During a recent saunter about the National Gallery I encountered ‘Exhibit A’ of a world reframed – and not for the better.

It always feels like you go ‘up the galleries’, rather than ‘to them’ – well in my head it does. To clarify, I refer to those classical sisters perched on the Mound, not the duo either side of Teletubbies Land up Belford way; that land art in front of Modern One always elicits an ‘eh-oh’.

Anyway, there, amongst the drawings on show at an exhibition by Dutch and Flemish masters, was a reframing…

No, not that kind of reframing. I mean, they hadn’t gone down The Range and picked up 3-for-2 on glass clip frames; it’s not the done thing for the most exquisite 17th century Flemish and Dutch masterpieces. A little on the gauche side, dahling. But then again, so is patronising your audience. Which, to my mind, is exactly what happened next.

Trigger warning: the following perspective might not be to your taste, but it is thought-through.

The moment arose when my partner and I were gazing in wonderment at a depiction of a person of colour, a portrait by some Dutch master or other (can’t remember the specific artist). It was, I think, a beautiful rendering in coloured chalk. A portrait of such skill in the way it effortlessly captured the innate character of this strong profile from the past. Then, just below, came, by way of contrast, the thudding clunk of a ‘learning moment’.

It just had to explain to us – to assuage some atavistic guilt – that there weren’t many black people in Northern Europe at that time. Certainly not people of status. Owing to the fact that, er… this was 17th century Northern Europe. That pearl of wisdom didn’t better inform my understanding of the drawing. Instead, it was an interruption, turning a colour-blind appreciation of virtuosity into a moment laden with the baggage of the now.

Yes, baggage. Along the way there was another such information panel, informing us that no women artists featured because society was er… different back then. Again, all very well. But rather than being enlightened – if you didn’t already know that we’ve come a long way on matters of race and gender since then – it was like someone tapping your shoulder, tutting, and doing a Marcel Marceau sad face. All silent tears and red braces.

And that’s where what I call my ‘dual heads’ end up butting heads. One head says: yes, to further our understanding of what is progress in society – the long road to where we are now, and where we still need to get to – is important. The other says: I don’t need to have an art gallery curate my thoughts, engineer my reactions, and divest me of the simple pleasure of appreciating a drawing. For the sake of it being… simply a drawing.

That may sound like boorish ignorance to some. Or a ‘first-world problem’. Or that I should go ‘check my privilege’ forthwith. But nah, sorry… because in the same vein, at the same gallery, I wouldn’t need a wee plaque telling me Degas was an anti-Semitic misogynist, or that Gaugin had his colonialist way with under-age Tahitian girls, or that any of the artists on show led terrible lives that would see them socially exiled today.

That’s not to say we ignore the character/societal flaws behind great works of artistic expression – be it painting, writing, music or anything else. Such inconvenient truths – the not so much dirty but filthy laundry that often goes hand in hand with total genius – do have a role in helping us get under the skin of art and artists. But I wonder if, more and more, we spotlight it to placate contemporary guilt rather than to aid appreciation.

That would be like oh… watching a comedy skit by the late Janey Godley, but with a tickertape of stuff she said on Twitter years ago rolling across the bottom of the screen. Or listening to Wagner, but with a recorded message played every 30 seconds stating that ‘Hitler couldn’t get enough of his stuff’. Or dropping Rabbie Burns from the Higher English curriculum in Scotland because he’s not ‘diverse’ enough. The last one is real.

Perhaps we should see the flawed world as it is/was, minus the need to reframe it with intrusions which seem there only as ‘safe words’, playing to the orthodoxies of modern audiences. Especially so when such reframing only serves to distract the eye from the beauty of the art itself.

As Rabbie said: “God knows, I’m no’ the thing I should be. Nor am I even the thing I could be.”

But I’ll wager we’re thankful for his ‘being’ nonetheless. ■