The Tate Modern’s plans to extend to sixty percent more exhibition space would appear to be in trouble. Only a third of the required finance has been raised and included in that is fifty million promised by the Government which is now looking shaky because of a £100m budget overcommitment for capital projects at the department for culture, media and sport.
Despite all of this, Lord Browne the chairman of Tate was in an upbeat mood when he presented the annual report earlier this week. Speaking about the promised government money, he said he was”highly confident that the promised money will be delivered.” In relation to the shortfall in fundraising he said “My sense is that confidence has come back to potential benefactors. Investors feel better about making donations. We intend to start building next year and, subject to the amount of funding we have in place, we are intending to have a building ready by 2012.”
Problems with the proposed extension aside, it was a good year for the Tate with record acquisitions to report. A gift of over seven hundred art works, ranging from pieces by Hirst to Warhol being a case in point. The works were given to Tate jointly with National Galleries of Scotland by former art dealer, Anthony D’Offay.
There are also ambitious plans for exhibitions next year. Tate will host the first major exhibition of works by Paul Gauguin (featured above) in London for over half a century. According to Vicente Todolí, director of Tate Modern, the exhibition will “challenge assumptions about his practice and reveal his complexity and richness”, looking at Gauguin’s role as a narrative painter and a “maker of fables”. It will establish him as “one of the pillars of 20th-century art”
Tate Liverpool will stage a large-scale Picasso show in May. The show will focus on the post war era, when Picasso was an activist and a peace campaigner. It will feature the painting Charnel House, said to be the artists most political painting after Guernica. It was painted after news first broke of the Nazi death camps.
The annual report is positive and upbeat with ambitious plans for the future despite the economic downturn.
