Tate Britain's director, Stephen Deuchar, explains to Samson Spanier the new re-hang at the museum, which includes types of art never previously exhibited there

Apollo, Oct, 2005 by Samson Spanier

Tate Britain's new gallery dedicated to the English Civil War is full of portraits, the prevalent genre in an era of iconoclasm, so Henry Gibbs's Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Troy (1654) stands out. The sacking of Troy would have reminded any seventeenth century Englishman, educated about allegory, of the sieges of his own time. Tate curator Karen Hearn speculates that the choice of Aeneas, the ancient world's most famous exile, as subject may suggest that Gibbs himself had fled to the Low Countries. The gallery's hang describes with extreme economy how the war shaped this painting.

The new hang, which marries thematic with period-based arrangements, is the largest change since 2001, and an improvement over the purely thematic hang of 2000, which was criticised for incoherence. The changes are visible everywhere. William Blake is now shown alongside his mutual admirer John Flaxman rather than by himself. There is (after an absence) a room dedicated to the Pre-Raphaelites. Most striking is the transformation of the largest gallery (Room 9) into a display of Romantic painting, where John Martin's large, apocalyptic triptych of 1851-53 is hung high up, with two Turners below.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, explained to APOLLO that this hang is by no means definitive. 'You could have done it an infinite number of ways,' he said. He sees the rooms as a series of 'subjective takes'. In this spirit, each room was curated by an individual person, who has signed the wall mounted texts.

There is nevertheless a pattern in that three types of art from the periphery of mainstream British culture are included for the first time. There is now a room on folk art, including trade unions' banners (People's History Museum, Manchester) and a decorated whale's tooth (National Maritime Museum, London). Deuchar says it is part of an initiative to 'expand visual culture' at Tate. The curator's notes tartly point out that the museum has not exhibited such work before because it has not collected it. There is also a display of Outsider Art (that of criminals and the insane), which marks the gift of the archive compiled by Monika Kinley and Victor Musgrave. Third, the Indian-born artist EN. Souza is given a room, concentrating on his paintings from the 1950s and 60s.

The galleries come to a spectacular conclusion with an installation by Chris Ofili, which would be another example of peripheral and non-white art if the artist were not already so comfortably ensconsed within the establishment. A dark room lined floor to ceiling with light wood, courtesy of architect David Adjaye, is the setting for thirteen individually lit paintings of monkeys, each with its own predominant colour, apparently inspired by images of the Last Supper.

The hang as a whole, however, is not politically correct but enjoyably various. Deuchar is aware that 'it is not possible to have a narrative of British art with an over-arching theme,' so the hang does not suffer from false unity. There are satisfying links nevertheless, such as a room of John Hartfield's photomontage images of the 1930s and 40s that leads to the amorphous figures of Francis Bacon. By the same token, everyone will think of a subject that they would like to have had included (satirical prints, for instance), but the opinionated rooms add up to more than the sum of their parts.