Alex Farquharson, the Tate Britain director, is one of the privileged few that John Berger described in 1973 as “having the power to use art to invent history”. This week, he gave it a go. As the man in charge of 500 years of British art, he opened the doors on his purported insurrectionary rehang of the gallery’s collection, adding 200 new works, half by women artists including Joan Carlile, the first woman in Britain to work as a professional oil painter back in the 1650s. The reviews have been mixed – “politics before art” said one critic; “a hectoring history lesson” said another, although one hailed it as an “illuminating masterclass”. Coming to the art world via a degree in English and Fine Art at Exeter, Farquharson calls it a fight against post-Brexit “parochial backwater” thinking as well as a reaction against his public school education. What would Berger think?
Photograph Tate
