Kapow! Pop goes the Tate Modern

Britain's biggest modern-art museum is doing the equivalent of changing the furniture around. But in this case, the items on the move are world-famous works of art. Louise Jury reports

Friday, 30 September 2005

When Tate Modern opened five years ago, the reaction to the building was wondrous admiration. The attitude to the art inside, which was hung in themed, rather than chronological, displays was not always as appreciative.

So the announcement yesterday of the first major rehang of the collection is set to spark a new round of debate over the best way to display the work in the former power station.

All 48 galleries devoted to the display of the Tate's permanent collection will be rehung - and 40 per cent of the art will be works never previously shown in Tate Modern. These will include one of Roy Lichtenstein's powerful pop-art paintings, Whaam! and Fernand Leger's The Acrobat and his Partner.

Around a fifth of the works will be new acquisitions including posters by the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminists who disguise their identities with gorilla masks, and works by Tacita Dean and Anish Kapoor.

Another recent purchase is Video Quartet by Christian Marclay, a striking installation using hundreds of short-film excerpts of performers, first seen at the White Cube two years ago and more recently at the Barbican, which Frances Morris, the curator, said was set to be a contemporary classic. Louise Bourgeois has donated one of her own works, Mamelles.

The artworks will continue to be presented in themes but will essentially focus on key movements in 20th century art -Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of theTate galleries, said: "I would be very surprised if there were not some criticism. Our purpose is not to deflect criticism but to present the collection in the strongest possible way." But he added that the rehang would probably answer one or two of the criticisms - such as whether the Tate was showing the strengths in its collection and whether it was presenting the works the public really wanted to see.

Ms Morris said the rehang was not a "a final solution" but she hoped it would shed new light, not least by continuing to pair artists of different generations she considers to have points in common, such as Martin Creed and Carl Andre or Anish Kapoor and Barnett Newman.

The rehang is being sponsored by UBS, which will also fund a programme of additional events and displays including bi-monthly live performance art events, building on the success of previous performances such as dance from the dance company DV8 and by Merce Cunningham. It will also offer the Tate access to its own corporate collection of 900 pieces to fill some of the well-documented gaps in the Tate's holdings.

A UBS spokesman, Jeremy Thompson, said: "We are delighted that works from the UBS Art Collection will be included in the display to augment areas of artistic practice which are not currently well represented in the Tate collection."

The rehang will be unveiled next May. Forthcoming temporary exhibitions, also announced yesterday, include the first major retrospective in the UK of Martin Kippenberger, the late German artist, a current passion of the collector Charles Saatchi who has already featured his work in the Saatchi Gallery.

Other shows will examine the early career of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the work of French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Tate Britain will present an exhibition of Constable landscapes, a major retrospective of Howard Hodgkin, one of Britain's greatest living painters, and a show examining the late 18th century and early 19th century taste for the Gothic.

Works no longer in the collection

* TONY CRAGG: Britain Seen from the North

* CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI: The Reserve of Dead Swiss

* ANSELM KIEFER: Parsifal I and Parsifal II

* MARK DION: Tate Thames Dig

* ANDRÉ FOUGERON: Atlantic Civilisation

* ARISTIDE MAILLOL: Torso of the Monument to Blanqui

* RACHEL WHITEREAD: Untitled (Nine Tables)

* BRUCE NAUMAN: Mapping the Studio

* HOWARD HODGKIN: Dinner at Smith Square

Saatchi gallery leaves South Bank

Tuesday, 27 September 2005 BBC

The Gallery opened on London's South Bank in spring 2003

Art collector Charles Saatchi is to move his gallery from London's South Bank to new premises in Chelsea.

The gallery, which opened its doors at County Hall near Waterloo in 2003, is to move into the Duke of York's HQ building near Sloane Square in 2007.

Building work on the new 50,000 square foot space will commence in April 2006.

"It's a magnificent building and the very high footfall on the Kings Road makes it a perfect location," said gallery director Nigel Hirst.

"Taking this entire building in Chelsea will give the gallery the opportunity to grow and develop in a way that we would like."

'Great success'

"We are very sad to be leaving County Hall because in many respects it's been a great success," said Mr Saatchi.

"The Duke of York's HQ Building, which will give us extremely large, well-proportioned rooms with very high ceilings, will create a perfect gallery to look at contemporary art."

The 62-year-old collector has blamed the behaviour of his current landlord, Makota Okamoto, for his decision to move premises.

Mr Okamoto and his representatives could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Saatchi show ventures north for the first time

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 24 September 2005

The first major British exhibition outside London of Charles Saatchi's art collection is to be staged in Leeds next year.

