Tate Modern

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**Tate Modern**

Established	2000
Collection Size	{{{collection}}}
Museum Area	{{{area}}}
Location	Bankside, London SE1, England
Visitor figures	4,900,000 (2006) ^[1]
Director	Vicente Todolí
Nearest tube station(s)	Blackfriars, Southwark
Website	www.tate.org.uk/modern

The Tate Modern as seen from the Millennium Bridge as of August, 2006

The Tate Modern in London is Britain's national museum of international modern art and is, with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, and Tate Online [1], part of the group now known simply as Tate.

The galleries are housed in the former Bankside Power Station, which was originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station, and built in two stages between 1947 and 1963. The power station closed in 1981. The building was converted by architects Herzog & de Meuron, after which it stood at 99m tall. The southern third of the building was retained by the French power company EDF Energy as an electrical substation (in 2006, the company released half of this holding)^[2]. Since the museum's opening on 12 May 2000, it has become a very popular destination for Londoners and tourists. Entry to collection displays and some temporary exhibitions is free.

1 Layout of galleries
2 New extension for 2012
3 Gallery
4 References
5 External links

The permanent collection of Tate Modern is on display on levels three and five of the building, while level four houses large temporary exhibitions and a small exhibition space on level 2 houses work by contemporary artists. When the gallery opened in 2000, the collections were not displayed in chronological order but were rather arranged thematically into four broad groups: History/Memory/Society; Nude/Action/Body; Landscape/Matter/Environment; and Still Life/Object/Real Life. This was ostensibly because a chronological survey of the story of modern art along the lines of the Museum of Modern Art in New York would expose the large gaps in the collections, the result of the Tate's conservative acquisitions policy for the first half of the 20th century. The first rehang at Tate Modern - opened in May 2006 as follows, with further spaces allocated on levels 3 and 5 for shorter exhibitions has eschewed the thematic groupings in favour of focusing on pivotal moments of twentieth-century art, and has been met with critical success.

This focuses on abstraction, expressionism and abstract expressionism, featuring work by Claude Monet, Anish Kapoor, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Tacita Dean.^[3]

This focuses on Surrealism featuring work by Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing.^[4]]]

This focuses on minimalism, conceptual art and constructivism with work by artists such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Martin Creed^[5] and Jenny Holzer.^[6]

This focuses on Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism and Pop Art,^[7] containing work by artists such as Pablo Picasso,^[8] Eugène Atget,^[9] Roy Litchenstein and Andy Warhol.^[10]

The Turbine Hall (level 1), which once housed the electricity generators of the old power station, is seven storeys tall with 3,400 square metres of floorspace^[11]. It is used to display specially-commissioned work by contemporary artists, between October and March each year in a series sponsored by Unilever. This series was originally planned to last the gallery's first five years, but the popularity of the series has led to its extension until 2008.

The artists that have exhibited specially commissioned work in the turbine hall are:

2000 — Louise Bourgeois — Maman, I Do, I Undo, I Redo
2001 — Juan Muñoz — Double Bind
2002 — Anish Kapoor — Marsyas
2003 — Olafur Eliasson — The Weather Project
2004 — Bruce Nauman — Raw Materials
2005 — Rachel Whiteread — Embankment
2006 — Carsten Höller — Test Site

A popular approach to Tate Modern is via the Millennium Bridge from St Paul's Cathedral. The closest tube station is Southwark, although Waterloo station or Blackfriars tube station and a short walk over Blackfriars Bridge may be more convenient.

There is also a riverboat pier just outside the gallery called Bankside Pier, with connections to the Docklands and Greenwich via regular passenger boat services (commuter service) and the Tate to Tate service, which connects Tate Modern with Tate Britain via the London Eye.

A glass pyramid extension dedicated to photography and video on the south side of the building, also designed by Herzog & de Meuron, which will increase the display space by 60%, was granted planning permission on 27th March 2007.^[12] This project will cost approx. £215 million and is scheduled to open in 2012, in time for the 2012 Olympic Games being held in the city. ^[13] The development is outlined at the subsite Transforming Tate Modern.

Tate Modern from St Paul's Cathedral. The rebuilt Globe Theatre is in white, to the left.	Tate Modern in 2000 at the opening (and closing) of the Millennium Bridge.	Tate Modern in the early morning, seen from near Blackfriars.	Tate Modern from the Millennium Bridge.
Construction cranes forming an honour guard.	A gallery in Tate Modern.	A view of the Millennium Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral from the Tate Modern.	Chimney of Tate Modern. The Swiss Light at its top was designed by Michael Craig-Martin and the architects Herzog & de Meuron and was sponsored by the Swiss government.
The Turbine Hall. No art work was on display in the hall at the time (June 2005).	Ólafur Elíasson's The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.	Rachel Whiteread's 2005 Embankment	Test Site by Carsten Höller (2006)