As the home of British visual culture, Tate Britain’s programme continued to provide a focus for ongoing national debate about art, identity and culture. Increasing visitor numbers in each succeeding year, from 1.3 million in 2004 to 1.7 million in 2005, demonstrated that this debate had captured public interest.
The huge popular success of exhibitions such as Turner Whistler Monet and Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec contributed to this growth, representing a 45% increase in audiences to Tate Britain. An increasing awareness of the permanent collection - the BP British Art Displays - was also especially welcome, the Turner at Tate Britain campaign in autumn 2004 and Create Your Collection campaign in autumn 2005 having increased visits to the displays by 31%.
In the summer of 2004, Art and the Sixties reappraised the way that decade is remembered, and drew on the depth of the Collection to present works which represented the countercultural art of the period, as well as the iconic images of Pop art. Alongside this, Art of the Garden demonstrated the various ways in which this particular obsession has captured the attention of artists for hundreds of years. Continuing the series of Duveens commissions, Michael Landy’s memorable Semi-detached 2004, an exact scale replica of his parents’ house, startled and intrigued visitors with its surreal domestic presence. Alongside the annual Turner Prize in autumn 2004, was the first ever exhibition to examine the distinctive careers of sibling artists Augustus and Gwen John. The Stage of Drawing comprised a rich array of works on paper from the Tate’s collection, selected by the artist Avis Newman to explore the medium of drawing, and the Roger Fenton exhibition offered a rare opportunity to assess one of the great pioneers of the medium and art of photography.
Spring 2005 saw record attendances for Turner Whistler Monet - an adventurous exploration of the relationships between the three artists and their shared interest in depicting the cities of London and Venice. This major exhibition was realised in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Musee D’Orsay Paris. Alongside this was a retrospective exhibition of the sculptor Anthony Caro, which occupied not only the Upper Galleries but also the Duveens, where The Last Judgement was shown in the North Duveens and a new work, Millbank Steps, was made specially for the South Duveens.
Joshua Reynolds upheld Tate Britain’s commitment to reappraising key figures in British art, and Picture of Britain took a completely new route through the British obsession with landscape, while forming the first cross-media collaboration in which an exhibition accompanied a major six-part series on BBC One. Degas, Sickert and Toulouse - Lautrec presented an illuminating account of the intense artistic exchange between Britain and French at the turn of the century. Gothic Nightmares brought high and low art together to chart the emergence of horror and fantasy in British art and literature. The third Tate Triennial, selected by German curator Beatriz Ruf, offered a rigorous and controversial view of what is new and most significant in contemporary British art.
Tate Britain’s Art Now programme presented ten solo projects by young artists, for many of them their first solo show in a museum context and for viewers, a chance to see these artists’ work at a time when they are just emerging to greater prominence. The Art Now Lightbox programme presents an additional programme of single-screen film and video works, and Enrico David presented a commissioned work on the sculpture court.
Paula Rego was the subject of a tightly focused show in 2004, as was John Latham in 2005. In both cases, strong collection holdings were augmented with key loans to make a succinct presentation of the artists’ work. Special collection displays were made to mark the acquisition of important works and archive of Donald Rodney, and also a major work by Chris Ofili: The Upper Room. Key loans into the Collection displays enabled visitors to see important examples of stained glass, folk art, the political graphics of refugee artist John Heartfield, and also the most complete presentation of work by the seventeenth-century gentleman painter Nathanial Bacon. The significant impact of immigrant communities on the development of post-war British art were further evident in the displays concentrating on the work of Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody in 2004 and the Goan-born painter FN Souza in 2005.
Engagement with visitors locally, nationally and internationally was a feature of 2004–6. Tate Britain’s pioneering programme of cross-curricular learning, which aimed to improve early education in the local community, was awarded a Sure Start national award for Enabling Children’s Learning. Many of the families involved in the Sure Start programme also helped celebrate British Art through the BP Saturdays series of free events and festivals.
Tate Forum, the Tate Britain young people’s programme, helped shape and deliver a number of new initiatives targeting young people. In particular, this group contributed to Visual Dialogues, a national project pioneered and managed by Tate in partnership with galleries in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield. As part of this project, peer-led learning groups worked with artists and facilitators to produce interpretative displays, getting their first taste of Tate’s Collection and their local galleries. Internationally, GCSE students from a local comprehensive school created visual dialogues with young people in Damascus as part of a Tate Britain-British Council project, Nahnou-Together, designed to enable young people to explore personal and cultural identity together.
The arrival of Chelsea College of Art and Design, next door to Tate Britain, was warmly welcomed as an opportunity for creative collaboration between the two institutions. Tate Britain’s ongoing monthly late night programme of art, music and live events, Late at Tate Britain, benefited particularly from this new community, with regular attendances of 5,000 per evening.
