On an industrial estate in south London there's a building, surrounded by manufacturing plants and transport depots, that you would walk past without a second glance. If you ever walked this way, which you wouldn't. To get inside it, you must first present yourself at the armoured gate. If you look trustworthy, the guard might let you into a holding pen; for security reasons, the second gate opens only when the first has shut. After that, all being well, you will gain access to the concrete loading area. Every step you take will be recorded on camera.
The building does not belong to a bank. It has nothing to do with the diamond trade or gold bullion. But it does contain priceless property, all of which belongs to you and me. The Tate collection of British art, which comprises a sizable chunk of the national art collection, consists of thousands of paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings and prints. There's Elizabethan portraiture; works by William Hogarth; 18th-century portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds; animal paintings by George Stubbs; vast numbers of the great Romantic artists Constable and Turner; pre-Raphaelite paintings that revolutionised British art in the 19th century; and, from the 20th century, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.
It's hard to put a price on the art stored here, because works owned by the nation are not available for sale and have not recently been valued. Nor are works on display commercially insured — they are only valued when on loan. (The government directly indemnifies against destruction and theft.) But to get an idea of the kind of sums we're talking about, let's take one artist: J M W Turner. When a pair of Turners were stolen from Frankfurt, in 1994, they were valued at £12m each. Today the Tate owns around 300 Turner paintings, and thousands of other works by him — so the entire collection, we can safely guess, is worth many, many millions indeed.
A large number of works are on display at the four galleries — Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, which between them attract more than 6m visitors a year. But, by my calculation, only 1,500 are on show out of a collection of 65,000. So the overwhelming majority remain unseen by the British public that owns it. And that's not good enough.
Tate Britain's director, Dr Stephen Deuchar, is obsessed with the idea of showing off forgotten works. The gallery has always rotated its art, but those changes usually amount to tampering. This year is different. Tate Britain will next month unveil a "rehang" so extensive that as many as 19 out of every 20 pictures on display will be freshly out of storage. "We could have continued to make gradual alterations," explains Deuchar, "but we decided to do something that had the energy and dynamism of an exhibition." Nobody who has visited the gallery before could fail to notice the difference. The display has been divided into entirely new themes for each room. For the first time in a long while, the pre-Raphaelites are being shown together. And many of the greatest Romantic paintings are on display together in the largest room. For the past three years, up to 20 of Tate Britain's curators have dedicated themselves to Deuchar's audacious scheme.
It makes sense. What with the annual Turner prize and one-offs devoted to the likes of Lucian Freud and Turner, Tate Britain has become better known for its exhibitions than for the permanent collection. "We're incredibly proud that people turn up for those exhibitions in huge numbers," says Deuchar. "But they're taking for granted the strength of our permanent collection. To have 200 Turners on display and not to have them regarded with awe by everyone who visits is a great sadness." The rehang is intended to change that perception. I spent a day at the store, on the strict understanding that its location remain secret.
I moved from one heavily fortified vault to another, accompanied by staff who pulled out long-hidden works at random. Most paintings are strapped in their frames to screens seven metres high. Because the art doesn't need to be grouped — as it would be in galleries, by date or theme — each screen offers surprises. Here's a Gainsborough alongside something 200 years younger. In the next one, a Victorian soldier in scarlet tunic stands next to a modern landscape.
Visitors almost always react strongly to the pictures they find here. They gasp, or laugh — reactions much stronger than they would permit themselves if they saw the same works on a gallery wall. I do the same myself. Why? I can only explain it as a kind of embarrassment, akin to what one might feel on pulling a corpse from a chill cabinet at the morgue.
The Tate was founded in 1897 by a Victorian sugar magnate who offered his art collection to the nation, along with a gallery to house it, if the government would donate a site and undertake the administration. Sir Henry Tate argued that other benefactors would follow his example: "Like myself, they would have the pleasure of feeling that justice would be done to British art." The government of the day agreed, and Millbank Penitentiary, overlooking the Thames, was demolished. Three acres were allocated to the new national gallery of British art. In 1917 the Tate was also made responsible for a collection of international modern art. To house that, more rooms opened in 1926, with further expansion up until 1987. In 1992 the trustees announced plans to divide displays between two sites in London: a gallery for international modern and contemporary art, Tate Modern, and a gallery devoted to British art, called Tate Britain in recognition of Sir Henry's original vision.
His own bequest comprised only 65 paintings, but included Millais' Ophelia and Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott — pictures rarely taken off the walls, and which routinely figure among the biggest sellers, in postcard-sized reproduction, in the gallery shop. (Not to be disregarded: Tate's shops and catering facilities bring in as much as £5m in profit a year.) But additional bequests came in as he predicted and the collection grew. Remarkably little has been lost, considering what it has endured. In the first world war, much of the art was rehoused in closed parts of London Underground, to protect it from zeppelins. In 1928, Tate's underground storage was flooded: 18 works were damaged beyond repair. In the second world war, the Tate once again made use of the Tube as well as private country houses. Five railway carriages were needed to evacuate the art, but larger pieces couldn't be moved. Sculptures were kept in the basement, beneath fire-retardant crates. Stanley Spencer's vast painting The Resurrection, Cookham, stayed in the gallery — with a brick wall built in front of it.
Last year's fire at Momart's warehouse was a ghastly reminder that even in peacetime, art can be destroyed. But Deuchar doesn't sound worried. "In terms of environmental controls and security, our store is first-rate," he says. "But personally I'd like a radically improved version. I'd like to make public access not just possible but positively encouraged. There is no better way of demonstrating the scale of the collection."
Some might think the Tate should select the "best" works and leave them in place for ever — so they can pop in year after year, as if visiting old friends. But art should be constantly reassessed, Deuchar said. "We're all hugely influenced by the images we see. Take landscape: the way you look at a real landscape is conditioned by what you have previously found beautiful in art. But what we perceive to be important in art is also affected by what is going on in the real world."
How does his aspiration work in practice? What does the rehang tell us about British society today? You get a pretty good idea by examining the themes by which the largely chronological display is broken down. Sometimes the content of a room is relatively straightforward: Tudor and Stuart portraiture, the British landscape, or the pre-Raphaelites. Often it's more explicitly polemical. Room 29, for example, was until recently styled "Society Consumed": a variety of modern works explored consumerism, wastefulness and the gulf between the ideals of town planners and the reality of living in social housing. That has now given way to a simple presentation of pictures by a single artist. But another room, previously devoted to the sculptor Antony Gormley, has taken the theme of "Displacements": it shows work by Mona Hatoum, stranded in London when civil war broke out in her native Lebanon, and Veronica Ryan, originally from Montserrat.
