The Modern Man Behind the Tate Modern

The powerhouse behind London’s old powerhouse-turned-modern art museum is Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota, a button-down Englishman who appears to the world as shy, earnest and reserved.

He is that, with a permanently furrowed brow and eyes of searing concentration. But these days Serota’s serious face tends to break into a sudden boyish grin that hints at a joy verging on giddiness.

And smile he should. One of the handful of culture gurus who have persuaded conservative Britons to cast aside their instinctual suspicion of modern art, Serota has, with Tate Modern, simultaneously catapulted Britain to the forefront of the international contemporary art world, up there with New York’s MOMA and the Pompidou in Paris.

Since Tate Modern opened to rave reviews in May, more than 1 million visitors have crossed the threshold of what is being called an “enthralling” and “inspired” cathedral of contemporary art. If the crowds continue to pour into the Bankside museum at the current rate of nearly 150,000 a week, that would be nearly 8 million visitors a year. And even if attendance falls by half, Tate Modern still will have twice as many viewers as had been projected and twice as many as MOMA.

“It’s good. Really good,” Serota said with characteristic understatement--and a big grin.

In the manic and often catty world of art, Serota has surprisingly few critics. In fact, except for the Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell, a renowned hater of contemporary art, it is difficult to find anyone to snipe aloud at Serota. He is a highly respected museum director with a rare combination of management, political and fund-raising skills, artistic sensibility and--if controversial--taste.

To some, this translates into a control freak who can’t stand to make mistakes, but even this is said with tinges of admiration accompanied by assertions that he was the right man in the right job at the right time. By all accounts, the looming Tate Modern, which has shifted London’s cultural center toward the south bank of the Thames River, wouldn’t exist without Nick Serota.

“He is an extraordinary leader with a positive vision of the future who is willing to take responsibility and risks to make major decisions,” said Richard Koshalek, former director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, who served on Tate Modern’s architectural committee. “Few people in politics, arts or business are willing to provide that kind of leadership.”

“He has complete clarity of vision and tremendous integrity,” said Neil MacGregor, director of London’s National Gallery. “He has a selfless, institutional vision, which is why people have wanted to help with this. It is not for him. It is something he believes in.”

Seizing the Moment

Timing undoubtedly has helped Serota in his mission to build a contemporary art museum. These have been boom years for Britain, and London has been busily asserting itself as Europe’s financial capital, despite the country’s reluctance to join the common European currency. Had there been a 1970s oil crisis or a debilitating recession, the $200-million museum with 150,000 square feet of gallery space--nearly twice the size of MOCA--most likely would not have come to fruition.

But there wasn’t an economic crisis, and, moreover, there was an explosion of energy in the British art scene, a proliferation of daring young artists, new galleries and eager collectors. Serota seized the moment.

“By the mid-1990s, there was a growing recognition that London was not only the historic financial center, but that it could be the financial center for the next decade and century to come,” he said. “But to do so it needed to be a city that had certain facilities. People do not want to live and work in London unless it has a rich and varied life.

“To attract international bankers, you have to have good theater, dance and visual arts. That understanding won supporters. And the success of the project will help to reinforce London as a financial capital, which, in turn, will make it easier to raise revenue to extend the project.”

Dennis Stevenson, former chairman of the Tate board of trustees and a key ally of Serota, modestly downplays their achievement as “hardly an original idea.”

“It was not such a clever thing to have done. After all, the Guggenheim was going to be built in London until the war broke out and it was moved to New York,” Stevenson said.

“It was long overdue,” Serota concurred. “London must have been one of the few capital cities that didn’t have a garret devoted to contemporary art. The Tate has been here for a hundred years, and British and international modern art had lived together in a confined set of spaces. We knew what the objective was. The question was how to get there.”

