LONDON CALLING

For more than a decade this has been one of the two liveliest cities in the rapidly globalizing art world. Los Angeles is the other, where a similarly dense concentration of interesting new artists continues to emerge. Today, as London unveils to the public the eagerly anticipated Tate Modern, its knockout new museum for art made since 1900, consider an L.A. precedent.

Sixteen years ago the Museum of Contemporary Art’s renovated warehouse space in L.A.’s Little Tokyo neighborhood was a dramatic revelation of how an architecturally undistinguished industrial building could easily be adapted for public use, becoming an ideal museum for modern and--especially--contemporary art. The reason was simple. Industrial buildings offered precisely the kind of space that artists had long been using as studios. New art’s emerging postindustrial vocabulary fit the physical context like a proverbial glove.

Now consider the Tate Gallery of Modern Art. With its beautifully renovated former power station on the banks of the Thames, London can rightly claim the best exhibition space in Europe for the art of our time.

Its rivals pale. Paris’ 1977 Pompidou Center has a great collection, especially of early Modern art; but even in its own newly refurbished (at a cost of $90 million), much improved condition, the famous inside-out building is still a mediocre place to look at art. Bilbao’s $100-million Guggenheim in Spain, by contrast, is an astonishing, even more famous building with good galleries but no compelling artistic program.

Two main differences separate what MOCA did in Little Tokyo and what Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, has done at Bankside, a run-down but highly visible location directly across the Thames from the landmark dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. (And, notably, across from the City, the London district emerging as Europe’s most powerful financial center--culture always orbits around economic clout.)

One is a matter of effervescent surface. The old Bankside Power Station, a grim, unlovely brick hulk designed in the 1940s and outmoded and mostly unused by the 1980s, has been injected with a breathtaking dose of industrial chic by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. Rarely have steel, concrete, rough-cut oak and glass looked so downright ethereal. The tonic effects of light and space seem to have guided the designers’ hand.

Second, Tate Modern is huge. Not big, huge.

Overall it’s fully seven times the size of MOCA’s imposing warehouse in L.A., with more than three times as much exhibition space (some 151,000 square feet). The vast entry hall, which is where the power station’s great oil-fired turbine engines once roared, is nearly the length of two football fields (American football, not British), while soaring higher than a modern 10-story building. This grand avenue pulls the public life of the urban street indoors, while providing the requisite occasion for a jaw-dropping Wow! from first-time visitors.

The tough but elegant Turbine Hall currently features two commissions--one hit, one miss--from octogenarian American artist Louise Bourgeois. At one end three big steel towers comprise fun-house viewing platforms (who needs ‘em here?). On the hall’s crossing bridge, a giant steel spider, balanced on delicate legs, is evocatively poised to deposit marble eggs into the room--an industrial-strength talisman for art-making.

The galleries are arranged on three upstairs floors to the left, between the entry hall and the river. One side offers dramatic views out over London, the other provides equally dramatic views over the Turbine Hall.

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For the opening the entire museum showcases Tate Modern’s permanent collection. (In a year the fourth floor will become home to temporary shows, with the collection on the third and fifth floors.) Founded in 1897 by sugar baron Sir Henry Tate, the Tate Gallery had, over the years, developed two intertwined strands of collecting. They have now been divided.

Across and down the river at Millbank, the original Neoclassical building is now called the Tate Gallery of British Art. It surveys the last 500 years of home-grown painting and sculpture--from grave portraitist Hans Holbein to 1990s phenom Mona Hatoum.

By contrast Tate Modern is a repository for international art of the last 100 years--Cubism to the Brit Pack of young artists. If you detect a certain overlap between the two museums, go to the head of the class. Current British art figures prominently in both.

Indeed, Tate Britain and Tate Modern are distinctive and successful because both spring from an active interest in British art being made today. The industrial building chosen for the new physical plant valorizes the common studio space of contemporary artists. Likewise, the program is conceptually organized around the activity of living artists working in the museum’s midst.

Yes, there’s Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Mondrian and many other treasure-house works by major artists from early in the century. There are important examples by such critical postwar figures as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman, too. Still, you always feel that the weight of the entire institution is subtly being deployed behind working British artists, who are everywhere stirred into the permanent collection mix.

That means both long-established figures and hip kids. Everywhere you look there’s work by British artists who emerged into prominence from the 1960s to the early 1980s, like Bridget Riley, Richard Long and Tony Cragg. And there’s lots of younger artists such as Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, Steve McQueen and Rachel Whiteread, who have gained recognition since.

It’s not that current British art is given undue play. Provincial self-importance is not the modus operandi. Self-confidence and commitment are.

In fact artists from elsewhere are often italicized. Compelling rooms are devoted to individual displays by Riley, Cragg and other Brits, but much larger emphasis is given to influential precedents set by Marcel Duchamp, Warhol and Nauman. (These latter two are represented by a substantial number of loans.) And the two most beautiful galleries among the museum’s more than 80 also go farther afield.

One is the double-height room on the fifth floor, lit from two sides by frosted clerestory windows, with terrific Minimal sculpture by American artists Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris and Richard Serra. The other is a sun-washed third-floor room that houses a haunting masterpiece of toppled stone megaliths, “The End of the 20th Century” (1983-85), by Germany’s Beuys.

The inaugural installation is not without problems. Instead of chronology or “ism” as an organizing principle, Serota and Tate Modern director Lars Nittve chose four familiar themes: history, the nude, landscape and still life. They derive from the 17th century French academy and have here been made more elastic to accommodate things like pure abstraction, which didn’t exist 300 years ago.

The nude rooms, for instance, do include Rodin’s voluptuous marble sculpture of entwined lovers, “The Kiss” (1901-04), and an energetic Kirchener picture of bacchanalian bathers. But it’s also where you find that gorgeous room full of abstract Minimalist sculpture--plus a big wall label explaining that 1960s Minimalism meant to make the audience acutely self-conscious, by emphasizing how an individual viewer physically perceives a sculptural object.

You might not be nude, in other words, but you are a “perceiving body.” The old genre of the nude, from academic art, is now said to include all manner of representations of “the body,” as well as such manifestations of “action” as performance art.

Similarly, traditional landscape is extended to include “matter” and “environment.” History expands into “memory” and “society.” Still life incorporates “objects” and “real life.”

The problem with such reductive themes is that art is made a mere illustration of a curatorial text. Forget 17th century France--themed galleries are symptomatic of a new academy. Conceptual art, an idea-based art that derives from language, has been established as the global norm for nearly 30 years. Its academic precepts drive this installation motif.

Yet no amount of wall text will help if diverse works of art don’t resonate on a visual and experiential level. You just feel lectured at, as if by a museum education department run amok.

No matter. Themed galleries do mitigate the chronological weaknesses in Tate Modern’s holdings--spotty Russian art, little Mexican Modernism, scant German Expressionism, few L.A. artists, etc., while allowing for productive deployment of such strengths as Surrealism and New York Minimalism. There’s some wit, too, as in making Claes Oldenburg’s hanging Pop sculpture of a giant three-way plug the first work you see--perfect in this former power station. And the large installations and video projections that currently fill the temporary exhibition spaces also brim with satisfactions.

So what did London finally get for $210 million, kick-started with National Lottery funds? A lot more than Paris or Bilbao, for neither of those significant museums has much savviness about the current art life of France or Spain. And what’s a contemporary museum for?

For now Britannia rules. Artistically, Tate Modern leaves its principal European rivals gasping in the dust.

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* Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London. Open daily, free admission. Web site: https://www.tate.org.uk;phone: 44-20-7887-8008.

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Architecture Review: The melding of art and industry is wonderfully resolved here. F24