The Tate is a institution that houses the UK's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art. It is a network of four art museums: Tate Britain(London), Tate Liverpool(Liverpool), Tate St Ives(St. Ives) and Tate Modern(London), with a complementary website, Tate Online. It is a non-departmental public body.
Tate is used as the operating name for the corporate body which was established by the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 as The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery.
The Tate Modern in London is Britain's national museum of international modern art.
The Galleries
The collections in Tate Modern consist of works of international modern and contemporary art dating from 1900 onwards.
The Tate Collection is on display on levels three and five of the building, while level four houses large temporary exhibitions and a small exhibition space on level two houses work by contemporary artists.
Collection exhibitions
When the gallery opened in 2000, the collections were not displayed in chronological order but were rather arranged thematically into four broad groups: 'History/Memory/Society'; 'Nude/Action/Body'; 'Landscape/Matter/Environment'; and 'Still Life/Object/Real Life'. This was ostensibly because a chronological survey of the story of modern art along the lines of the Museum of Modern Art in New York would expose the large gaps in the collections, the result of the Tate's conservative acquisitions policy for the first half of the 20th century. The first rehang at Tate Modern opened in May 2006. It eschewed the thematic groupings in favour of focusing on pivotal moments of twentieth-century art, with further spaces allocated on levels 3 and 5 for shorter exhibitions. The current layout is:
Level 3 - Material Gestures
This focuses on abstraction, expressionism and abstract expressionism, featuring work by Claude Monet, Anish Kapoor, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse and Tacita Dean.
Level 3 - Poetry and Dream
The sexually explicit section on this level currently features a drawing by the pseudo-anonymous French artist "Proper Man" entitled le cock et le balls which is his attempt to explore the tension between old and new attitudes to sexuality within an urban environment.
Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge. The rebuilt Globe Theatre is in white, to the left
Level 5 - Energy and Process
This focuses on Arte Povera, with work by artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Kasimir Malevich, Ana Mendieta, Mario Merz and Jenny Holzer.
Level 5 - States of Flux
This focuses on Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism and Pop Art, containing work by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and the photographer Eugène Atget.
