London’s Latest Renaissance
LONDON — The new Tate Gallery of Modern Art opening on the south bank of the Thames River on May 11 is the epicenter for a seismic shake-up of London’s arts landscape.
Carved out of a massive former power plant, the museum is huge, rich and already humming with energy. It adds about 150,000 square feet of gallery space right next door to the renovated Globe Theatre, creating a cultural hub that will be linked to central London by a new river crossing, the Millennium Bridge.
The hulking brick and steel building, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the 1950s and topped with a two-story glass rectangle in the make-over, is the city’s most significant new museum in a century, and the symbol of an era that surely will be remembered as a gilded age for art in London.
The National Lottery and a prolonged period of economic prosperity have fueled an unprecedented museum expansion at the turn of the 21st century, with about $700 million in public and private donations invested in the Tate Modern and additions to at least half a dozen other musuems that are to be inaugurated this year and next.
Among facilities opening this spring and summer are a major new wing of the National Portrait Gallery; a centenary expansion of the painting and decorative arts museum, the Wallace Collection; a museum for the Gilbert Collection of decorative arts, installed in a neoclassical public building called Somerset House;, and an addition to London’s oldest museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
In addition to enhanced art spaces, London is also gaining a new wing at the Science Museum to present contemporary science and technology exhibits, a new gallery dedicated to the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum and, at the British Museum, a renovated Reading Room and inner courtyard, which is being transformed by architect Norman Foster into the Great Court, a public square the size of a soccer stadium that will be covered by an undulating glass and steel roof.
Finally, in 2001, the original Tate, renamed Tate Britain at Millbank and now dedicated to British art from 1500 to the present, will inaugurate six new galleries.
The museum expansions are complemented by a boom in new commercial galleries in east and south London, creating a citywide sense of momentum.
“There is a tremendous on-rush. Wherever you look, there are things happening,†said Richard Cork, art critic for the Times of London. “It is incredibly important, particularly the Tate Modern. At last we’ve got the full-fledged museum of modern art in this country that we’ve needed for 50 years. Finally, Britain is taking modern art seriously.â€
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At the end of April, just two weeks before the Tate Modern’s inauguration by Queen Elizabeth II, there were still cans of paint on the floor and test swatches of color on many walls. Wooden crates were scattered along corridors, and the enormous bronze spider legs of a Louise Bourgeois sculpture were lying haphazardly across an interior bridge, waiting to be assembled. Drills were screeching, and there was a faint smell of glue in the air.
Still, Lars Nittve, the director of the new museum, seemed remarkably relaxed as he explained the role of the new museum. “On the one hand, we are happening as a result of the art scene here in the last 10 to 20 years,†he said. “Artists paved the ground, made this possible. On the other hand, we want to provide what the London arts scene has been missing, which is an anchor, a focal point. We can provide a symbol of the energy in the arts scene.â€
Nittve, who came to the Tate from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, has been working for two years toward this opening, which he boasts is on schedule and on budget at about $215 million.
Tate Modern is expected to catapult Britain to the forefront of the international contemporary art world, thanks largely to the director of the parent Tate Gallery, Nicholas Serota, who saw the need to split the Tate collection in two and shepherded the new museum into existence, starting in the early ‘90s.
While it represents a huge change in the London arts scene, Tate Modern does not significantly change the waterfront scenery. This is not Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum transforming the down-at-the-heels Spanish city of Bilbao. Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were not asked to build something from scratch and, despite the new roof line and landscaping, from the outside Tate Modern still looks like it houses a massive oil-fired turbine.
Inside, however, London critics are already calling it an “industrial cathedral.†Visitors are drawn in along a ramp sloping down into the vast Turbine Hall--500 feet long and 100 feet high--that serves as the museum’s central plaza. The structural bolted steel beams have been sandblasted, and light pours in through the new roof. The energy is physical as well as creative: Transformers provide a dull hum in the background, from a substation still housed in a hidden corner of the building.
As with all of the new London museums, one of the main goals is accessibility--to increase public exposure to art by making museums bigger and friendlier, with bookstores, auditoriums and cafes as well as more galleries. Tate Modern does it in spades.
Between the top-floor cafe, with a panoramic view of the Thames, and London’s largest art bookstore downstairs, there are three floors of galleries, two of which are for the permanent exhibit. The space means the Tate will be able to display about 50% of its modern collection at any one time--at least four times what it was able to show at Millbank.
