Arts notebook

This week, I wandered through Britain's most exclusive art collection, the catacombs of the Tate Gallery, hidden behind solid anti-flood doors (the Thames is dangerously close), combination locks and security personnel. Within the storage racks are 2,000 or so paintings. I pulled out one rack and found a Gainsborough, a Stubbs and a Whistler.

I wandered there with Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, as he explained how the re-development of the Millbank site would allow a further 250 of these pictures from key figures in British art to take their place in the collection proper. There will be, he promised, a "thicker representation" of such people as Hogarth, Whistler and Barbara Hepworth - the artists the public love to see and constantly name as among their favourites. Currently, Mr Serota said, naming another public favourite "we are unable to show David Hockney on a regular basis".

Unable? Surely not. Unwilling, perhaps. The Tate could perfectly well have a Hockney room now. It just chooses not to. That is curatorial privilege. And even with 250 more pictures on show in the year 2001, subjective curatorial judgements will still prevail. Fair enough. What is odd is that Mr Serota admits that the public do tend to complain about not seeing their favourites on show, yet the Tate still finds it impossible to display the key pictures that the public comes to see, say, Hockney's A Bigger Splash.

I have a suggestion. Why does Mr Serota not devote one of the current display rooms to the Most Requested Pictures? It would not only, by definition, be immensely popular. It would also tell sociologists heaps about the British public.

Poor old Peggy Ashcroft. A new biography by Garry O'Connor goes on about her love life. That she had a stormy off-stage liaison with Paul Robeson is not just common knowledge but decades' old common knowledge. The same goes for her good companionship with JB Priestley. What did interest me though was the brief aside that while Laurence Olivier expressed a desire for her, this was, in the words of the book, "not requited". This is a puzzler. If Dame Peg was so liberal in her affections, why withhold them from the best- looking, most charismatic and greatest actor of the age? Sad to say, we weren't told.