‘It's my proudest achievement': Tate Modern at 25

Telegraph

24-04-2025

Ten days before Tate Modern opened in a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames, a trustee of the gallery expressed concern that nobody would find it. 'He was really worried,' recalls Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director from 1988 to 2017. 'And I had to say, 'Well, you live in Chelsea, and it's rather a long way from Chelsea to Bankside, but I think other people will find their way across Blackfriars Bridge.''
They did. Despite 'a slight sense of disbelief, because it had all happened relatively quickly', Serota had an inkling from the off that Tate Modern would be a success, because, he recalls, 'the Queen didn't disapprove when she opened it' on May 10, 2000, even if 'she was a bit nonplussed by what she was being shown'. The first work to greet Elizabeth II was Maman (1999), a gigantic bronze spider by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, which, to mark Tate Modern's 25th birthday, is returning to the same spot, on top of a footbridge, ahead of a weekend of events next month. 'I remember taking the Queen into a room of Bridget Riley's [abstract] paintings,' Serota says. 'Afterwards, she said, 'It was rather dazzling.''
Nobody, though, predicted the scale of the gallery's success. Tate Modern had prepared for two million visitors, but, during its first year alone, five million people came to check it out. I was one of them, captivated, like everybody else, by the vast, awe-inspiring void of the 500ft-long Turbine Hall, which, Serota says, 'challenged artists to make proposals on a scale and with a boldness that they hadn't been able to achieve elsewhere'. It became the backdrop for some of the most spectacular art installations ever staged in this country – including, unforgettably, The Weather Project (2003), by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.
This gigantic, illusory sun, powered by 200 mono-frequency lights, seemed to be setting beneath a mirrored ceiling – and, Eliasson tells me, 'transformed' his career. He remembers waking up after the press preview to find his work reproduced on every front page on a news-stand near his hotel: 'It was a big thing.'
Materially, he tells me, the installation 'was very easy to do: just half a disc, smoke, and mirrors.' But the 'unifying and inclusive' underlying concept – creating, as he puts it, 'a living environment', in the manner of a piazza – proved enormously popular, attracting 'an influx of first-time museum-goers, who sat down on the floor'. What were they getting from this artwork, as they picked out their reflections high above? 'Feeling seen,' replies Eliasson, who says that the public's reaction made Tate Modern 'more self-confident' and helped them realise that a museum's activities could have a 'social dimension'.
Today, it seems absurd that, as recently as the 1990s, London had no institution to rival the Centre Pompidou in Paris or New York's Museum of Modern Art. Before Serota took over at Tate, its trustees were planning to construct several pavilions, including a 'Museum of 20th Century Art', beside the gallery's 19th-century home (now Tate Britain) on Millbank. 'I felt that the museum, as designated on this plan, was much too small and insignificant,' Serota recalls. By 1992, the trustees agreed: a new, bigger site for Tate's modern art museum had to be found.
Six spots were seriously considered, including London's Docklands, Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, King's Cross, Vauxhall, and Battersea Power Station – which, Serota says, 'was regarded as too remote'. In the end, Tate plumped for Giles Gilbert Scott's brick-clad Bankside Power Station, which had closed in 1981 – even though, as Serota recalls, 'large parts of it were derelict: the roof over the Turbine Hall was letting in water significantly.'
Yet, he continues, its 'raw space [was] appealing, because, over the past 30 years, artists had increasingly colonised those kinds of spaces in which to show, as well as make, their work.' He also had in mind successfully converted industrial buildings elsewhere, such as a former police garage in Los Angeles that the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry had transformed into 40,000 square feet of exhibition space, which opened in 1983.
'I can remember standing on the other side of the Thames, by St Paul's,' Serota says, 'looking through this slot of space, which is now occupied by the Millennium Bridge, and thinking, 'If this building were in Dusseldorf or Amsterdam, it would already be a museum.''
Its full potential wasn't evident, though, until Tate Modern's Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron, became involved. They were appointed in 1995, following a swift competition (held quickly so that the project could stand a chance of winning funding from the Millennium Commission, which provided £50 million), because of the unique 'brilliance', as Serota puts it, of their proposal: to take out a false floor at ground level, and so 'open the full height of the Turbine Hall to form a single gallery and entrance space', accessed by a ramp.
While raising the £135 million that was eventually required to create Tate Modern, Serota was helped by the succès de scandale of the Young British Artists, who captivated the media during the 1990s, and galvanised an apathetic public into getting excited about contemporary art. According to Chris Smith, who, following New Labour's landslide in 1997, became Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and helped to deliver Tate Modern: 'There were grumpy old codgers who were saying, 'I don't know what all this fuss is about: piles of bricks and urinals and slabs of colour daubed on a canvas. This is not real art.' But they were very firmly in the minority.'
Nevertheless, Serota recalls that there was 'a lot of controversy' about the presentation of the permanent collection, which adopted a thematic, transnational approach. (Traditionally, museums favour chronological displays, or displays organised by different 'schools' of art, because they help confer coherence on art history's complexities.) In part, Serota concedes, this was a 'tactical' decision.
Simply to present a series of displays on a totally chronological basis, beginning in 1900 and ending in 2000, would have meant that we were putting ourselves up against the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou, and there was no contest in terms of the quality of the collection,' he explains. 'Tate has some wonderful things' – The Snail (1953) by Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962) spring to mind – 'but it can't match those other two institutions, in terms of telling a very standard [i.e., European and North American] story.'
Since the start, Tate Modern has sought to expand the canon (although Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which Serota co-curated in 2014, attracted more than 562,000 visitors, and was, for many years, its most popular exhibition). Later this year, the gallery will stage an exhibition of work by the Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, as well as an installation, within the Turbine Hall, by Máret Ánne Sara, an indigenous artist from the northern European region of Sápmi.
'This year is quite strong when it comes to indigenous art,' admits Tate Modern's director, Karin Hindsbo who tells me that she is 'working on' restoring Tate Modern's flagging audience (the gallery's visitor figures are still around one-fifth lower than before the pandemic), as well as achieving a 'balanced budget'. 'Obviously, when you have a deficit budget, it's not a sustainable situation,' says Hindsbo, who concedes that there has been a recent 'reduction' in staff numbers at the gallery, although she points out that the process has been 'voluntary'.
For Serota, he and his team's work on Tate Modern remains his 'proudest achievement'. He still recalls a time in Britain when, as he puts it, 'modern and contemporary art had never been shown with real conviction, but always with a slight sense of apology, or of trying to connect it with tradition, rather than see it in its own terms… There was a feeling that Britain was a literary rather than a visual culture, and that somehow other people did it better than us.'
Yet, he believes, Tate Modern 'forged a new way of thinking about what museums could be', and 'made people feel less frightened by contemporary art, more willing to deal with uncertainty, challenge. So, it has given confidence.'
This was certainly the effect it had on me when I was still a student, learning about the art of ancient Greece and Rome. In 2002, I encountered Marsyas, an extruded, 500ft-long red PVC-membrane trumpet by the British sculptor Anish Kapoor, which filled the Turbine Hall like pulsating muscles and organs inside a giant's ribcage; for almost the first time, I felt properly thrilled by an installation created by a living artist.
The opening of Tate Modern had a galvanising effect on the wider sector, too – as, for the first time in decades, London (which now boasts many hundreds of galleries) became an important centre internationally for contemporary art. Just as you can't imagine the capital today without, say, the National Theatre, it's impossible to think of a London with no Tate Modern.