Athena: The best stage for contemporary art is inside our historic houses and gardens

Last month, Athena visited Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, which this year is the setting for a new venture organised by the National Trust with the contemporary art gallery White Cube.

For the remainder of the season — until September 14 — visitors are asked to book an arrival slot to see an exhibition of 47 works by a diverse group of artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin, that extends through the main rooms of the house and into the garden. It’s well worth a visit and offers a bit of welcome publicity for a property that, but for the overshadowing local presence of the landscape park at Stowe and Waddesdon, would surely enjoy much greater celebrity within the Trust’s portfolio.

Indeed, its fantastical 18th-century Gothic, Chinese and Rococo interiors by the carver Luke Lightfoot and the stuccadore Joseph Rose are outstanding by any measure. The display of contemporary art in historic houses has been enjoying something of a vogue in recent years and this particular collaboration has raised the bar for the Trust.

In the past, too many exhibitions of this kind have fallen far short of the ambition exemplified in both permanent and temporary shows by privately run estates, such as Boughton, Northamptonshire; Goodwood, West Sussex; Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute; Wolterton and Houghton in Norfolk; or Jupiter Artlands, Edinburgh (to name a few).

Despite being so well established, this genre of exhibition is sometimes presented by contemporary art critics in slightly patronising terms. One resilient fiction —contradicted by their popularity — is that visitors will be offended by the juxtaposition of old and new. Casting contemporary art as something shocking serves artificially to exaggerate its novelty, radicalism and capacity to transform its audience. It also denigrates the historic context, which by implication is possessed of none of those qualities.

Another wishful and self-flattering platitude is that the new ‘breathes life’ into the old or even, in extreme cases of self-delusion, makes it ‘relevant’ (although quite how is never clear). What actually strikes Athena as notable about the collaboration at Claydon, and which generally makes exhibitions of this kind interesting, is that it stands accepted norms of contemporary-art display on their head.

The name White Cube evokes the soulless interiors in which contemporary art is usually displayed; featureless rooms with white walls and an even fall of light. This ideal, seen in museum galleries around the world, aims to focus attention exclusively on the object displayed. At Claydon, by contrast, the interiors have a strong character. That, in turn, creates a dialogue between the rooms and the art displayed in them.

This is not, however, an asymmetric conversation. Certainly, the work of Lightfoot and Rose is never eclipsed by this juxtaposition. It remains a matter of personal taste as to which we might prefer to look at, but — regardless — it is the fact that each helps us see the other differently that matters.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

For more information on the exhibition and how to book, see here.