The Imperial War Museum finds a deadly place to display first world war masterpieces

The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by hordes when I visited (it was still the school holidays). There’s a new and effective restaurant, inevitably, but also a new sense of spaciousness.

I am not concerned here with weapons of mass destruction, merely with the record of the damage they inflict. They keep the art up on the third floor of the museum, and currently have a major display devoted to the first world war, which they claim is the largest of its type for nearly a century. It’s full of expected names, shown in some detail. But the ambience is wrong: there is something utterly deadly about those third-floor galleries (appropriate in a war museum, I suppose), which kills exhibitions stone-dead. However great the art — and there are masterpieces to be seen — it suffers badly from being shown there.