TJ McNamara: Lively treasure houses offer more than art

In Munich there are two grand art museums - the Old (Alte Pinakothek) and the New (Neue Pinakothek) which, despite its name, is a collection of mainly 19th-century art.

They have been joined by a really new art museum, the Moderne Pinakothek.

This pattern of grand old museums and a new gallery is followed in most of the big cities of Europe and the new galleries are a source of great civic pride. In London the National Gallery has been joined by the Tate Modern with its access across the elegant Millennium Bridge. The Prado in Madrid is complemented by the Queen Sophia Centre. In Paris there is the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre which first set the pattern, and Vienna has two modern museums of art just opened across the road from the famous Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Vienna's modern museums share with the Moderne Pinakothek a bold brutality of architecture. They are not as minimally simple as the Museum of Modern Art in Berlin which was the last work of Mies van der Rohe, but lack the severe proportions of that building. They do not have the graceful curves that give style to the modern art galleries in Stuttgart or Dusseldorf and are a world away from the spectacular waves of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

All these museums of modern art have taken on special social functions.

The older museums are crowded as never before. Art has become an industry and a museum such as the Prado is continually crowded. The voices you hear, once mostly American and Japanese, are now predominantly Spanish. The great old museums are filled with the people of their own nation. Growth of national pride is expressed in a pride of artistic achievement, and the enormous growth of vividly illustrated literature on art has led to the immense interest.

There is a parallel growth of explainers. Earnest young people addressing groups of older people, explaining, helping, elucidating. There are teachers, too, with groups of children, explaining the visual masterpieces to a generation whose experience is more visual than literary.

In the old museums the school groups are mostly primary age children.

The museums of modern art attract the secondary schools and groups from the polytechnics: the link with the polytechnics may be because of the emphasis on design as well as art.

The new Moderne Gallery in Munich has a vast atrium and a huge staircase. Above ground level is the painting and sculpture; below are the exhibitions on 20th-century design. They are full of cars, motorcycles, ceramics, jewellery and furniture. There is a permanent show devoted to the development and manufacture of the many varieties of Bentwood chair.

These wonderful, spectacular modern galleries are much more than places of instruction and treasure houses. They are meeting places offering a variety of cafes and restaurants where people come to meet, talk and celebrate the art.

The number of places to eat and drink in the Tate Modern almost seems excessive but the way they are all filled with lively, talking, laughing and interested people is ample justification.

The blockbuster exhibition still reigns. At the Grand Palais in Paris the passionate interest shown in London in the Matisse/Picasso show continued. At the same venue was a big exhibition of that most English of painters, John Constable, curated by Lucian Freud. It, too, was drawing large crowds and the explainers.

In London there was the biggest gathering of paintings by Gainsborough at the Tate Britain and a grim show of Aztec art at the Royal Academy. Prints and drawings by the great German Albrecht Durer at the British Museum drew crowds.

The British Museum, which opened in 1759, is a combination of the old and modern. The Great Court is a wonder of modern architecture with its marvellous roof and splendid use of its circularity to facilitate movement in the museum.

It was home to one of the two most impressive recent works that I saw. One room in the curved structure around the former Reading Room was given over to a work by Antony Gormley, the British sculptor who created the monumental Angel of the North near Newcastle. Gormley's Field for the British Isles at the museum was not a giant work but 40,000 small ceramic figures. He was helped by children and adults. Each figure was made by a squeeze of the clay, the pressure of two thumbs and a push of a pencil for two eyes. The immense crowd of the figures reach out of sight around the curve of the space so they became symbols of humanity - all similar but each with an individual difference, all looking upward in hope.

The second work, by Anish Kapoor in the Tate Modern, was said to be the largest sculpture in Europe. The Turbine Hall in this gallery is an immense space but this extraordinary construction of taut, stretched translucent tan fabric filled the entire space. Two huge horns grew from a circular centre. Its great size offered sensations that would be impossible to photograph adequately. Every view vanished over a hill to infinity. It was an unparalleled demonstration of how humans create, enclose and define space which still in nature remains infinite.

Old and new galleries still make room for magnificent new work. We are lucky in Auckland that we too have this divided capacity.