Blockbuster Tate Modern At 20

Hits such as 2003’s ‘The Weather Project’, by Olafur Eliasson, have made Tate Modern the most popular modern art museum in the world.

- Richard Benson

Tate Modern may be an international superstar art museum today, but when it opened in May 2000, the critics hated it. “The triteness of these concepts and the arbitrariness with which they are applied can be irritating, and the juxtapositions are often visually jarring,” sniffed an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, the revered, long-running arts journal. “The overall lack of continuity is disorienting… [and] we are not reoriented or offered a fresh vision: the themed rooms tend to encourage an aimless wandering through a curatorial playground.”

Reviewers didn’t like the location (a grotty bit of the Thames’ South Bank), criticised the building’s design (a converted power station with much of the original interior left intact) and they lost it completely over the first temporary exhibition, Century City, which showcased art scenes from different cities of the world (“the section devoted to Lagos is so weak, you feel like a racist, imperialist, colonialist swine for daring to say it,” said, er, The Guardian). The strongest objections were to the grouping of the art by theme rather than period and to the amount of work from outside Europe and America. In truth, Tate Modern’s curators had expected a backlash but believed their way to be fairer and more interesting.

Frances Morris, the current director of Tate Modern, was there at the outset and remembers: “We genuinely thought it would be amazing but we didn’t feel at all confident that the press or the public would side with us. And, of course, the press hated it. They eventually came round, but it took them 15 years.”