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Gallery review The most intelligent of great art museums

The Guardian

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May 08, 2025

There are so many twists, turns and fascinating detours in the National Gallery's rehang, you have to pick up some kind of thread.

- Jonathan Jones

Gallery review The most intelligent of great art museums

In my case, perhaps distracted by the thought of the National's new restaurant, Locatelli, it's foodie still lifes.

Two huge paintings of cheese take pride of place in one of the Dutch rooms. In Floris van Dijck's 1616 still life, a black gouda rests on top of a yellow one, their surfaces like walls of fat. In another room you can see Gustave Courbet's great, melancholy Still Life With Apples and a Pomegranate, which manages to express the defeat of the Paris Commune in battered, pockmarked fruits.

Finally, at the climax of Britain's free national collection of European art from the middle ages to the birth of modernism, three revolutionary still lifes hang together so you can see how Cézanne's pictures of fruit begin to rip apart perspective and make way for Picasso's mind-boggling 1914 Cubist masterpiece Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin.

The Wonder of Art may seem a glib, even desperate, title for this rehang, but I can't really argue. This is one of the greatest museums of painting in the world, a magic labyrinth. My anxiety was that the curators might try to reinvent or even reimagine their collection, without chronology or coherence. But this "new" National is reassuringly like the old one.

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