The Tate Modern features Britain's
most extensive collection of modern art, and in fact is the most visited modern
art gallery in the world. The museum itself features a fitting modern design,
with sleek white walls and long escalators to help you traverse the museum's
four floors. At the Tate you can explore a vast collection of modern and
temporary art dating from 1900 to the present. Whereas art from before this
time period typically consisted of traditional paintings and sculptures, the
Tate Modern features art that includes installations, artist rooms, and
text-based art in addition to the aforementioned paintings and sculptures.
These different forms of modern art are split into eight different exhibitions
and displays titled “the Lawrence Weiner Rooms”, “the Joseph Beuys Rooms”,
“Structure and Clarity”, “the Gerhard Richter Rooms”, “Skirt of the Black
Mouth”, “Transformed Visions”, “Poetry and Dream”, and lastly “Energy and
Process.”
To get a feel for the type of art
you will find yourself encountering at the Tate Modern, I suggest that you
first visit the “Structure and Clarity” display. The art here focuses on a
certain minimalist aesthetic that emerged in the early 1900's, one that later
found its identity in the interwar period through geometrical expression and a
break from any clear depiction of reality. Some of my favorites from this
section include works by Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and René Magritte.
Mondrian, who was fascinated by the abstract quality of the line, demonstrated
this in his piece Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red. The
painting is incredibly simple but also pure in its depiction of lines and basic
colors. Picasso has a number of notable works in this museum that include Seated
Nude and Bowl of Fruit, Violin, and Bottle which can be found in
this section. Seated Nude is especially interesting as a deconstructive
and expressive view of the traditional nude painting. Here, the woman is an
unrecognizable collection of geometric planes that leaves her looking cold and
mechanical. However, she still retains the pose similar to a classical nude
painting. René Magritte's The Anunciation is a beautifully expressive
and colorful painting that shows a landscape populated with objects from
everyday life, including a metal sheet with bells and a paper cut-out. The
otherwise normal landscape painting is infused with a dreamlike and surreal
quality. The art here gives a solid introduction to what you might typically
define as modern art: abstract, surreal, and sometimes even confusing or hard
to make sense of.
For some more beautiful modern
paintings and sculptures, you should spend some time walking through the
“Poetry and Dream” gallery on floor 2 and the “Transformed Visions” gallery on
floor 3. “Poetry and Dream” focuses on surrealism and the art and ideologies
that diverged and sprung from that field of art. Many of the paintings here
deal with dream-like imagery. A couple of really interesting pieces from this
section are Max Ernst's Celebes and Giorgio de Chirico's The
Uncertainty of the Poet. Both pieces showcase odd juxtapositions, dark
color tones, and seemingly random images drawn together to create a puzzle for
you to solve. You can spend quite some time trying to extract meaning from
these pieces, and your interpretation will almost certainly differ from the
person next to you. In the “Transformed Visions” gallery you will experience
different visions of traditional art subjects like figures and landscapes. For
example, the paintings Water Lilies by Claude Monet and Yacht
Approaching the Coast by Joseph Mallord William Turner both depict obscure
visions of real world objects. We know what they are supposed to look like, but
through the lens of these artists we get a different interpretation on their
canvas.
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| Tate Modern Museum, London |
For a different type of gallery, you
should see the “Energy and Process” exhibition on floor 4, which attempts to
look at different artists' interest in transformation and natural forces. The
work here features less paintings and more art that blurs the line between art
and objects from day-to-day life through film, photography, and installations.
Three interesting pieces from this section that are designed to make you think
and hopefully provoke a response from you are Spacial Concept 'Waiting,'
Violent Incident, and Untitled (Living Sculpture). The first piece
is an unpainted canvas with a slash in the middle of it, the second is a series
of videos aligned together depicting incidents of meaningless violence with
different pairs of people, and the last is a work of aluminum hanging from the
wall that recalls the image of a jellyfish. What do these all mean? That is for
you to decide. But each piece will definitely cause you to think. Or you may
just say “Is this even art?” and walk out (if so, then the artist has done
their job though).
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| Energy and Process, Tate Modern |
If you are willing to expand your
definition of art beyond traditional notions of beauty and what you find to
normally be aesthetically pleasing, then you will find the Tate Modern to be an
interesting and unique experience. You won't find art like this in another
museum in London, so I recommend everyone at least give this museum a chance,
and who knows you might end up liking what you see here.
-By Phillip Storm, Arts
Correspondent VisitMuseums.com
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