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Sir Nicholas Serota talks to Peter Aspden about his plan to rethink the controversial gallery arrangements at Tate Modern
Tate Modern, which controversially abandoned the principle of hanging its works in a single, chronological narrative when it opened in 2000, has had a partial change of heart. It is to carry out a
radical rehang of its next May, to be based on four "suites" in the gallery, focusing on crucial moments in the history of 20th century art: cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and minimalism.
The new display will be organised to show how the movements relate to trends in contemporary art, as well as to earlier practices. Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries, describes the rehang as "changing the kaleidoscope" of the gallery's collection, to reflect the way artists thought about their work. "These are four particular moments in 20th century art which seem to us to be highly significant in themselves, but are also strongly represented in the Tate collection," he says.
The rehang, which will be sponsored for three years by the financial services group UBS, will replace the current thematic display, which brings together pieces from different eras according to their subject matter. The four groupings are: landscape, matter and environment; still life, object and real life; history, memory and society; and nude, action and body.
The thematic organisation, based on genrq categories established in the French 18th century Academy, has attracted strong criticism on its opening for failing to provide a coherent account of the history of 20th century art. Serota says it was a novel way of presenting works "which reflected our belief that the roots of art aren't absolutely fixed, and that bringing about new juxtapositions increased people's understanding".
The rebang is a compromise between the traditional chronological approach, and making lateral links across different eras. "We want to take some of the lessons from the past five years, and produce quite a subtle set of relationships between a moment in time and the individual artists working at that time, so you get a strong sense of the intensity of the moment, and then reflections both back and forward. The chronological approach has its strengths. But young people in particular are used to absorbing information in very different ways: looking at snippets, which then lead on to other things. It is a contemporary way of absorbing things. And for young people, the displays at Tate Modern have been fascinating.
"History is really only one skeleton, and this march from gallery to gallery as you move forward through the century is something we wanted to avoid [in 2000] and we want to avoid it this time. Artists don't work like that. They don't think only of their immediate predecessors; they dip right back into the early part of the century, and beyond. What we are trying to do is create a presentation that reflects the way artists themselves think about the 20th century, but give some points that can be seen as key moments."
More than 40 per cent of the works in the new displays will never have been shown at Tate Modern before. They include "Whaam!" by Roy Lichtenstein and recently acquired works by artists including Francis Picabia and Anish Kapoor. In addition, highlights from UBS's own extensive collection in areas such as photography and drawings, poorly represented in the Tate collection, will be shown as part of a rolling programme. The UBS sponsorship, which Serota describes as "very substantial", will also enable the gallery to put on more of the popular live events.
The rehang will be revised after three years, so that other 20th century categories, such as arte povera or geometrical abstraction, may replace the existing headings. "In any one moment, there is always more than one current running through. There are two or three other moments one can imagine dropping in on," says Serota. He adds that public interest in the visual arts "and not just the Young British Artists" has substantially increased over the past 15 years. Tate Modern alone has received more than 20m visits since its opening.
Asked if some press coverage of modern art, such as satirical pieces on the Turner prize, was a doubleedged sword, he says: "Some of it is trivial and irritating to the artists, because it doesn't present their work in terms they can recognise as their work. But one can get too precious about it... Damien [Hirst]'s 'Shark' or Rachel [Whiteread]'s 'House' have entered public consciousness in a way that has meaning for many people, rather than just being something one can lampoon."
by Peter Aspden
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