Tate Britain has been in the news this week – but the biggest story was the least reported. Amid all the excitement about Tracey Emin’s My Bed returning “home”, the Millbank museum more quietly revealed that its director Penelope Curtis is to leave after just five controversial years.
Curtis had become the focus of interest at Tate Britain in a way that wasn’t healthy for her or the museum. Her record was actually mixed: she improved the main collection displays, putting more of the Tate’s collection on view. That was good.
There were some dodgy exhibitions, such as Art Under Attack.
But what troubled me most was how strongly the museum reflected her personal enthusiasms: Curtis is an expert on sculpture who came to the Tate from the Henry Moore Institute, and under her direction Tate Britain has strongly pushed Moore and other British sculptors, culminating in the widely reviled Sculpture Victorious and, soon, an uneagerly awaited Barbara Hepworth show.
It is arrogant to so ostentatiously push your personal taste as the official Tate Britain view, when in my opinion, that taste is so poor. Her bad taste has also, I think, been evident in ever-worsening Turner prize shortlists. Turns out you need taste to run a museum.
Anyway, Curtis is going. But that will not solve this museum’s problems.
For the weaknesses of Tate Britain long predate Penelope Curtis. It has never taken off. In the 15 years since Tate Modern opened, its sister gallery has failed to establish an identity. Tate Britain is too many things. It’s the residue of the old Tate Gallery itself, in its old building. It’s the home of the Turner prize, where Emin’s bed made a splash in 1999. It’s a historical collection of British art since 1500. It’s a showcase for young artists. Wanting to be all these things, Tate Britain has become nothing special – nothing unique. It lacks passion, purpose, focus, energy.
Above all, it lacks fun. Tate tends to identify fun with youth, conceptual art and lots of videos, but fun is more complicated than that. People enjoy museums for their space, richness, and variety. The V&A, for instance, is an utterly beguiling museum because it is like a vast cabinet of curiosities where you can always be sure of finding some odd gallery of, say, Victorian barometers you never knew existed. The British Museum is a similarly capacious place where you can wander from Africa to ancient Greece in a few footsteps.
These places offer richness, while Tate Britain, ever since it became Tate Britain, has always felt thin and parched. Its displays – despite their improvement – have a didactic narrowness. They do not offer enough scope for encountering the unexpected.
It should be possible to really lose yourself here in the art of Britain, to wander and play and not feel all the time like some curator is telling you what to think.
Tate Britain needs to appoint someone with a real interest in how museums can win hearts. It needs to set out to seduce, to amaze, to mystify. British art is full of wonders, and frankly, this museum needs to either truly believe and share that, or give away its collection and close down.
