Comment | The UK National Gallery's new remit puts it in competition with Tate-here's why that's a mistake

"Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, likes to think big. Just months after unveiling the gallery's new entrance he announced plans for a new wing. Normally these announcements launch ambitious funding targets, but Finaldi has already raised £375m. If we add on the £95m raised for the NG200 development and various picture acquisitions, then in ten years as director he has raised over half a billion pounds."

"This alone is an astonishing achievement. No other cultural leader in the UK or Europe has come close. Finaldi will rival Neil MacGregor as Britain's most consequential museum director of modern times. In fact, they will be a fitting double act; it was MacGregor who had the foresight to acquire the site on which the new wing will be built."

"Finaldi, however, wants more. For he is also radically changing the National Gallery's collecting criteria. Previously, the gallery has displayed paintings up to around 1900. Finaldi now wants to go up to the present day. (See p8.) The National Gallery, for two centuries devoted to historic art, will become within a decade a museum of both Modern and contemporary art."

Gabriele Finaldi has raised over £500m in ten years, funding a new wing, the NG200 development, and picture acquisitions. Finaldi intends to extend the National Gallery's collecting remit from around 1900 to the present, aiming to transform the institution into a museum of modern and contemporary art within a decade. That expansion will create direct overlap with Tate Modern and Tate Britain, producing competition for audiences, funding, and artworks. The historical separation established when Henry Tate supported a national British gallery on the assumption that the National Gallery would retain Old Masters may be undermined, shifting national museum roles.

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