Facelift and fresh direction for Tate

Having been temporarily upstaged by the Tate Modern, writes NIGEL REYNOLDS, London's original Tate Gallery now has a new look of its own.

The Tate Gallery, a former favourite destination on any arts tour of London, has been given a flamboyant face lift. The Prince of Wales raised the curtain on a night of star-studded revels as he formally reopened the gallery last Tuesday.

Later, the capital's fashionable elite, often accused of blindly going to any party with some wild, modern art attached, proved it has a traditional underside when 2000 guests led by the likes of Icelandic pop singer Bjork and fashion designer Stella McCartney danced into the small hours.

Formerly the plain Tate Gallery at Millbank, it has had to refresh itself since its sibling Tate Modern was created at Bankside, on the other side of the Thames, 18 months ago. When that was opened, the party of the year that followed helped to attract more than five million visitors in the first 12 months.

At the new Tate Britain, which displays British art from 1500 to the present day, Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, writer Hanif Kureishi, rock star Bryan Ferry and fashion designer Nicole Farhi were among the throng that mingled in a more conservative atmosphere, surrounded by Constables, Holbeins and Gainsboroughs.

They were celebrating the reopening of the complete gallery. Parts have been closed for a £31 million ($NZ110.7 million) rebuilding project which has seen nine new galleries added, increasing hanging space by 25 per cent.



In his speech, the Prince of Wales accused schools of skimping on art education. "It is encouraging to note that there are now some 70,000 art students at work in this country," he said.

"What is less encouraging, perhaps, is the fact that in some secondary and primary schools less than 60p per pupil per year is spent on art materials.

"A basic knowledge of art is still too readily dismissed by too many as a luxury that has little to do with the business of life.

"Of course, it has everything to do with the business of life.

"Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is the duty of all of us to ensure that art practice and its appreciation remains an essential ingredient of the modern education we give our schoolchildren."

The Independent's art writer Tom Lubbock liked the new look. "Last year, when Tate Modern opened on Bankside, Tate Britain was in a tricky position. It was upstaged, and it looked as if it had been left behind. It didn't close, but it wasn't fully open.

"In the past year and a half, it has put together some excellent exhibitions - Blake and Gillray, for example - but at the same time, it has been under construction. Basically, it was ticking over.

Now, the work is revealed. There are four new rooms added to the main floor of galleries, and five old ones have been revamped. There's also an extra suite of special exhibition galleries on the lower floor, and an extra entrance. There's also, naturally, a new shop.

Large structural changes like this are spectacular, but you soon come to take them for granted. The new hanging policy will be of more lasting interest.

When it opened in spring last year, Tate Britain adopted a chaotic, non-chronological display, each room filled with an allsorts pick'n'mix of pictures connected by some very loose themes - the land, the city, fantasy, portrait. This now appears to have been a temporary aberration.

The new hang returns broadly to chronology - British art from 1500 to now - but with some intelligent thematic steering. There are galleries devoted, say, to Britain and Italy in the 18th century, or the First World War. There's a William Blake room in which Blake's work is shown with a wall of 20th-century Blakist works - by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, David Jones - acknowledging the way that English modernism found in Blake a natural forerunner. There are single artist concentrations, too: two rooms given to Constable, early and late; a room to Wyndham Lewis.

This is a focused and impermanent display. It doesn't show all of the gallery's greatest hits all of the time. It will shift its focus every so often, particularly at the modern and contemporary end. But the framework seems sound.-

INDEPENDENT