A restricted extension
John McEwen
On Thursday the Queen opened the new extension to the Tate Gallery, a building that adds 47,000 sq. ft. of much-needed and long overdue space, roughly divided between public galleries and staff facilities. The staff facilities include a glass-fronted tower block at the back largely for the benefit of the conservation department but, important though these internal improvements are, it is the increase idgallery space that People really mean when they talk of the extension, and this is dramatic: 50 per cent in fact, allowing for approximately 40 per cent as opposed to 9 per cent of the modern collection to be shown at one time. In accordance with the design brief the new galleries have been built to the highest conservation specifications while blending as practicably as possible with the old. Internally you can pass from one to the Other without interruption because they are on a level.
Externally the facade is blank as elsewhere, and the Portland stone facing has even been taken from the shelley bed of the quarry so that its rougher texture matches the weathering of the older building. The natural overhead light that has persuaded Giacommetti and Rothko among others to give work to the Tate is continued, though muted by a barrage of technical controls including phased-in artificial lights. The extension is air-conditioned throughout, air-locked from the other galleries and even flood proof in its basement. The main gallery, the whole extent of the lawn that used to be viewable through the railings from Bulinga Street, can be as empty as a hangar or divided with full-height screens, as at present, into as many as 21, 30 foot square compartments. The solidity of the screens would disguise this admirable flexibility were it not for a fussy fire regulation which stipulates that every compartment must have two exits, but some dramatic installations will undoubtedly be possible. The modular ceiling with its obtrusive technical requirements is hideous, though blanked off and high enough not to be totally distracting. For the opening, pictures have been hung as many as four deep to emphasise the breadth of the collection as well as the need for yet more space. 351 Paintings, 151 sculptures and 126 prints are O n view. The Tate's Director for the last 15 .years has been Sir Norman Reid. He retires at the end of this year. In March his dtrectorship was bitterly criticised by David Hockney in an article for the Observer. 'The simplest and most effective answer to David Hockney's criticism of the conduct of the Tate Gallery under my directorship,' replied Sir Norman in an answer the follow ing week, 'will be made on 24 May, when the Queen opens the new galleries.' To make the required judgment the extension and what it contains have to be seen in their proper historical and economical context.
The first thing to realise is that the addition, far from being a glorious climax to Sir Norman's career as the forgetful might suppose, is the long-postponed and now outdated fulfilment of an idea that was first considered imperative over 40 years ago. A decade of this can be subtracted for the war, so it was not till coronation year that the responsible Minister of the day agreed that plans for the completion of the Tate, by filling the north-west corner of the site, should be resumed. The following year the Gallery was further strengthened when it was formally separated by Act of Parliament from the National Gallery, though the exact boundary of their responsibilities was never drawn and is more contested today than ever. Nothing much happened with regard to the extension however till 1960, when Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks and Partners were called in as consultants. Apart from gallery space the trustees were most anxious that priority should be given to a lecture theatre, new restaurant and the comfort of the public in general. Llewelyn-Davies, who is probably best known as the architect of The Times building, decided to leave the north-west area free as a car park — perhaps already having wind of the possibility of the Tate one day taking over the adjacent site of the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital — demolish the portico and fill in the front. Discussion of this first full feasibility study fell to the lot of the new Director, Norman Reid. In his Report of 1974/75 he wrote: 'The extension in front would mask the whole of the present facade and the appearance of the building would be radically altered. This has naturally provoked some searching of heart both within the Gallery and outside it. It is hard to disagree with the excellent opinion which has found Sidney Smith's frontage undistinguished. The fact that many of us have become attached to it is due as much to the site as the design. . . The old facade is rather like the massive frames of the period. It pays impressive tribute to art, yet eventually becomes a burden to it.'
" The study then went the rounds of the relevant Government Department, the Westminster City Council and the GLC.
After one and a half years they asked for a model and a more detailed proposal.
