The world’s largest modern art museum is now open
Adrian Searle
The opening of Tate Modern is a watershed in the cultural life of Britain. It signals the importance of the art of our times, and its centrality in British culture.
Unlike most of the big cities and capitals of the Western world, London has never had a museum dedicated to the permanent display of international modern art, and there has never been a museum anywhere on quite this scale.
Tate Modern isn’t just an extension of an existing museum; it is as important a venture as the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Tate Modern is bigger than either. Does that make it better?
It is huge. It is the largest modern art museum in the world. Half of it is a vast, echoing space. High up behind the tiers and clerestories are more than 50 galleries, half-rooms and ante-chambers comprising six suites of showing spaces on three levels. The galleries are practical, flexible and often very beautiful.
Nothing prepares you for this. One moment you are plunged into a blacked-out video installation, the next you find yourself in a river-lit pause between galleries, the Thames below, St Paul’s Cathedral across the river. You go from killer set-pieces – a room devoted to the severities of minimalism, say, to small and elegant chambers with few works. Turn again, and a view into the Turbine Hall plunges the eye into a space that feels all the bigger for its containment.
After this, Tate Britain at Millbank feels cramped, parsimonious and a bit shabby. Its inadequacies for the job it has had to do are suddenly all too apparent. Standing in Tate Modern, Millbank might as well be as far upstream as Berkshire. And what of the art, those parts of the Tate’s collection that the Tate has decided, for reasons undoubtedly as political as they are aesthetic, are Modern rather than British?
In common with most modern art museums the Tate has in the past grouped its collection in terms of movements, isms and historical determinism.
You know where you are with an ism. Impressionism begat post-impressionism, which begat cubism, which sired futurism, expressionism and all manner of errant abstractions. This model, which was never altogether clear and was attended by all manner of bolt-on caveats and contradictions, has been under attack for at least three decades.
Tate Modern’s curators have taken on board the need to present art in a different way, even if paintings still hang on walls, and some sculptures insist on the quaintness of plinths. The Tate has made four stabs at presenting its collection. Landscape becomes Landscape/ Matter/Environment, the figure is now Nude/Action/Body, and still life is Still Life/Object/Real Life. History/Memory/ Society stands, I guess, for everything else. Each of these sections realigns parts of the Tate’s collection, as well as a significant number of loans, to tell the story of modern art in four distinct ways on two levels of Tate Modern.
The different thematic groupings are interchangeable, impermanent and contingent. I am quite happy with this as an idea, as it seems to be the only direction worth pursuing. But really it is a substitute for one’s own map. It is also obvious, walking into a room filled with the Tate’s surrealist collection, that calling this collection Inner Worlds and locating it in the landscape section is about as arbitrary as you can get.
Too many of the conjunctions and alignments here are so awful that one hopes they are very temporary indeed. The most glaringly awful, perhaps, is the room containing the large, tremblingly beautiful Monet waterlily painting, which for many years hung in the National Gallery, opposite a wall-filling black-and-white splattery drawing by Richard Long. What do these two artists share, apart from an interest in nature?
The perceptual field of the Monet and the all-over effect of the Long wall-drawing have nothing useful to say to or about one another. What does Long’s red slate circle, down on the floor like a miniature mountain range, have to say for itself? Suddenly it is a stone water lily. This is crass.
But you get used to the jolts. In a room called The Intelligent Object, Michael Craig-Martin’s glass of water that thinks it is an oak tree finds itself with a Georges Braque painting of a glass on a table, a drawing of Duchamp’s coffee grinder (the bachelor grinds his own coffee, ho ho), a computer designed by Richard Hamilton, and a little Giorgio Morandi 1946 still life. Craig-Martin finds himself again alongside Patrick Caulfield, Roy Lichtenstein and furniture sculptures by Richard Artschwager. Standing here I feel as though I’m turning into Tintin. If I look down I’ll find myself surrounded by an outline.
Putting the watercolour female figures of Marlene Dumas opposite Matisse’s series of relief Backs is quite joyous: the lightness of Dumas’s wash figures and the chocolatey heaviness of the Matisse relief bronzes play off one another to mutual advantage. The big, double-height gallery containing classic works of minimal art – Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes, a lowering and dangerous Richard Serra, a beautiful Eva Hesse, Don Judd and Carl Andre – is breathtaking. This work is in the Body suite, and it makes sense only in that these quasi-industrial and geometric forms make us aware what gawky, lumpy, strange, compound beings we are.
Returning to the History/Memory/Society section, one moves from a room devoted to Picasso’s Weeping Woman and the Spanish civil war, to a smallish room called The Grid. There, Carl Andre’s infamous bricks, a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, a quiet linear painting by Agnes Martin and a stunningly beautiful Jasper Johns white-on-white numbers painting from 1959 are all roped off to one side, so one can’t actually see the Johns or the Martin head-on. This is worse than frustrating.
The Andre bricks lie half over one of the industrial-looking (but fake) grilles in the floor, part of the gallery’s climate control system. This entire room is a replay of Rosalind Krauss’s 1978 essay on the grid, recontextualised to highlight the grid’s metaphoric relation to social order. Whether it is always what the artists had in mind is another matter.
On we go, walking through a room of Frank Auerbach paintings straight into Joseph Beuys. What do these two artists share? A belief in unseen forces, perhaps, which in Auerbach’s paintings are evidenced by angular vectors in the sky.
The Beuys room is one of the most beautiful galleries in Tate Modern. This tall space, illuminated by daylight streaming in through Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s original bank of narrow windows, is gorgeous but too crowded. Beuys’s overwhelming Lightning With Stag In Its Glare, with its huge suspended lump and smaller, delicate elements arranged on the floor about it, is somehow diminished and confused by the plugged stones of his equally monumental End Of The Twentieth Century, and all the other bits of Beuysabilia, the vitrines and blackboards that share the room.
I’m carping. I don’t really mind all these problematic moments. This, surely, is part of the unending job of making sense of the past and the present.
Never before has so much of the Tate’s holdings been on show. Some of the rooms devoted to individuals (Tony Cragg, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman) are great. The conjunction of Giacometti’s sculptures with two Barnett Newman paintings is splendid.
I’m so happy to see Absalon here, with one of his singular white habitations, even if you can’t go inside it, and it is good to see the resuscitation of 1940s and 1950s French art, especially Fautrier’s Hostage heads, his grim, effaced echoes of Medardo Rosso.
Sarah Lucas finally meets Hans Bellmer in a deliciously nasty room of uncomfortable objects, which also collides a macabre Chapman brothers machine with Dali’s lobster telephone.
A Robert Gober leg pokes out of the wall, down at ground level in a corner. Sometimes small moments have the greatest effect.
The collection may be weirdly arranged, but overall the past 100 years or so of art make a kind of broad sense here.
The display, flawed and problematic as it is, reminds us that modern art is still an experiment, rather than a linear progression of indisputable masterpieces. There’s a moral here somewhere.
Whatever feels transient and deficient, or modish and awkward about the displays in Tate Modern, I am unashamed of my enthusiasm for so much of the work here that I can forgive almost anything. This is great.