This week, I went on a day trip to Lille for the vast Rubens exhibition. My journey by Eurostar took an hour and 40 minutes each way - about as time-consuming as travelling from Croydon to Islington, or Newcastle to Edinburgh, and a lot less stressful. Delicious-looking Frenchmen served me croissants and coffee on the way there, and tea and treacle tart on the way back. Arriving at Lille Europe, I paid 1.15 euros for a Metro ticket, clambered aboard a Blade Runner-style modular train, and reached the Palais des Beaux-Arts seven minutes later.
The layout of the show revealed how stale our own approach to staging major exhibitions has become. There are plenty of posters, but no shop crammed with "themed" furry toys, jewellery, paper clips and T-shirts of Rubensesque beauties. This may simply mean that the French government has given Lille a huge grant, so the Palais has no need to flog "Cezanne-wiches" and the like. What with the minimalist buying facilities, visitors confront a nice, airy space on arrival. The Palais has a vast ground floor containing nothing but a self-service cafe (as opposed to the J Sheekey/Costa Coffee combination currently favoured by British galleries) and a cloakroom.
The exhibition itself is also a delight. It is naturally lit - welcome relief from the subterranean gloom in which most British exhibitions are shrouded. Paintings, usually created by daylight, are best viewed under the same conditions, although anyone who has been to any temporary exhibition in the new wing at Tate Britain or in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery could be forgiven for thinking that this is something British curators have failed to appreciate. Perhaps forcing visitors to wander around a maze of windowless, interconnecting galleries causes them to become so disorientated that they go mad in the shop afterwards. Or maybe it's all about tricking them to stay later (as in Las Vegas, where there's a ban on hanging clocks on casino walls). Whichever way, I hate it.
If all National Gallery exhibitions were to be displayed in the main spaces, some of the permanent collection would have to be moved into storage, which would cause a row. In fact, the Rubens show in Lille has displaced many of the gallery's other pictures, which perhaps explains the rather odd hanging policy everywhere else in the Palais. Bruegel's Census at Bethlehem is lost above a service entrance, while the famed painting of people dining inside a giant egg (attributed to Hieronymus Bosch) is displayed far too high. Other gems are not even available.
But who needs these when you have more than 150 dashing masterpieces by Rubens? Full of stunning colour, drama, shafts of sunshine, beams of moonlight, milk spurting from breasts, people stepping on to clouds, horse-drawn chariots, swords, shields, flowing hair and livers being torn out, this show triumphantly puts the Flemish artist through his paces. The highlight is Lille's own heroic Deposition From the Cross. Grief, weight and gore fly across the painting's diagonal design; swirling figures pay attendance to the huge, central body.
Rubens was a committed pacifist, and many of the paintings focus on the hideousness of war and the productiveness of peace. In what was possibly the wisest gesture of his reign, Charles I gave the man a knighthood.