Meanwhile the 1966/67 Report disclosed a new problem. Henry Moore had made it clear that if the Tate was willing to find the space he would make it a comprehensive gift of his works. Here was England's most famous sculptor of all-time offering the Gallery a gift the equivalent in size of the Turner bequest, but to accept it would mean, at least temporarily, consigning most of the modern collection to the store-rooms. A formidable list of artists, several of them Moore's former assistants, condemned the idea in a letter to The Times. The Tate approached the Government for a special grant to build a gallery for the gift, though where it is difficult to imagine. The Government promised £200,000 if the figure could be matched. Seeing this for the refusal it was by the Tate, Moore gave the lot to the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 1969 the plan for the new development of the Gallery was made public. The facade and the north-west corner were to be filled in. There was an outcry. The noble facade of the Tate must be preserved at any cost. But the issue was supplanted. On 8 July 1969 Harold Wilson allocated the adjacent site, that of the hospital, to the Gallery for a completely new building on the understanding that the hospital would shortly be rebuilt elsewhere. This was what the Tate must long have been hoping for. It had now become quite apparent that whatever form the new extension took it would be quite inadequate to its task, and equally apparent that the only real solution would be an entirely new building alongside the original. In the interim the north-west or 'fourth quarter' extension should be built and the facade preserved. Everyone was happy, most of all Sir Norman. He even put the statue of Britannica that surmounts the old facade on the cover of the 1970 Report `to celebrate her survival together with the whole of the Tate portico.' To return from a journey of a week or so impels rediscovery,' he enthused. 'Absence, which makes the heart grow fonder, sharpens the eye.' The fourth quarter extension would be ready in 1974 at a cost of a million pounds, a quarter of it from the Gulbenkian Foundation, the rest from the Government. Ahead was the vision of the new building on the hospital site, with Bulinga Street transformed into a garden interlude. But the 1972/74 report is more wary, and weary, in tone. Nothing much seems to have happened about the hospital and the extension is suffering normal ('we are told') delays: 'In the planning stage we were invited to consider 'the fourth quarter' and the new building on the hospital site as two parts of a single project. Consequently the disposition of a space for special exhibitions and of a number of the services — publications shop, cloakrooms, as well as essential backstage facilities — were designed for the short term and many are awaiting provision of the new space which the hospital site will provide.' As report succeeded report to the present the delays became a joke, the chance to placate Henry Moore by celebrating his 80th birthday with an inaugural extension show passed, the proposal for a new gallery on the site of the hospital was trimmed to a partial renovation of the building as it stood. Now at last the extension has opened, but the event is clouded by the continuation of what appears to be becoming the even more frustrating saga of the hospital site. Renovating an unsuitable building is the worst of all possible solutions but since the work is already fitfully under way the chance of a new gallery seems lost. Applicants for the directorship are ominously warned that the Tate 'is committed to a programme of building on the hospital site which will go on for a number of years.'
But what of the collection the new extension displays? Sadly, it too reflects inadequacies largely beyond the control of a Director, who is not only responsible for administration but also expected to buy works for a British collection from roughly 1500-1850, an international modern collection from 1900 and a modern British collection from 1850, on a current annual purchasing grant of just over one million pounds. Obviously this is beyond the powers of any one man. There should be a separate administrator and separate directors for each of these three very different collections.
As for the budget, and the current one represents a recent 100 per cent increase, it is incredible that the Tate has been able to buy anything of note at all. For much of his fifteen years of office Sir Norman has had to do with even more pitiful sums revised at long intervals, irrespective • of rapidly increasing market prices, and been forced accordingly to scrounge for loans and gifts and launch public appeals. One masterpiece, even for the modern collection, has always been capable of scooping his pool, and meanwhile the National Gallery with its superior purchasing power, has encroached on his territory by buying increasingly modern work, most recently an early Matisse and a Picasso of 1916. The new extension displays Sir Norman's greatest achievements as a diplomat, the gifts of Rothko, Giacommetti and Gabo, and shows too that a reasonable number of holes have been plugged. Dada and Surrealism are better represented. There are the notable additions of Gonzalez and the Russians, particularly the new Malevich. But at least two-thirds of the work is English, and few of the foreign artists are represented at their best.
So, in the main, second-rate work by a reasonable number of acknowledged 20thcentury masters is muddled up with the production of a very Considerable number of second-rate artists. Inadequacy of funds and divided responsibility make this confusion so inevitable that it would be churlish to be more specifically critical. Sir Norman, perhaps through no great fault of his own, leaves the Tate therefore much as he found it. Now is the time for a Conservative Government, and in particular Mr St John Stevas, to give London what most civilised capitals have had for years: an independent Museum of Modern Art. Like the Beaubourg in Paris, it could, if done with a bit of radical style, be the wonder of the town.
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