The obvious answer was to tack another couple wings onto Tate Millbank, the original gallery. Instead, Serota opted for a new museum. He wanted to separate the Tate’s British and international modern collections and to locate the latter at a central London site that would become a landmark. After looking at three or four possibilities, he chose the derelict Bankside power station, a Giles Gilbert Scott steel-and-brick eyesore with a 1940s design.

“A lot of people had dreamed of a museum of modern art, and this wasn’t it. We had to persuade them that this could be better [than their dreams],” Serota said. “And we had to contend with the fact that we live in a country that is innately conservative, where things evolve slowly and it is easier to stop things than to start them. Initially, only a small number believed.”

Serota and Stevenson never faltered. The Bankside plant offered more space than they would find elsewhere and the kind of rough industrial space popular with artists and that had been successfully converted into MOCA. They set about getting it, wooing artists and neighbors in the run-down south bank area and hiring a project team before they ever had the money to build. Then they raised the funds.

Serota was one of the first museum directors to realize what a windfall the new National Lottery would provide for cultural institutions when it began in 1994. He also set up a crack fund-raising team and recognized what other Europeans had yet to see--that many American donors saw themselves as international players and would give to a European museum as well as to one at home. Tate Modern would be an international museum with international support. He raised about $90 million in private donations, much of it from the United States and Germany.

“The MOMA always had international friends,” Serota said. “There was a recognition here that these institutions are not going to prosper if they rely entirely on state support. You need more money. And more involvement brings a different energy, demands and expectations.”

After a long and arduous process, in which crises were made to look like hiccups and operational funds were guaranteed, Tate Modern, beautifully overhauled by Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron, opened on budget and on time in May to a flurry of glitzy parties and hugs for a teary-eyed Serota.

“It’s a great instrument,” Serota said. “Now we’ve got to learn how to play it.”

He’s had lots of practice already.

A native Londoner from middle-class Hampstead, Serota was born in 1946 to a Jewish family of Eastern European descent, a civil engineer father and Labor Party activist mother who became a life peer, deputy speaker of the House of Lords and governor of the BBC. Serota entered Cambridge University to study economics but soon changed to history of art.

“I realized economics wasn’t going to fulfill me. I knew I was interested in things visual, and this was taking on more and more importance,” Serota said. “If I had started earlier, I might not have been a museum person, I might have been an architect. But I am glad I found this when I did. I do enjoy thinking about objects and space and how the two relate to one another and to a building.”

He liked artists and art but gave up trying to create his own “when I realized I wasn’t going to be good enough to get into the Tate,” he joked from his riverfront office at Tate Millbank.

Serota studied the Italian Renaissance and wrote his master’s thesis on English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner in Switzerland, but his true love was 20th century art.

He began his career as an exhibition organizer for the Arts Council and, at 24, was elected chairman of the Young Friends of the Tate. He resigned the latter post, however, after Tate trustees banned a new contemporary art gallery that he and the Friends had set up for cutting-edge art near Waterloo Station. The young Turks accused the board of being out of touch with new artists--something Serota means never to be.

He went on to become director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford--according to his two-paragraph official biography--and director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, a leader in contemporary art during the 1950s and ‘60s that had fallen victim to turf wars and budget cuts by the time Serota took over in 1976.

He sought out new artists moving into downtrodden east London, launched a community outreach program to attract new audiences and staged a series of headline-grabbing shows by Georg Baselitz, Richard Long and Carl Andre, as well as exhibits of Max Beckmann and one on Hawksmoor. He turned Whitechapel around.

When the Tate job opened in 1988, Serota was an obvious candidate and a popular choice with artists.

“He is passionate about art,”’ said painter Howard Hodgkin, whose work Serota exhibited at Oxford in 1975. “When he was appointed to the Tate, it was clear that nothing in the modern art world would ever be the same again.”

Serota quickly made his mark on the Tate. His first innovation was to rotate the gallery’s permanent collection, only a small portion of which was on view at any given time.