The collection is arranged in four galleries according to genre--history, landscape, still life and nudes--rather than by the more traditional chronological categories.
“The chronology of modern art has grown incredibly long,†Nittve said. “When [New York’s] MOMA was built in ‘29, it was a short story. There was not a big distance between classical, modern and contemporary art. Now it is a very long story.â€
“We are saying that artists of the same generation often are more inspired by and react more to what has been done before. No one believes there is one single true story of modern art. There are many stories. Or, there are equally good suggestions for ways of looking at modern art,†Nittve said.
“We want to show how these 17th century genres are still alive in art, how they have mutated, expanded and changed over the years.â€
On this day, the galleries were closed to all but those involved in hanging pictures and securing them. As seen through windows, they were spare, white rooms with floors of unfinished oak or concrete, spaces that will not compete with the artworks.
The Guardian newspaper’s Jonathan Glancey, who has been allowed to tour some of the galleries, wrote that “the art on display is an eclectic collection--truly something for everyone--in precise white galleries, some with views out to St. Paul’s [Cathedral] diffused by net curtain-like screens, others enclosed, like that displaying the intensely layered red and purple canvases of Mark Rothko.â€
Others who have not seen the thematic exhibits worry about the possibilities. Keith Patrick, editor of Contemporary Visual Arts said in an interview, “I think it’s rather spurious and not necessarily original; you could get some alarming juxtapositions, like some wonderful Matisse bronze reliefs of a female behind in different aspects of abstraction next to that rather gross and popular poster of a female tennis player scratching her bottom.â€
Similar criticisms already have been lobbed at the revamped Tate Britain, which is now also hung by genre, not chronology.
One floor of Tate Modern is reserved for temporary exhibits, the first of which will be a display of single-room installations called “Between Cinema and a Hard Place,†after a video of the same name by Gary Hill of Seattle. Here, Nittve said, is where Tate Modern can prove it is quick on its feet as well as being a solid and well-researched museum.
“We want to stay alive, close to the artists, to be quick and flexible in ways that institutions that have been around a long time find much harder,†Nittve said.
Some critics have suggested that the opening of the Tate Modern leaves a vacuum at the Tate Britain, which Patrick said risks becoming “an ethnographic museum.â€
The Tate’s split into two museums also risks confusing the public, as British contemporary artists are to remain part of Tate Britain but may also appear across the river as part of the international scene at Tate Modern. The annual exhibit of finalists for the Turner Prize for British contemporary art, for example, which has drawn ever larger crowds, still will be at Tate Britain.
But Nittve doesn’t see a problem. Tate Britain will grow. Some artists will be on display in both museums. Others may be moved back and forth.
“This year [David] Hockney might be more present at Tate Britain, but next year it might be the other way around,†he said.
In the meantime, the hottest ticket in town is to the opening of Tate Modern on May 11, a lavish reception for about 4,000 of London’s hippest and richest art fans.
And Nittve expects the heat wave to last. His goal is to attract more than 2 million visitors a year. But can he really draw that kind of crowd with everything else going on in the London art world?
“Together you increase interest in visual art, you expand the audience. The hotter the situation is, the more public you get,†Nittve said.
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Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery, agrees. “Increasingly, people want to be in the public sphere in places where they can do something purposeful,†Saumarez Smith said.
The art business already is booming, particularly at free, major museums such as the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery where “there is no pressure of value for money,†he said. Visitors stroll in, look at some art, have a coffee, browse in an art bookshop and see some more of the museum. In addition to works of art, the public wants its museums to offer lectures, biographical films and even concerts.
“In all of this new building, there is a conscious and unconscious attempt to take account of the shift in public expectations about what a gallery should offer,†Saumarez Smith said.
Guidelines drawn up by the previous government of Tory Prime Minister John Major for National Lottery funds stressed public access, and the current Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has continued to emphasize “the democratization of access to the arts,†he said.
At the National Portrait Gallery in central London, which opened in 1896 to promote an appreciation of the men and women who have made British history and culture, this “democratization†began in the 1960s when the museum introduced photography to its exhibits and then lifted its “10-year ruleâ€--that a person had to be dead for 10 years before appearing on the gallery walls.
“Seeing figures who have been part of their own life experience gives people a sense of their own identity. . . . Gradually, through the 1980s, the balance shifted from distant past to recent past to contemporary society,†Saumarez Smith said.
