Julian Spalding argues the National Gallery should scrap its 1900 cut-off date (Report, 10 February). There are good reasons why it would be better to keep it. There’s the fact of precedent: the Louvre has a cut-off of 1848; Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie about 1800; the Prado’s collection ends with early 20th-century works. Those dates are arbitrary, but make sense. It’s usual that there should be a big city gallery that displays older art, while other galleries show more recent work.
Spalding suggests that the cut-off date implies that painting ended in 1900. No one thinks that, but everyone knows something radical happened to painting around then, and the advent of modernism makes 20th- and 21st-century painting a distinct body of work.
Spalding points out that in 200 years’ time, all the paintings will be 300 years old. Why should that matter? The implicit thought seems to be that because paintings are old, they are too remote from us to count. The entire point of the National Gallery – or the Rijksmuseum or the Alte Pinakothek – is that old paintings are always new. A Rembrandt painting is the ancestor and the contemporary of a David Hockney. If I want to be inspired and moved by the first, I go to Trafalgar Square, and if I want to be inspired and moved by the second, I have a choice of Tate galleries. Compressing the collection in the National Gallery to make room for 20th-century painting is an unnecessary move.
Michael Newton
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
