When the JMW Turner exhibition, drawn from Tate’s Turner Bequest, appeared in Washington, DC last year, most people probably wouldn’t have realised how much work had preceded it.
Preparation for the event started many months before: conservators examined the 89 works and checked loan reports. Transit frames were ordered, to allow the paintings and their frames to be lifted and handled without the actual frames being touched. The works were sent to the USA in groups of just four or five paintings per shipment, all accompanied by a courier. Conservators from Tate also went to Washington to make sure they’d arrived safely and to supervise their installation.
It’s been a busy year for touring exhibitions: there were five each from Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool, and four from Tate Modern. Tate St Ives continued to tour small-scale exhibitions, as well as its successful If Everybody Had an Ocean exhibition.
As well as the Turner exhibition, other highlights from Tate Britain included Hogarth to La Caixa in Barcelona, Millais to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting which opened first at the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.
Tate Liverpool’s Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era went to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and drew around 200,000 visitors there. From Tate Modern, Louise Bourgeois went to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and Gilbert & George travelled to Munich, Turin and San Francisco.
During 2007–8, Tate lent 862 works in total to 218 venues, for 192 separate exhibitions. In April 2007, a new department – Tate National – was created to make connections within Tate as well as nationally and internationally in areas such as research, learning, training and exhibitions. Tate National has developed a UK-wide programme, known as Tate Connects, to be launched later in 2008. This programme will, in collaboration with other organisations, try to strengthen programmes, support artists, attract audiences across the UK and create a diverse, highly skilled workforce in the visual arts sector.
One of Tate Connects’ first initiatives is Imagine a Nation. This will be a four-year programme – with four major exhibitions – using art to explore what it means to be British. The four exhibitions will take place at the galleries of the partners in this initiative: Tate Britain, Tyne & Wear Museums, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, and Museums Sheffield.
But Imagine a Nation will go far beyond the galleries. It specifically aims to take art to a huge range of people around the country in the lead up to the Olympics in 2012, and engage people in a dialogue about their individual and collective identities in Britain.
