Located in front of the Saint-Paul cathedral in London, the Tate Modern, dedicated to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, opened its doors in May 2000 in a power plant rehabilitated by the Herzog and Meuron architects. She was then led by Lars Nittve. At the inauguration, the mother sculpture, a bronze spider ten meters high ordered in Louise Bourgeois, is installed in the Hall turbine. It weaves a symbolic link between the rooms, where the works are presented according to a non -chronological course.
This choice is dictated by a still limited collection and an immense space. Monet of the 1910s were hung in the face of works by Richard Long dating from the 2000s, causing the ire of certain criticisms. However, this time rupture allows the Tate to present art “Like an implacable sequence of experience, there was neither beginning nor end. There was only an eternal present “writes the art critic Waldermar Januszak.
“The Tate Modern has completely changed the face of London museums. We did not have a museum dedicated to modern art and it quickly acquired a status, in the same way as the MoMA (…) and the Pompidou museum (…), even if questions remain as for its collections “added the art historian Tim Marlow, now director of design Museum.
On the left the extension of the Tate Modern.
In 2006, the critic Jonathan Jones expressed his disappointment to Frances Morris, then responsible for exhibitions. She answers him, according to The Guardianthat “The different types of visitors had different needs”and that the mixture of times appeals in particular to adolescents.
The success was immediate: two million visitors were expected in the first year, they are finally 5.25 million. In 2003, on the occasion of the installation of a setting sun by Olafur Eliasson, the BBC broadcast the weather from the museum. In 2007, Doris Salcedo created Shibboleth, a crack of 167 meters on the ground of the Hall turbine. This “Gulf of the story that separates the whites from non-white people”according to the artist, materializes a negative space. Exhibitions follow one another, from Modigliani (2017-2018) to Cézanne (2022), while the collection reaches nearly 70,000 works from 2015.
In 2016, the opening of the Switch House (Blavatnik Building), a gross concrete pyramid, added 21,000 m² to the existing 34,000 m². In 2019, it became the most visited museum in the United Kingdom, going beyond the British Museum, notably thanks to the 2018 Picasso exhibition. But the 2020 pandemic slows down this momentum. The after-Cavid marks a sustainable fall in attendance, mainly foreign, resulting in posts. In 2023, with 4.7 million visitors, the Tate Modern was the fourth British tourist attraction, a figure still behind the front.
In January 2025, its director since 2023, Karin Hindsbo, declared to Journal des Arts :: “The museum has always been a pioneer in its way of diversifying the guns of art, focused on the West. Today, we continue to work in this sense, at the transnational level. »»
From May 9 to 12, the festivities will be held around mom’s resettlement in the turbine hall. It will be the starting point for a route of 25 major works within the Tate Modern. Among them, the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik from Dorothea Tanning. Two free exhibitions will also open their doors: “A Year in Art: 2050” and “Gathering Ground”, which will bring together the latest acquisitions of the Tate, including works by Outi Pieski, Carolina Caycedo and Edgar Calel, as well as an installation ordered from Abbas Zahedi.
The new extension of the Tate Modern, London, October 2016
© Ludovic Sanejouand for The Arts Journal
