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Organisation
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2020
Hyundai Commission: Kara Walker, Fons Americanus, 2019, installation view; photograph © Ben Fisher, courtesy of Tate
TATE MAY BE a name immediately associated today with modern and con-
London Irish FRANK WASSER REFLECTS ON 20 YEARS OF TATE MODERN.
temporary art, but its origins are entangled in a flamboyant and restrained conservatism, that arguably still underpins parts of the upper echelons of the contemporary British art world. In 1938, James Bolivar Manson, director of the Tate Gallery (est. 1897), said that the gallery would “never ever own a work by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth or Picasso”. However, by 1988, a significant collection had been amassed, with the majority of works dating from the 19th century. The Tate collection was so expansive that less than ten percent could be hung at any one time, since a substantial amount of space was dedicated to J.M.W. Turner and Henry Moore.1 Remarkably, in the late 1980s, London had no major museum solely dedicated to modern and contemporary art, akin to established giants such as Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York or the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ireland’s Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) also predates the arrival of Tate Modern by nine years, opening its doors in 1991. In December 1992, the Board of Trustees at the Tate Gallery announced its intention to create a new gallery for international modern and contemporary art. A decision had been made to expand the gallery into a new building at another location, due to a severe lack of space in the original Millbank building. Potential sites for the building included a car park, now home to the London Eye, and the iconic Battersea Power Station, which proved too expensive to develop in the mid-90s. The former Bankside Power Station, originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was eventually selected as the site of the new gallery in 1994, after then-director, Nicolas Serota, managed to convince the board that such an ambitious project was achievable. In 1995, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were appointed to convert the building into a museum of modern art, despite previously being commissioned for smaller projects, the largest and most notable of which had been a railway switch tower in Basel. Their pragmatic proposal retained many of the original features and cathedral-esque character of Gilbert Scott’s building. The building had been redundant since 1981, which stacked neatly into the timely use of abandoned buildings by the
