Opening night at Tate Modern, 25 years ago this May, was the kind of party that defines an era. Stars of the arts world and politics, including prime minister Tony Blair, attended. All of them were dwarfed by a giant spider – Louise Bourgeois’s visiting sculpture – perched on the gangway over the vast, packed Turbine Hall.
For Alex Beard, particular joyous moments still stand out, but not just from the evening: “It was a remarkable night, but I most clearly remember the first morning, 12 May, when I walked around outside, really early doors, and saw people lining up right around the building. I talked to the first person in the queue, who told me this was something they’d been waiting for all their life,” recalls Beard, who was deputy director of Tate.
“The queen had officially opened the building with the words, “I declare the Tate Modern open”, adds Beard, remembering how Nicholas Serota, the director and the driving force behind the venture, discreetly winced at the monarch’s use of the definite article. This was simply Tate Modern.
“The last gallery proposed for London was in 1936, so this one took a long time coming,” says Beard, who now runs the Royal Opera House.
“There were worries about funding, and a moment when we discovered some asbestos in the Turbine Hall, but our most spectacular inaccuracy was in the projection of business for the first year.
“We thought there might be two million visitors, and it was more than double that.”
Last week, the gallery, built inside the brick hulk of a former power station on the south bank of the Thames in London, revealed plans to mark its anniversary with a “birthday weekender” of events. It will host a free celebration of visual art, live music and performance, running from 9 to 12 May.
Bourgeois’s spider will be back, as it was in 2007, and in honour of an eventful quarter-century, a trail of 25 art works is being installed around the galleries, featuring modern art landmarks such as Andy Warhol’s images of Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone.
Art historian Tim Marlow, director and chief executive of the Design Museum, feels that another party is justified. “Tate Modern has utterly changed the face of London’s museums. We didn’t have a separate museum for modern art and it pretty quickly gained status, up alongside Moma [the Museum of Modern Art in New York] and the Pompidou [in Paris], even if there are some questions about its collections.”
It is, Marlow believes, everything Tate wanted it to be, although the original Tate Britain – on the other side of the river – may have suffered at its expense.
“Tate Modern was the result of a series of things happening, not just one key moment,” says Beard. “There was the lottery money, of course, then all those ‘YBA’ graduates of Michael Craig-Martin’s at Goldsmiths College, as well as Charles Saatchi collecting at Boundary Road, and then all the new technology, turning us into a more visually aware nation. All that came together to create a gallery that could further energise what was going on.”
But the chill March wind also brings sobering news. Tate, the parent organisation, is now in serious survival discussions with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is banking on central government coming to the rescue while it looks for a “financially viable model”. The most recent annual report also reveals that trustees have approved a deficit budget for this financial year.
So while Tate Modern may have held on to its high place in the annual popularity rankings for British visitor attractions, released on Friday, it does face a dilemma. The Tate’s four galleries have jointly lost 2.7 million visitors in five years, according to Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva) figures.
Tate Modern is in fourth place with 4.6 million visitors, 3% fewer than last year and 25% down on 2019. Only Windsor and the Natural History Museum lie between it and the British Museum, in the top spot again. Its neighbour up the river, the Southbank Centre, also celebrating 25 years since it was significantly overhauled, lies just behind in fifth.
As some other attractions return to pre-pandemic visitor levels, the original site, Tate Britain, is still down 32% on 2019, though up a bit on last year. The financial lifeline discussions and visitor figures come after recent reports outlining plans to cut staffing numbers by 7%.
Alva’s director, Bernard Donoghue, suspects that Tate “has been heavily dependent on overseas visitors”, and so is being hit by the comparative lack of Chinese tourists since the pandemic.
Tate points out that 2019 was a record-breaking year as Tate Modern pushed the British Museum out of first place in Britain for the first time in nine years on the Art Newspaper’s annual survey of international museums and galleries. The success was chiefly down to the appeal of its acclaimed 2018 Picasso exhibition.
Alison Cole, a former editor of the Art Newspaper who now directs the Cultural Policy Unit, a new thinktank, believes that renewal – and money to carry it out – is now vital: “Tate is not alone in facing these issues, and it has to manage many sites in terms of attracting visitors.
“It’s hard to continually reinvigorate yourself; it is a question now of renewal. Many institutions are feeling their age since that big museum expansion at the turn of the millennium, not only in terms of deteriorating buildings but also flagging staff morale when finances are under strain.”
Cole’s thinktank would like to see a temporary switch in the way lottery funds are distributed, in an effort “to help these great organisations put themselves on a sustainable footing”.
The first Tate Gallery at Millbank was founded in 1897 by the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate to champion British art. Away from the action in a residential area and with a limited collection of foreign and modern works, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it became a prominent feature of the art world.
Its creation of the Turner prize in 1984 brought it – and the modern art world – much needed publicity and controversy. Then the appointment of Serota as its director four years later changed its fortunes.
“Right from the beginning, on a crisp, two-sided application for the job, Serota laid out his vision,” says Beard. “He has got the most fantastic 60,000ft view of the role art plays in society and also knows how to get things done, with incredible attention to detail.” Now in the hot seat as chair of Arts Council England, Serota is becoming accustomed to less enthusiastic praise, after criticism of the organisation’s most recent round of cuts.
Children and young adults were at the heart of the new Tate Modern gallery “from the get-go”, explains Beard. The idea was to avoid the atmosphere of a reverent temple to the arts. “The entrance into the Turbine Hall was that liminal space between the city and the museum and part of the whole philosophy. It established what was so different about Tate Modern.
“It was genuinely groundbreaking in its relationship with the city. The bridge over to St Paul’s was conceived really early on and it caused a great opening up of the river. It’s ridiculous to think you couldn’t walk along it easily then. It has helped London develop its confidence, to become one of the greatest cities in the world, rather than the dysfunctional capital of a lost power.”
The two sides of the river have since reached a fairer balance, putting the Thames back at the centre of the city.
“I was recently on the Southbank and it was heaving,” says Marlow. “Before, there was a sense that all the arts happened north of the river. Now it is a vibrant cultural corridor. And it seems incredible that a city with so much major art being produced in it didn’t have a separate museum for modern art until 2000.”
