Tate Britain backing-up
Tate Britain has at last received the necessary lift-off through
an architectural redesign which could not be achieved entirely through
exhibition diversity alone. Called the Centenary Development and
costing 32.3 million, there is less razzmatazz and more contemplation
of the traditional kind. Architects Allies and Morrison have succeeded
in making the landscaped approach to the new galleries on the west
side of the building, as less of a basement event as is conceivably
possible. John Miller and Partners, as main architects for the project,
have, without rhetoric, managed to establish a mood of reflection
before any art is even viewed, by means of the graduated progression
through a series of benign, well proportioned spaces. All the galleries
are air-conditioned and there is no more of that squeaky, slow-slow-quick
which used to be the bane of concentration in the old spaces. Lighting
is also state of the art. However, the accompanying show, ‘Exposed;
The Victorian Nude’, while quintessentially ‘Britain’,
offers less than the sublime or the beautiful in its quivering Victorian
nudity, revealing naked Victorian attitudes to sex, undress, innocence,
decadence, unrelieved by flesh, flesh and more flesh, however much
cleanliness is next to godliness.
