From Tutankhamun to the Terracotta Army via Monet and Velázquez, a familiar name with blockbuster potential has long been at the top of every curator’s wish list. But now one of the galleries that did most to develop the phenomenon is turning its back on the “big-name, big-audience” strategy.

Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery, said yesterday that the 184-year-old institution had a duty to display art with which the public is unfamiliar rather than yet another parade of a famous artist’s greatest hits.

Speaking about the forthcoming exhibition of the little-known Italian Divisionists, Dr Penny, who took up his post last week, said that 20 years ago people expected exhibitions to introduce them to new art. Too many blockbusters today show people images that they already know.

“The responsibility of a major gallery is to show people something they haven’t seen before,” he said. “A major national institution should be one that proves a constant attraction to the public. What is important is encouraging historical and visual curiosity in the general public.”

He added: “I have a lot of thinking to do about our exhibitions and the direction they are taking.”

His arrival at the front line of British art is likely to stoke debate on the role major galleries and museums should play in public life. The start of the modern blockbuster exhibition is often sourced to Tutankhamun, when 1.7 million people filed through the British Museum in 1972 to see the boy king’s golden death mask.

In the 36 years since then, nearly every conceivable artistic and archaelogical heavyweight has been packaged up for one of the crowd-pleasing shows that power the budgets of the big museums and galleries. Dr Penny’s predecessors staged major exhibitions devoted to some of the behemoths of art, notably Velázquez, Titian and Vermeer, which have each drawn up to 300,000 visitors.

Down the road from the National in Piccadilly, Sir Norman Rosenthal, the outgoing exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, has laid on even more lavish spectaculars such as a Monet exhibition that stayed open into the early hours, and Sensation, which made household names of the new generation of British artists.

A short walk to the north, the British Museum has sold 700,000 tickets for its current show featuring the Chinese Terracotta Warriors. Across the river, at the O2, a second Tutankhamun show is doing similarly robust business. Despite this, Dr Penny received qualified support from leading figures in the field yesterday.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director, exhibitions and programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, said that a blockbuster show designed purely with box-office takings in mind would be “meaningless”. He said: “A good exhibition has to produce knowledge in the people who see it but it also has to attract people in the first place. It’s not ‘either or’ — it can be ‘both and’.”

The exhibition that Dr Penny introduced yesterday is less immediately familiar. Giovanni Segantini, Luigi Russolo and Giuseppe Pellizza are not well known in Britain. Nor is the Italian Divisionist group with which they were affiliated. Only one of their works is in a British public collection, the Walker in Liverpool — a Segantini bought in the 1890s — and no major exhibition has been staged in Britain.

Dr Penny said that the Divisionists were “enormously prized” in their home country, having revolutionised the medium of painting at a time when Italian art had lost the preeminence it held in earlier centuries.

The National Gallery came into existence in 1824 after the Commons voted to buy 36 paintings for the nation from the banker John Julius Angerstein

Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891–1910, from June 18 to September 7.

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