It’s only six years old, but who can remember London’s artistic landscape before Tate Modern? Analogies between art and religion are usually bogus, but this cathedral on the Thames is so powerful and successful that to question its foundations is to declare yourself elitist, old-fashioned, last-century. In the evolution of Bankside power station to Tate cultural powerhouse lies enshrined the myth of post-industrial, egalitarian, cool Britannia. The triumph of conceptual art, accessible and instantly gratifying, and the non-chronological hang of the permanent collection, reversing history, hush-hushing individual genius, are its Blairite bedrocks.
Like peasants in a medieval church, we gasp in the Turbine Hall at Eliasson’s sun, Nauman’s sound installation, Bourgeois’ spider – which ironically mimic the effects of global mass culture to make us seem small and irrelevant, even as we feel empowered at being part of Tate Modern’s pulsating energy, a piece of contemporary art’s bright, crowded jumble. Four million visitors a year, twice as many as New York’s Museum of Modern Art gets, more than half of them under 35, can’t be wrong. The effect mirrors perfectly the feel-good aim of all-must-have-prizes New Labour Britain.
That is fine and fun until you dig deeper – into the 20th-century collection that it is Tate Modern’s brief to represent. This week the permanent display has been entirely rehung for the first time. Chronology has at last crept into each new grouping – “Idea and Object” is arranged around a hub devoted to minimalism, “States of Flux” focuses on cubism, “Poetry and Dream” on surrealism, “Material Gestures” on abstract expressionism – but this is still history by half-truths. Each hub tells its tale well enough, but is encircled by satellite galleries showcasing conceptual art while jumb-ling everything else.
Work by ground-breakers such as Matisse and Picasso continues to be split across all sections, crushing any celebration of individuality. The ploy backfires: Picasso’s “Nude in a Red Armchair” screams fraught eroticism off the surrealist walls, making the rest of the room look childish, schematic and silly. Lesser, proto-conceptual artists, by contrast, get rooms of their own: the iconoclast Francis Picabia, for example, whose oeuvre was about denying creative identity, and whose mock-kitsch “Otaiti” is one of Tate’s most trivial new acquisitions.
To trace anything as bourgeois as true personal evolution, let alone artistic influence, is impossible here. “The Tree A”, where Mondrian in 1913 trembled on the verge of abstraction, hangs two floors down from the geometric grids in primary colours in which he achieved it. Two Chagall self-portraits, of 1915 and 1917, revealing his response to Russian revolutionary suprematism, also hang floors apart. But several 1990s conceptual installations satirising throw-away pettiness – Tomoko Takahashi’s room plastered with scratched-out letters, “Drawing Room”, Thomas Schutte’s bloated caricatures “Untitled Enemies” – get lavish independent spaces.
History belongs to the victors. MoMA recounts 20th-century art to climax with American abstract expressionism. The Pompidou is thick with the Ecole de Paris. And Tate Modern continues to mis-shape 20th- century art into one long build-up to today’s Young British Artists-refracted conceptual endgame. A few -isms, and Sara Fanelli’s lovely, graffiti-like timeline, are welcome, cohesive pointers to help make sense of this collection. But a conceptual wolf, in the lightest of historical sheep’s clothing, growls unchangingly here.
In its good places, the new hang is spectacular, seductive and beautiful. On level five, minimalism has rarely looked more stunning than in the double-height room where a Judd box glows copper-red against the metallic symmetry of Stella’s “Six Mile Bottom” and the neutrality of Richter’s “Grey”. Across the atrium, “States of Flux” opens with a fabulous pairing, Lichtenstein’s 1963 war-comic diptych “Wham” – scandalously in storage until now – and Boccioni’s 1913 dynamic half-man, half-machine bronze figure “Unique Forms of Continuity”: two charged images of technology and power. In another cubist satellite, a top recent acquisition, Christian Marclay’s four-screen audio sampling “Video Quartet”, composed of 700 Hollywood clips, is a witty, unnervingly aesthetic postmodern reprise of Picasso/Braque collage and Duchamp’s found materials.
On level three, opened in February, other pairings, likely and unlikely, already feel familiar, convincing, yet continuingly provocative. In “Material Gestures”, Monet’s near-abstract “Lilies” prefigures Pollock’s free-dripping “Summertime”, and illuminates a rush of strong American abstractionists. In “Poetry and Dream”, Cy Twombly’s lush, clotted, crimson-gold 1993-4 “Four Seasons”, another wonderful recent purchase, is superbly enhanced by the mad vigour and odd lightness of being of Beuy’s heavy metal “Lightning with Stag in its Glare”.
But why is Twombly, most painterly of painters and unrivalled decadent heir to Pollock, in the surrealist section rather than in “Material Gestures”? Historical continuity is the price you pay for Tate eclecticism. Sometimes it’s worth it; often historical insensitivity turns to boorish farce. Munch and Klimt, poetry and dream merchants if ever there were, are stuck in a cubist ante-chamber. Bonnard’s shimmering, ambivalent “The Table”, one of Tate’s greatest and most popular works, is removed from display altogether. Tate’s best Picasso, the death-haunted “Three Dancers”, is temporarily absent.
A century ago, MoMA gobbled up modern works that Tate was too blind to buy. How Tate curators still hate modernism, the optimistic art of construction derived from Cézanne – also banished to a corner – and essential to understanding the art of deconstruction that came afterwards. While our great living individualist artists who still recall the modernist tradition – Freud, Rego, Ofili – are relegated to Millbank, conceptual, hopelessly dated British dross is showcased here: Sarah Lucas’s urine-yellow toilet bowl, Julian Opie’s non-working ventilation unit. “Incubus”, Gary Hume’s pink house-paint map of hospital doors, is the central work in a section called “Contemporary Painting”, suicidally installed next to late Matisse and Léger, whose vigour makes 1940s and 1950s canvases look by contrast as if the paint had just dried.
Tate Modern has a world-class building and a world-class collection, but the British provincialism of its curators is embarrassing, and their refusal to look history in the eye mauls a potentially dazzling display of art past and present into meaninglessness.
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