A derelict former power station in a rundown area of London is being transformed into one of the world’s great modern art museums and will be opened next May to the first of an anticipated 2 million visitors a year.
Tate Modern, on the south bank of the Thames River overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral on the north side, will be an extension of the existing Tate Gallery, which will now focus only on British art from the 15th Century to the present.
The new, $223-million museum will be linked to the north bank of the river by an elegant 1,056-foot-long, 13-foot-wide pedestrian bridge that will open in April and will be the first span across the river in London since Tower Bridge was built in 1894.
Tate Modern, which is expected to rank alongside the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris as one of the world’s great modern art museums, is the centerpiece of a number of artistic projects scheduled for opening in London next May and June.
The 18th Century Somerset House will become the new home for the Gilbert Collection of decorative arts, donated to Britain by the American entrepreneur Sir Arthur Gilbert, and will have permanent space for changing exhibitions from the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Other projects will include a $26.5 million expansion of the National Portrait Gallery, a $13.3 million refurbishment of Dulwich Picture Gallery, a redevelopment of the Imperial War Museum to include a new gallery dedicated to the Holocaust, and the opening of new exhibit space at the Wallace Collection.
All of these developments have been made possible, in part, by grants from the National Lottery, begun under former Prime Minister John Major.
“The legacy to this country of John Major was to create the Lottery,” said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery. “He will probably be best known for this. It has resulted in the transformation of the cultural landscape of this country. It has been a while since we have had major investment in our cultural infrastructure.”
The old Bankside Power Station, which provides the outer shell for the new Tate Modern, was completed in 1947 but abandoned in 1981. It is in the poor Southwark borough of London, and it looks across the river to one of the great centers of the nation’s wealth–the City, London’s financial district.
Southwark has been in decline since the warehouses and docks that lined the riverfront, heavily bombed in World War II, were abandoned after the war. There are 3,000 people living in public housing projects in the borough.
But Southwark has been undergoing a regeneration in recent years. The replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, opened in 1997, sits alongside the power station. A new arts center opened in Southwark in 1998, and the borough also has a new student facility for the London School of Economics, a major apartment development and a new museum of wine called Vinopolis.
A recent study estimated that Tate Modern will bring benefits of between $85 million and $150 million to the area each year, and will help create 2,400 jobs.
The Swiss architectural firm of Herzog and de Meuron won the contract to design Tate Modern, in competition with 147 other firms around the world. The architects have preserved the original building, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and even kept its distinctive tall chimney.
Their major innovation has been a glass structure running the length of the roof, which adds two floors to the building. The glass structure provides natural lighting for the upper galleries, and sweeping views of London. One of two restaurants in the museum will be on the top floor.
Lars Nittve, the Swedish-born director of Tate Modern, said the power station was chosen by the Tate after it had consulted various artists. “It is hard to find a good piece of land in the heart of London,” he said. “And these are remarkable spaces for art. Artists work with these types of (large) spaces, and the museum can land in the Southwark community without too big a splash. It took a long time for the Pompidou Center to develop a link into the community in Paris, but this building has been here a long time.”
Visitors will first enter a giant hall, 500 feet long and 115 feet high, that formerly housed the turbines that ran the power plant. Unilever, the multinational British-based foods and home and personal care products company, has donated $2 million to enable the Tate to commission five large-scale sculptures to go into the Turbine Hall over each of the next five years.
The first will be by the 88-year-old Paris-born American sculptress Louise Bourgeois, whose work remains under wraps until the May 12 opening and is being shipped here from New York.
“The Turbine Hall is an industrial cathedral,” said Nittve. “It addresses a scale no living artist has been able to work with until now.”
The building has seven floors, and most of the artworks will be exhibited on the third, fourth and fifth floors. To fill the space, the Tate has one of the world’s great collections of 20th Century art, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Gabo, Duchamp, Dali, Giacometti, Pollock, Rothko and Warhol.
Because of lack of space, less than 15 percent of the modern works can be exhibited at any one time. With the opening of Tate Modern, 60 percent can be displayed, and many of the most important works will be on view permanently. Other works that are rarely shown will get a viewing.
Nittve said the museum would have four “themed” exhibitions, each telling a story about 20th Century art. “I’m not disclosing the four themes,” he said. “That’s one of the surprises we are planning.”
The Tate expects to have three major loan exhibitions each year, one of them by a single artist, which will occupy the fourth floor. It will provide space for large-scale exhibitions that often have bypassed London because of the lack of a suitable facility.
Serota said a $53 million redevelopment of the existing Tate Gallery on the north bank of the Thames will be completed in 2001, and will provide new space for showing the works of such British artists as Hogarth, Blake and Spencer. The Tate Gallery, which draws 2.4 million visitors a year, will change its name to Tate Britain.
The new $26.5 million pedestrian bridge across the Thames will be a low-level suspension bridge of stainless steel railings and aluminum deck that has been designed by the leading British architect Sir Norman Foster in collaboration with Ove Arup & Partners and Sir Anthony Caro. Queen Elizabeth II will dedicate the bridge on May 9. It will be lighted at night to form a “blade of light” across the Thames, and the first lighting on June 8 will be accompanied by a huge fireworks display.
Until recently, access to Southwark by public transport has been poor, but that is changing too. An extension of the Jubilee Line on the London Underground (subway), mainly intended to take visitors to the Millennium Dome project in Greenwich, has just opened and has a station near Tate Modern.
A riverboat service, also intended primarily for the Dome, will take visitors from Tate Britain to Tate Modern, and there is a possibility of a shuttle-bus service between the two as well.