Highlights of The Triumph of Painting show, which has drawn large crowds despite mixed reviews to his gallery on London's South Bank, will open at the Leeds City Art Gallery in January and run until March.

The move was a condition of a sponsorship deal between the Saatchi Gallery and Walker Morris, a Leeds-based law firm, which is supporting the third instalment of the show and a previously unplanned fourth round.

After attracting more than 360,000 visitors since opening in London in January, the show has been just extended to a six-part series running to next April.

It profiles painting, a genre Charles Saatchi said had been seen as "pitifully uncool and bourgeois" for the past 20 years but was now enjoying a revival.

The loan was welcomed by civic leaders in Leeds. John Proctor, the city council's executive board member for leisure, said: "This is a fantastic coup by Walker Morris and one that will be a significant boost to the city's national and international image."

Until now, British art-lovers have had the opportunity to see the Saatchi collection only at his own gallery or, once, in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy. This later transferred to New York where there was a row over a dung-encrusted painting of the Madonna by Chris Ofili.

The deal to take works outside the capital is a new venture for the advertising millionaire.

Nigel Walsh, curator of exhibitions for Leeds Museums and Galleries, said he was delighted. "The Saatchi Gallery has been very accommodating," he said. "The show isn't selected yet, but we'll be able to have a selection from all six parts so we might be showing things that haven't been seen [in London] yet."

He expected it would attract audiences from across the North to the Leeds gallery which usually receives around 250,000 visitors a year. It would have been very difficult for the gallery to raise the funds to mount such shows, he said, adding that it would be exciting to see the purchases of a major collector.

Charles Saatchi has admitted that he never thought the show would be a success. "It's good that the public are responding to painting so keenly," he said.

80: Charles Saatchi, 62

From Times Online

September 7, 2005

Collector

AFTER last year’s critical mauling of the County Hall gallery and the fire of Momart, SAATCHI’S stock has certainlyfallen since the days when he championed the Young British Artists, but you can’t count him out: his two Triumph of Painting exhibitions at County Hall showed a new direction, and his break with the YBAs - he is believed to have sold £16m worth of Hirsts -was impeccably timed. He continues to be a key figure for British arts. And he’s married to a domestic goddess, of course.

Field Guide to Judging a Show by Its Title

Angel Franco/The New York Times

At the Met putting up a sign for the name-brand "El Greco" show.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: September 4, 2005

THIS time of year, the titles of oncoming art exhibitions blare from magazine covers and museum posters, amplified by megawatt names, weighty epochal allusions, clever colloquialisms or restrained, status-reeking factuality. (Can you say "2006 Whitney Biennial"?)

"Dada," is the one-word title of a National Gallery exhibition.

"Style and Status," is a euphonious, before-the-colon title.

"Populence" is, well, made up.

An exhibition title is a harbinger, the first whiff of a brand whose apotheosis will be not only the show, but also assorted gift shop merchandise: the ties, scarves, umbrellas and totes on which it will be emblazoned. Or, looked at another way, the title is a flare fired from an ocean liner that has yet to crest the horizon; it lights up the night sky regardless of whether the vessel is sinking or there's a party onboard. Once the exhibition opens, the title becomes a mere handle, an appendage whose fate is forever tied to the impact of the show.

Some titles are almost drabbly self-evident. "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" the plain-spoken title of one of Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s groundbreaking surveys at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, may not roll off the tongue, but it is hallowed - if a bit dry, like Barr himself. But other titles seem calculated to enhance a show's mystique. The afterlife of the first museum show of Conceptual Art (Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969) undoubtedly benefited from its poetic mantra of a title: "Live in Your Head: When Attitude Becomes Form." The risk, of course, is that at a certain point originality can simply seem weird. The Whitney Museum's current "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing," for example, practically tells you not to look too closely at the art.

Occasionally titles fuse so vividly with their shows that they become a kind of code of their own. It's hard to believe the furor over the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of works belonging to the British adman Charles Saatchi would have reached quite the pitch that it did without the title "Sensation." On a far more sinister note, there is the pitch-perfect poison of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" exhibition of 1937. "Modernist Trends of Which the Führer Disapproves" would not have had the same effect.

And then there are the titles so lengthy they require internal punctuation: invariably, a colon. The protocol of the colon is complicated, if not unfathomable, involving rhythm (number of beats per side) and balance (the less, apparently, the better). The Modern's forthcoming "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" gets leverage up front from the Todd Haynes movie of the same one-word name, but can't quite go it alone. Anyway, the two dots lend a Hollywood cadence: "Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings" meet "Superman: The Movie."

