The National Gallery by Gabriele Finaldi

The privatisation policy is strongly supported by the current chair, Mark Getty, but his successor, Hannah Rothschild, may want to change the mood music. If the dispute is resolved by August, when Finaldi takes over, the impending appointment of a new chair of the trustees will have helped.

Why privatise those endlessly patient, dignified and knowledgeable guardians of the nation’s art? Since then, a series of strikes has resulted in the temporary closure of many rooms and a growing perception of an organisation ill at ease with itself. It also provided the union with a PR gift. After years of rocky industrial relations, the PCS viewed the move as a gauntlet thrown down. Last year, the trustees announced the appointment of a private security contractor to take over the gallery, starting with the Sainsbury Wing. Top of the current directorial agenda is the dispute with the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union over the privatisation of visitor services at. Finaldi can add contemporary arguments about selfie sticks, oil sponsorship and corporate hires to the list.įinaldi says farewell to the Prado. Controversies ranging from picture cleaning ( too aggressive) to acquisitions ( the wrong ones), exhibitions ( too many visitors … or too few), architecture (a “ carbuncle”) and the provision of the public lavatories ( never enough) have dogged successive directors with predictable regularity.

Ever since the post of National Gallery Director was created in 1855 (some 30 years after the gallery was founded), it has been demonstrably impossible to please everyone, all of the time. The contents of the intray on Finaldi’s desk will, of course, be daunting. So what does such an impressive track record augur for his tenure in Trafalgar Square? A host of problems Finaldi oversaw the redisplay of the entire collection, the opening of a major extension and the creation of the Prado Research Centre. This is a role that involves much more than writing erudite essays on Baroque painting (his field of art history) and shuffling the picture hang. Since then, Finaldi has amply demonstrated his directorial ability Madrid’s Prado Museum, where he has been Deputy Director for Collections and Research since 2002. By all accounts, he made many more friends than foes during his previous time at the gallery. When the announcement was finally made on March 18, the question was less “Gabriele who?” and more “what took you so long?”įinaldi’s appointment has been universally welcomed, not least because he is returning to the institution where he was Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings from 1992 to 2002. For the past few months, the much-anticipated appointment of Gabriele Finaldi as the next director of the National Gallery has been one of the worst kept secrets in the art world.

The National Gallery by Gabriele Finaldi