have devoted their lives to studying the career of Titian, and you can’t pretend that’s insignificant,” he tells me.
At the same time, he argues, there are occasions when “people want to look at Titian in a quite different way from a traditional art historian – and I think that’s also legitimate”. Yet, steering a “middle course”, he says, is “difficult”. “Let’s ensure that what we do is solid and serious, and that we’re not buffeted around by every new trend or enthusiasm.”
At Tate, director Maria Balshaw acknowledges that her staff are still “learning” as they “try different approaches” to respond to the times. That said, she rejects much of the recent criticism of Tate Britain’s Hogarth and Europe exhibition, which got a lot of flak, much of it from me, for distorting its subject by overemphasising contemporary concerns.
