For most of its 200-year history, the mission of the National Gallery in London has been to show the greatest works of painting in Western tradition stopping at a rather specific date: 1900.
The gallery, which attracts over three million visitors a year, is filled with masterpieces of European art, including works by van Gogh (one of his “Sunflowers”), Diego Velázquez and Titian. But the revered art museum owns only about two-dozen works from the 20th century, including one Picasso and one Matisse.
Such modern painting, it had agreed, was for the Tate collections.
Now, the museum wants that to change.
Early Tuesday in London, the gallery announced that it is kicking off a global competition to design a new wing for an expanded collection. That wing would include 20th-century paintings that the museum said it would start collecting. The wing is projected to open in the early 2030s.
The museum said it has secured 375 million pounds, about $506 million, for the project, from various sources, including a $200-million donation from Crankstart, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco set up by Michael Moritz, a British-born venture capitalist.
Gabriele Finaldi, the National Galley’s director, said in an interview that 1900 was “a quite artificial date” for a museum to stop telling the history of painting, and that he is seeking 20th-century works that match the “weight” of those already in the museum’s collections.
Finaldi admitted it would be “very difficult” to acquire masterpieces, given how few come to market, but he said he is looking at alternative ways of building a collection, including loans from artists’ estates.
The project is also likely to shake up London’s museum world.
Since 1996, the National Gallery has had a written agreement with the Tate group of museums, which includes Tate Britain and Tate Modern, about the eras of focus for each organization. When Finaldi first raised the possibility of extending the museum’s collections into modern art, back in 2016, British newspapers published articles saying such a move could start “a war.”
Finaldi said he didn’t expect any kind of conflict. And Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate, said in a news release on Tuesday that the group “looks forward to working closely with colleagues at the National Gallery on loans, curatorial and conservational expertise to support the development of their new displays.”
In an interview, Finaldi spoke about reasons for the change, the artists he might collect and the importance of potential American backing for the project. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
You first discussed your desire to add 20th-century paintings to the National Gallery’s collection in 2016. Why is this change so important?
We’re now in 2025, and 1900 is a long, long time ago, and we’re very conscious that painting didn’t stop then; there’s a desire to continue telling that story. To an extent we already do — we have some early-20th-century paintings, whether that’s the Matisse or Picasso, and we recently acquired a Pechstein — but that sense of an evolving and developing art form is very exciting.
It’s interesting that when we were encouraged to acquire works by van Gogh, those had only been painted some 30 or 40 years earlier. So that sense of the gallery being able to show things that are not so far in the past has always been there. In a way, the ambition to show 20th-century pictures was stunted by the fact that we don’t have space.
What works do you actually want to go in this new wing?
It’s premature to get into names and works, but the story we’ll want to tell will continue to be those artists who are very influential, who had new things to say in the development of the genre, and who are responding to the traditions represented in our collection.
You agreed with a 2016 interviewer that Picasso deserved to be on the museum’s walls. But obviously there are many disruptive painters in those 100 years. Does someone like Dalí deserve to be?
Potentially, yes. I mean, interestingly right now, we’ve got this show on Millet. And Dalí, in spite of the fact that he was revolutionary and in many ways was wanting to break with tradition, was also an artist who was very interested in the tradition in museums, like Millet or Vermeer. He was taking inspiration from the works of the great masters.
You have potential resources for acquisitions. For instance, you have the American Friends of the National Gallery, a nonprofit made up of U.S.-based patrons with a significant endowment. Still, most of the works you’re discussing are in museum collections, or rarely come up for auction. How can you actually achieve this goal?
You could say it’s a big ambition at this stage. Across the history of painting, there are fewer and fewer of these masterpieces available, and those which are of the quality to enter the National Gallery’s collection are very expensive.
Acquisition forms one part of the way in which this collection can be developed, but I do think we need to look more broadly at how you form a collection, like the idea of borrowing long-term from artists’ estates, for example, or from other museums.
We do long-term loans already. We have an exchange, for example, with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, so pictures from us are on long-term load there, and there are paintings by [the Dutch painter] Sweerts that are on a long-term loan here.
Most museums across Europe are struggling with fund-raising, with many looking to the United States for donors; yet you’ve secured $500 million.
Well, these things don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere, and a lot of work had been done around our bicentenary, which we just finished celebrating. So I’m astonished by the amount we’ve raised, but it can be done.
I’m very pleased because it’s for the benefit of the gallery, the benefit of this country and the benefit of art lovers well into the future. I have quite a few grandchildren. It’s for future generations as well.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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