Reflecting Tate's increasingly broad audience, Tate Enterprises continues to work creatively to optimise the quality and variety of its products. Its success this year is easy to measure; overall Tate Enterprises (excluding Tate Catering) had a turnover of £13.7 million and contributed a profit of £2.9 million to Tate.
The shops at Tate Modern prepared for a large and diverse audience attracted to Carsten Höller's slides for The Unilever Series by presenting an affordable range of highquality art-centred gifts, which proved very popular and made the Christmas trading season particularly successful. The exhibitions dedicated to Howard Hodgkin, Hans Holbein and William Hogarth at Tate Britain attracted a committed audience, whose clear enthusiasm for these great painters showed in the high take-up rate of the exhibition catalogues and merchandise. The Holbein in England exhibition catalogue was particularly successful and sold over 20,000 copies.
The catalogue for Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction was also a huge popular success, but the highlight of the publishing year at Tate Modern coincided with Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition. Tate Publishing had the privilege of working with the artists on a special publishing project, The Complete Pictures, which comprised two hardback books, each over 600 pages, in a specially designed carrying case. There was also an exhibition catalogue at under £10. People flocked to artist signings in bookshops and at Tate Modern, and bravely carried away 10kg of books.
