Walk Through British Art, Tate Britain, review And after decades when to read one of the garrulous picture labels at Tate Britain made the heart sink, the new ones tell us only the name of the artist with his birth and death dates, the title of the painting and the year it was painted. What Curtis has understood is that pictures on show in a public gallery are themselves primary data. You study history so that you can understand them, not the other way around. And anyway, who says they need to be studied? Gallery visitors should be allowed to have their own responses in front of them not told what to think by the curator. Architecturally the galleries renovated by Caruso St John are a joy to walk through. Skylights have been opened and cleaned to flood the interiors with natural light, creating a more spacious look in rooms that always felt dark and claustrophobic. New galleries have been created specifically for showing Tate Britain's extensive and virtually unknown collection of works on papers, and floors have been strengthened so that there is far more sculpture on view than ever before, including a spectacular permanent gallery devoted to the work of Henry Moore. Pictures of roughly the same date are hung next to each other whether or not they belong to the same school, style or movement. So Reynolds's full length homage to Titian, 'Colonel Ackland and Lord Sydney: The Archers," hangs between two scenes by Joseph Wright of Derby that could hardly be more different either from the Reynolds or from each other - 'A Iron Forge" and 'The Eruption of Vesuvius." Next to this group, a mythological subject in the neoclassical style by Benjamin West hangs opposite Reynolds's 'Master Crew as Henry VIII. What is so refreshing about Curtis's chronological grouping is that it illustrates something art historians hate to acknowledge: chaos theory at work in the visual arts. The downside of this approach is that the true stature of artists such as John Singer Sargent and Alfred Gilbert is vitiated by not grouping work from different periods in their long careers together. This is implicitly acknowledged in more comprehensive displays of work by William Blake and Henry Moore. The new way of presenting the collection comes unstuck in other respects too. True to a long tradition at Tate Britain of treating Victorian art with undisguised contempt, the gallery devoted to 1840 to 1890 is the visual equivalent of a disaster area. Until now, the story of British art has been told in increments of two or at most three decades per gallery. Suddenly the 40 years that saw among other developments both the birth of Pre Raphaelitism and the Aesthetic movement are bunged into one large space. Pictures are double and triple hung in a way that we haven't seen before and the result is a travesty. The three paintings that make up Augustus Leopold Egg's harrowing chronicle of adultery and its consequences 'Past and Present" are placed under John Martin's lumbering 'The Great Day of his Wrath" in such a way that that no lighting engineer in the world could have lit them. And I wanted to weep when I saw what they'd done to James McNeill Whistler's tonal and psychological tour de force 'Miss Cecily Alexander" - it has been shoved into a corner because even the person responsible for this debacle had enough sense not to hang it next to John William Waterhouse's crass 'The Lady of Shalott." By the time we arrive at the next gallery in the sequence, which is devoted to the years 1890 -1910, the crisis is over and the picture hang returns to its high standards. Another weakness of the opening display are the' spotlight" galleries that explore different themes or the work of one artists in depth in small exhibitions that will change every six months or so. The most successful ones at the moment look at Constable's 'The Cornfield" and the Douglas Gordon's video of a circus elephant performing tricks in an art gallery.But a display portraits of artists called 'The Image of the British School" struck me as completely pointless.. The 20th century collection is also a problem. According to the works on view here, British art became more and more derivative in every successive decade until it bottomed out in the conceptual art of the 1970s. That may well have to do with the quality of the Tate's acquisitions, but it is a fact that no amount of special pleading can change. Meanwhile we've been given back the glorious old masters, so please join me now in giving three loud cheers for British art and its saviour, Penelope Curtis. Opens May 14.