Should the National Gallery welcome visitors first with its loos, or its masterpieces?

If you had an array of masterpieces at your command, how would you sort them? Would they be like the Top Ten, starting off slowly but getting better and better, so that by the time "Britain's Number One" arrived your audience would be at fever pitch? Or would you start with a bang?

When the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan briefly relocated to a space in Queens that was once a staple factory, it placed its permanent collection in a series of humble rooms. Walking in off the street, visitors were immediately confronted by Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and Matisse's Dance - two of the most iconic and influential canvases of the 20th century. Even in its temporary home, MoMA wanted to shout about its collection, wheeling out its biggest guns.

Curators at the Centre Pompidou in Paris have done things the same way. Visit the rehang of the permanent collection, entitled "Big Bang", and you immediately come across a huge canvas by Picasso, opposite an equally mesmerising triptych by Francis Bacon. Just around the corner shimmers a Pollock.

In my case, it was just as well that the Pompidou delivered the goods up front. Arriving at the gallery, I met a bewildering system of doors and steps, with no help from the French signage, which directed me first into a service duct, and then kept on suggesting that I visit the bibliotheque. Having finally found, and then climbed up, Lord Rogers's exterior escalator (which was broken), with not only a large baby but also a pushchair in my arms, I was in no mood for pussy-footing around with work by minor masters. As far as I was concerned, it was Picasso or nothing.

Over the past year, the National Gallery in London has been deliberating on just these issues, as it revamps its own arrival "experience". Leading a hard-hat tour, Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the gallery, energetically described to me what visitors previously encountered on arrival at this country's cultural flagship. "Pure shabbiness! There was no pride in this entrance hall, none at all," he said. "This wonderful pink marble was covered up by what looked like white bathroom tiles. The walls were covered with this sort of 1980s Laura Ashley-type wallpaper. The original, 19th-century ceiling decorations had been whitewashed

over." And as if that wasn't bad enough, he said, irritating paraphernalia such as cloakrooms, ticket desks, computers and pamphlets followed the visitor right into the start of the collection.

Everything of that nature has since been banished to the basement. From 24 September, when Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, will open the new entrance, visitors will be able to swan in through an extended hall decorated in the original marble. It's all going to be very grand, generous and clutter-free - it will be straight to the masterpieces.

As with MoMA and the Centre Pompidou, the National has brought its best-loved canvases to the fore. No warm-up. No false starts. In Gallery No 1, visitors will be plonked straight into Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and the much-discussed Madonna of the Pinks by Raphael. "The paintings should start immediately," said Saumarez Smith. "After all, what is the prime requirement of the National Gallery? Masterpieces or loos?" Quite.

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