The Guardian view on Tate Modern at 25: a huge good fortune | Editorial

The novelist Ian McEwan tells a excellent tale concerning the opening celebration for Tate Modern on 11 May 2000, when he was once presented to the then high minister, Tony Blair, by means of the Tate director, Nicholas Serota. Mr Blair shook the writer’s hand and informed him that he was once a large fan of his paintings and had a few of his art work in Downing Street.

Yoko Ono, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Tennant have been additionally there, at the side of Queen Elizabeth II. As the gallery celebrates its 25th anniversary, it’s arduous to consider such an extravaganza taking place lately.

Back then, London was once the one primary European town to not boast a world-class gallery of contemporary artwork. This repurposed energy station was once set to change into the United Kingdom’s cultural powerhouse. Hulking on a as soon as unloved stretch of the South Bank, its 99-metre tower signalled a message of regeneration and risk to the remainder of the arena. And the arena replied. They had ready for 2 million guests in its first 12 months – 5 million got here.

Following Cool Britannia and the Young British Artists within the 90s, Tate Modern blasted away the final vestiges of British stuffiness about fresh artwork. To hide the gaps within the assortment, Mr Serota changed chronological putting with a thematic one (to a lot crucial dismay). Instead of imitating competition just like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern rewrote the principles and set the tone for 21st-century museums.

From the momentous Matisse Picasso in 2002 to Cézanne 20 years later, it has delivered sufficient masterpieces to soothe the ones sniffy about helter‑skelters and swings. But its biggest triumph is surely the 300 squaremetre Turbine Hall. The cavernous house has inspired artists to increase their imaginations to suit. Louise Bourgeois’s massive spider, Maman, which first greeted guests, returns for the anniversary celebrations.

From its earliest tournament, held for London taxi drivers, Tate Modern’s manifesto has been to make artwork available to all. Children draw at the ground, scholars hang around, households picnic. Mr Blair would possibly have known as it “the people’s palace”.

It has additionally sought to increase the canon, including extra international and feminine artists to its assortment, along primary exhibitions of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama, the final of which broke report numbers in 2023. A Tracey Emin retrospective is billed for subsequent 12 months.

It hasn’t all been champagne and blockbusters. As with maximum cultural establishments, Brexit, the pandemic and a investment disaster have taken their toll. The gallery’s BP sponsorship, which resulted in 2016, provoked a chain of protests from local weather activists. And its good fortune hasn’t completed any favours for its much less glamorous sister gallery, Tate Britain in Millbank.

It is an overly other image on the earth at massive than when Tate Modern first opened its doorways. Where when we have been basking within the post-millennial glow of Olafur Eliasson’s surroundings solar (The Weather Project) in 2003, now we appear to be flailing within the darkness of Mirosław Bałka’s giant black field, which reworked the Turbine Hall into an anxiousness dream in 2009.

The National Gallery additionally marks a large anniversary this 12 months: on 10 May it turns 200. Tate Modern continues to be a whippersnapper in contrast. Over the primary quarter of this century it has change into a part of the established order with out dropping its edge – a difficult act to stay up. But it’s the task of contemporary artwork to conform and problem the established order.