How Tate Britain overhauled 500 years of art history with its first rehang in a decade

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “She wanted these images to help improve conditions and pay for women in her lifetime,” Carol Jacobi, curator of British Art, 1850–1915, says of Pankhurst’s paintings, “but they also have a place in historic British art as rare portraits of working-class women.” Alongside her paintings, there is also a tea set designed by the preeminent suffragette, which is “quite a radical modern piece”, Farquharson declares – “to the degree you can make a tea set radical and modern”. “Bronstein imagines this as a fully out, extravagant molly house,” Farquharson says, “which looks a bit like a facade of a modern-day cinema, and it’s full of iconography from art history that is as homoerotic as you can get, ending with an aubergine and a banana emoji.” Even more than radical or working-class histories, LGBT+ histories are particularly hard to visualise in Tate’s collection, for the simple fact that for much of history queer people were persecuted, oppressed, and driven underground. “I would say it’s more about the fact that artists – through being of identities that have been historically marginalised – bring with them perspectives that enable us to see mediums and genres in art that have a very established history, whether it’s portraiture or abstract painting or documentary photography, in a whole new way.” Farquharson points to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who was the focus of a major exhibition at the gallery earlier this year, as a great example of this. “Both really welcoming people to what British art can be, in its most relevant, dynamic sense, and also really innovative for people who know this art history well – seeing it in a whole new light and juxtaposed with things they don’t expect to be juxtaposed.” Ultimately, he hopes the rehang will inspire interest and curiosity in all visitors “to cross the historic floor, through these themes that act as waves that keep resurfacing, but also through the incorporation of a contemporary artist’s work in a historic realm.” It’s certainly no small feat, but Farquharson hopes Tate’s “ideal viewer, whether they’re new to it or they’re experienced, will want to take it all in”.