In fact, artworks had been moved in a quiet and piecemeal fashion before, but Serota made a loud point of it, drawing cries of protest from traditionalists who believed the Tate should always be as they thought it always had been. The uproar--and change--brought new attention and larger audiences to the museum.

A Sense of Drama and Materials

Serota also demonstrated his unconventional eye for placing and hanging works of art. Anna Somers Cocks, editor of the Art Newspaper, a London monthly, recalls that, shortly after arriving at Tate Millbank, Serota had low ceilings and other modern add-ons to the central gallery removed and restored the area to its original design by Russell Pope (who also designed the National Gallery in Washington).

“He said, ‘To hell with looking modern, this is a great neoclassical gallery.’ And he put [Rodin’s sculpture] ‘The Kiss’ at the focal point, instead of where it had been traditionally, crammed into a corner. Then he hung all of this avant-garde Italian art of the ‘80s around it,” Somers Cocks said. “It was superb, the right sense of materials and a sense of drama.”

Not everyone agrees, and Serota’s exhibitions juxtaposing new and old, traditional and avant-garde, have remained controversial. The Evening Standard’s Sewell, in particular, condemns Serota as a phony high priest blessing dead sharks, unmade beds and other rubbish posing as modern art.

Of the Tate’s “Abracadabra” show last year, he wrote, “it was a prime example of the hocus-pocus and mumbo jumbo by which the false intellectuals of the art world are able to ‘hey presto!’ anything into art, be it the dung of elephants-- or a dead horse suspended from a dome,” a la artist Damien Hirst.

Elephant dung has featured prominently in the work of British artist Chris Ofili, who won the Tate’s coveted Turner prize for contemporary art in 1998.

Reviving the Turner prize was another Serota project, probably the most significant in raising the profile of contemporary art in Britain. During his tenure, the prize has been limited to artists under 50 and Channel 4 commercial television has begun to air the awards ceremony live.

As chairman of the jury picking the winners, Serota is a lightning rod for criticism from those who believe the Tate is courting controversy for controversy’s sake in its selections, such as Tracy Emin’s “My Bed,” which was short-listed last year. Emin lost out to video artist Steve McQueen, but her work drew massive audiences that seemed to vindicate Serota’s views on exhibitions.

“They have not always been liked by the art press, but they have been highly liked by the public that doesn’t take for granted the history of art from 1900 to today,” Serota said. “My wish is to give people the confidence to feel this is a place for them. I try to remember what it is like to come in here for the first time, what it is like not to know.”

Tate Modern’s arrangement of its permanent collection according to broad themes--nude, still-life, landscape and history--also has been controversial. While some say the displays smartly mask significant holes in the Tate’s modern art collection, others have dismissed the selection and presentation of art as doctrinaire and disappointing. There also is much debate as to whether it really is the work of Tate Modern director Lars Nittve, as Tate officials say, or whether, as John McEwen of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper insisted, “the show bears the undisguised stamp” of Serota.

“Anyone not totally clued up about modern art will come away with a weird idea of what has happened over the past 100 years,” McEwen wrote. “Just for starters, they will think Picasso was an also-ran, Cubism a minor movement and Antony Gormley a more significant sculptor than Rodin. This demolition of hierarchy, the unwillingness to face the unpalatable truth that there are a handful of creators and numerous imitators, is a mark less of Marxism than American Coca-Colanisation.”

Serota concedes that Tate Modern is a work in progress along with Tate Millbank, which has been bleeding visitors to its new sister museum. He says both institutions will thrive on exciting exhibitions, innovative installations of their permanent collections and, hopefully, new acquisitions.

Tate Modern, he says, must show new artists along with the old, becoming the museum of late 20th century and early 21st century art.

“If people want to know what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they should come and see it at the Tate and they shouldn’t have to wait until 2005,” Serota said. At the same time, “we have to show new art as it emerges. If we don’t do it, people will be disappointed, and rightly so.”

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Janet Stobart of The Times’ London bureau contributed to this report.