The museum opened new ground-floor galleries in 1993, but found that the public began to ignore the historical art that suddenly seemed to be hidden away in the stairwell and upper galleries. The museum had to expand, but how could it do so in a crowded block behind the National Gallery?
In a rare move for museum administrators, normally a jealous bunch, Saumarez Smith and Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery, agreed to a trade. The Portrait Gallery handed over about 4,300 square feet of gallery space to the National Gallery in exchange for the right to build on a long, narrow courtyard they had shared.
On that land now stands a $25- million wing designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, architects of the newly renovated Royal Opera House.
Inside the bright foyer of the new wing an escalator of a length usually reserved for the London Underground carries visitors up to a balcony for 20th century portraits--Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch and Joan Collins among them. This airy white gallery provides a striking contrast to the somber Tudor Gallery upstairs, its walls covered in the gray felt used for military overcoats.
The museum also has a new lecture theater and an information technology study center, but perhaps the best addition is a rooftop restaurant with one of the most interesting views in London. The picture windows overlook a series of National Gallery roofs that lead the eye to the back of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square--a hard-to-get perspective--and on to the church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, the Houses of Parliament and the city’s new observation wheel, the London Eye. It is a fantastic “portrait of the nation,†as the architects claim.
In summarizing the changes at the Portrait Gallery, the Evening Standard newspaper’s Rowan Moore wrote, “What was a baffling mess is now a lucid pleasure, with the modern white architecture adding to the NPG’s accumulation of historical layers.â€
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Among the other historical buildings undergoing modern renovations are the 18th century Somerset House on the north bank of the Thames; the Wallace Collection at Hertford House on Manchester Square; and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Regency architect John Soane during the 19th century.
Somerset House, former government offices designed by George III’s architect, William Chambers, is the only wholly new museum, providing a permanent home to the Gilbert Collection of decorative arts. Arthur Gilbert, a British-born entrepreneur from Los Angeles, donated the collection of about 800 pieces of gold, silver, snuffboxes and mosaics to Britain in 1996 after pulling it from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a dispute over its display.
Gilbert calls himself “a maniacal collector,†but said on the eve of the inauguration that he always felt his collection of aristocratic objets d’art “belonged to the people.â€
The collection will be installed in the refurbished South Building and the Embankment Building, which once housed stables, storage space and workshops, facing the Thames. Additionally, in the center of the 1,000-room Somerset House, a courtyard that used to be a parking lot will be turned into a public plaza--with fountains, restaurants and shops--that will double as an open-air concert hall. In all, Somerset House’s renovation will open up more than 100,000 square feet of the historic building to the public.
In other parts of London, American-born architect Rick Mather is developing the Wallace Collection and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. At the Wallace Collection--which includes paintings, sculpture, furniture and porcelain amassed by the four marquesses of Hertford and Sir Robert Wallace, the illegitimate son of the fourth--he has covered the central courtyard in glass and excavated former stables, an 18th century kitchen and Word War I air raid shelter to add such things as a library and lecture theater. New galleries will allow the museum to set up an arts conservation exhibit, a room for its watercolors and a display of its reserve collection of fakes.
“Our desire is to explain things better, to help the visitor understand and fall in love with the art,†said director Rosalind Savill.
Dulwich, with a collection of paintings by 17th and 18th century European masters, has undergone similar improvements. Mather has refurbished the original gallery and created a new building linked to it by a glass and bronze cloister. The new building houses an arts education center, lecture and exhibit room and cafe.
Soane’s original facade at the Dulwich had been masked by earlier additions and its restoration nets more display space for the picture gallery. The whole is expected to draw a wider public to what Sunday Telegraph art critic John McEwen calls “sleepy museums.†He adds wryly that there is a risk that the changes “may disappoint some old Londoner hands who used to like taking their mistresses and lovers to a quiet out-of-the-way museum on a Sunday afternoon.â€
But Louise Jury, art correspondent for the Independent on Sunday, said these new spaces from cutting-edge Tate Modern to the traditional Dulwich “can only encourage more people to go and look at art. Even if one isn’t interested so much in the exhibits, the spaces which have been opened up are worth looking at. But I think it is very hard not to be enthused by the contemporary art scene in London at the moment. There is a lot of imagination in it and people seem to want to see it.â€
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Times London researcher Janet Stobart contributed to this report.
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