On the other extreme are brazen one-word titles. "Dada" at the National Gallery in Washington, for example, assumes - probably correctly - that the word is a part of the vernacular, even perhaps a brand. The Modern's "Pixar," opening in December, makes that bet somewhat more literally. "Frequency," which is being planned by Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a little unclear but has a certain buzz about it. It may also be a sign of an institutional tradition. Ms. Golden, who a decade ago organized "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," remarked at the time of her last survey, organized with Ms. Kim and simply entitled "Post-Black," "I have no colon."

But punctuation doesn't always slow a title down. "Russia!," the immense survey of Russian culture opening on Sept. 16 at the Guggenheim, would certainly be dull without the Vreelandesque exclamation point.

No one messes much with solo shows of the quick or the world-famous (witness MoMA's "Elizabeth Murray" and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Fra Angelico"). But an added word or two provides focus. This year we have "Memling's Portraits" (did he paint anything else?), "Frank Stella 1958" (i.e., very early), "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" (i.e., seminal) and "Gottlieb 1956" (huh?).

Over all, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there seems to be an inverse ratio between the prominence of the museum and the nerviness of its titles' forays into wordplay, popular culture references or general touchy-feely appeal. Prominent big-city museums favor straight-laced titles; the most playful one at the Met this season is "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," which doesn't exactly pander.

Smaller, out-of-the way museums in need of attention take more risks and liberties. This summer the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo appropriated one of marketing's most overused adjectives for "Extreme Abstraction," while the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston opted for sitcomese with "Getting Emotional." "Girls Night Out," a show organized last fall by the Orange County Museum of Art, sounds as though it might involve two-for-one daiquiri specials. And there's always the option of reshaping or simply inventing words. Look at "Populence," an exhibition about popular culture's influence on current art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

The league leader of contemporary-art titledom may be the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which segued from deconstructionist chic to rocker sinister to Sunset Boulevard suave in the late 1980's and the 90's with "A Forest of Signs," "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990's" and "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945." This year the museum is back on the charts with "Ecstasy: In and About Altered Space," a contemporary art survey that explores heightened consciousness and perception. Other indications of a trend toward the intergalactic include "Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal" at the University of Maryland, and my fave, "Star Star: Toward the Center of Attention" at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Yet even at their most adventurous, museum exhibition titles rarely breach book-club acceptability. This is left to commercial galleries, which in New York alone offered, this summer, "Bridge Freezes Before Road," "Ribbed for Her Pleasure" and "Drunk vs. Stoned 2" - the bare-bones original of the "Ecstasy" exhibition in Los Angeles. These gallery shows may be the tiniest of boats, full of holes and taking on water, but their titles will stay afloat, tantalizing us from the pages of artists' bibliographies for years to come.

Vine's model vision informed by her own journey from strip club to artist's studio

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Friday, 2 September 2005

Lucian Freud's portrait of the model Kate Moss sold earlier this year for £3.9m. Stella Vine has yet to put a price on her own version, finished just a day or so ago, but given the dramatic transformation in the life of the one-time stripper who got her big artistic break last year thanks to the acquisitive eye of collector Charles Saatchi, it is unlikely to stay propped up against a wall for long.

It was revealed this week that the pop star George Michael had paid £25,000 for one of Vine's paintings, a portrait of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who was one of his friends. The two were introduced by Michael's boyfriend, Kenny Goss, who has a gallery in Dallas where she has exhibited.

It is a developing friendship through which Vine, 36, is now meeting celebrities such as the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, whom she has previously painted only with the help of magazine and newspaper images.

Her picture of Kate Moss was also inspired by photographs. Vine has painted the blonde model, whose spirit she admires hugely, several times before but has not been satisfied with the results until now. "I'd done a few small ones before but never quite got her. But I've been working on this for a few days and I just stayed up all night and finished it yesterday morning or the day before," she said. "It's got the little Sid Vicious sneer she does. I'm pretty impressed by Kate. Although she does her job very well and very professionally, she doesn't seem commercial. She's got something, I suppose."

Despite media controversy about Moss's relationship with the pop singer Pete Doherty, a self-confessed drug addict, Vine said she was sure she was a good mother to Lila, the model's daughter by her ex-boyfriend Jefferson Hack. "The Sixties were very wild - with the Rolling Stones - and they all lived forever and had many children who are OK," Vine said.

Vine had been working as a stripper to support herself until just before Mr Saatchi snapped up two of her works last year, catapulting her to prominence. The first was a portrait of the dead heroin addict Rachel Whitear and the second was an earlier portrait of Diana, which portrayed the late princess with blood pouring from her mouth.

The artist's task now is to produce the work required for shows commissioned by galleries from London to New York.