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Their shining morning faces cover the walls of the Duveen galleries from floor to ceiling: beaming, laughing, awkward, exuberant. Who could not love them, all these eager young children from primary schools across London? Seventy-six thousand year 3 pupils, aged seven or eight, arranged on the diminutive wooden benches of our childhood in thousands of class photographs. This is a collective portrait of both our past and our future. Face to face with all this rising hope, which of us could not be moved?
Year 3, Steve McQueen’s new project with Artangel, is unassailable in its emotional immediacy and grandeur. At first it thrives on the impact of its sheer scale. Walk into Tate Britain and you can hardly take in the spectacle of so many school photographs stretching into the distance, and all of them so regular in their lineup and format: the benches at identical range from the camera, the children symmetrically arranged around their teachers, the colours of the school clothes – red, grey, purple, royal blue – regularly repeating. They are all of them, so to speak, uniform shots; at least until the eye homes in.
Skewed ties, missing teeth, the wild child, the double act fooling about in the back row: perhaps one looks for the familiar at first. But then there is that tall boy in a turban leaning so slightly out of line, as if he wanted to break free; the baffled girl with the amber eyes stretching out her hands; the nervous anxiety of the child squeezed into the front row at the last moment, not quite sitting on the bench.
Some classes break into laughter at the shutter’s click, delighted by the photographer’s rival smile, or perhaps by the whole surprise of the occasion (few primary schools organise these all-together-now group portraits any more). In at least one shot, a child is jubilantly singing while the teacher tries to maintain the conventional silence. And, sad to say, an entire class of grey-clad children looks fearful and tense. Looming top left is the grim overlord of discipline.
There are schools with 32 pupils to a class, and schools with five children in a Georgian salon. There are home schools and sports academies, free schools and pupil referral units, although not a single image is captioned. This is surely crucial, a principled egalitarianism. No seven-year-old is to be pigeonholed according to the kind of school their parents chose for them. You will see the same exuberance in the salon, with its parquet floor, as the run-down gymnasium where the uniforms are reflected in the lino’s dull gleam. And it is the children themselves who defy social prejudice.
Clearly nobody can take in the stupefying numbers. Perhaps skip the odd photograph, you think, anxiously trying to do them all justice. But then some child stands out with a quizzical frown or a fetching smile and you have to give their classmates your full attention too. This is the lovely paradox: a mass observation project (two-thirds of London’s primaries took part) that allows each and every pupil to single themselves out. It is no overstatement to say that you could spend hours with these children, in all their curiosity and innocence, straining to see the little images skied high on the wall – like children overlooked, yet again, for this year’s school nativity.
But McQueen has a plan for these invisible faces. A special giant magnifying glass on wheels will be provided to view photographs on the top rows. And every one of the pupils involved will visit Tate Britain. Children who may have never left their borough, let alone set foot in a gallery, can come and behold themselves on the walls of a national museum. Perhaps they might look at the art around them too and become the next generation of artists.
Outside the gallery, a selection of these school photographs appear on 600 billboards throughout the city. You can see the twins in Miss Smith’s class in pleats of laughter on an underground poster, or the contemporary pupils from Steve McQueen’s own primary school on a gigantic street billboard. Here they are, out in the open – free from art world associations, and from McQueen’s own reputation as a prize-winning artist and film director: standing for potential and liberty, representing nothing but their own unique selves.
An art event of an entirely different kind is taking place at the National Gallery. It would be hard to think of a greater disparity. The subjects of Year 3 are living beings, our fascination with them almost a test of human solidarity. Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece in Trafalgar Square is exactly the opposite. Created by machines, it might have been made for them too, so frigid, empty and remote is it – taking you far closer to the state of contemporary CGI displays than the workings of Leonardo’s mind.
The first room feels like the gift shop into which visitors are decanted at the end. It consists of nothing but a sequence of tacky display stands in the form of open-ended aluminium boxes through which photos of Alpine rocks may be glimpsed, along with wrong-scale reproductions of drawings related to The Virgin of the Rocks, which is the subject of this “immersive” extravaganza.
The audio of dripping rivulets leaks into the next room: a facsimile conservator’s studio, lit with Anglepoise lamps, where the technical observations of scholars who cleaned the painting, to the effect that there is another composition below the surface (meaningless, without narrative context), have to be cheered up with instrumental music.
The lowest point is the interaction room, where visitors can twiddle knobs to change the chiaroscuro lighting on a rock… at which point, the Science Museum surely beckons. In the final room, the painting is displayed in a virtual mock-up of the altarpiece in Milan where it was first seen in 1508. Projections shift across its surface, to the point where my neighbour though it was a CGI too. Can that really have been the intention?
Perhaps no damage is truly done, since more people stood before that eerie masterpiece of Italian art than any digital pixelation in the Leonardo experience. I cannot imagine what possessed the National Gallery to “recontextualise” our Leonardo in this way. The price of admission is steep: £20 at weekends, for a painting that belongs to the nation and can be viewed free, again, from 20 January onwards. If you want scholarly exegesis, spend the money on the catalogue instead.
Star ratings (out of five)
Steve McQueen: Year 3 ★★★★
Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece ★★
• Steve McQueen: Year 3 is at Tate Britain, London, until 3 May 2020
• Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January 2020
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