London’s Courtauld Gallery has completed work on a modernization project that has been underway since 2018. The gallery revealed images of its revamped interiors at Somerset House ahead of its reopening in November.
Architects Witherford Watson Mann have designed the redevelopment of the building originally completed by Sir William Chambers in the 1770s. The restored and expanded complex will house a number of new galleries and spaces with backing from major sponsors including the luxury conglomerate LVMH and the Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik; other funders include the National Lottery Heritage Fund which has given £11m to the revamp.
“The Courtauld was founded in 1932 on the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to engage with art,” Courtauld director Deborah Swallow said in a statement. “This major redevelopment has provided a unique opportunity to look at the collection afresh, and it provides new narratives and new ways of enjoying our works.”
The Great Room which has been renamed the LVMH Great Room after the French brand that helped fund the overhaul will also be enlarged. The gallery will be dramatically expanded by removing “internal sub-divisions”, says the gallery’s director Ernst Vegelin.
A suite of six galleries across the second floor have been named the Blavatnik Fine Rooms after the businessman who has donated £10m to the initiative Photo: © Hufton+Crow
The new space will house founder Samuel Courtauld’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings including Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore (1897). The historic room, which housed the summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts until 1837, is London’s earliest surviving purpose-built art gallery.
A suite of six galleries across the second floor have been named the Blavatnik Fine Rooms after the businessman who has donated £10m to the initiative. The floor will display works dating from the Renaissance to the 18th century. “A major highlight will be Botticelli’s large-scale The Trinity With Saints (1491-94), the only altarpiece by the artist in the UK, unveiled after a three-year conservation project,” says a statement. A room will also be dedicated to works by Peter Paul Rubens.
A group show of drawings by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Cy Twombly assembled by the late collector Howard Karshan (Modern Drawings: the Karshan Gift) will inaugurate a set of new temporary exhibition galleries along with an exhibition of unseen images of Kurdistan from the 1940s. The works, donated by the late British photographer Anthony Kersting, chronicle the activities of the Yazidi community.
The UK artist Cecily Brown will also unveil a new work on the curved wall of the Courtauld’s 18th-century staircase. Meanwhile the vast painting, The Myth of Prometheus (1950), the largest work in the Courtauld’s collection, will go back on display in the Katja and Nicolai Tangen 20th-Century Gallery.