Tate Research Centres
Tate's research remit is broad and encompasses not only art history but also visual culture, technical art history and conservation science, cultural theory and policy, education and museum studies.
Individual projects are initiated in all these subject areas at Tate, and details of the largest of these can be found under Research Projects. In addition, however, the museum aims to stimulate research and fresh thought in wide-ranging or new subject areas, bringing together staff and scholars from different disciplines and collaborating with a number of partner organisations.
Tate has therefore set up several Research Centres to focus attention and energy on areas of particular interest to the museum, or where the museum is uniquely placed to contribute to debates within research communities.
The Centres are:
- The Art Museum and its Future
- British Romantic Art
- Creative Communities
- International Avant-Gardes 1960-80
- Surrealism and its Legacies
Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research
Updated September 2009.
Tate Research Centre: The Art Museum and its Future
Art museums today face many challenges. Like all museums, they need to respond and adapt to the many forces shaping the contemporary world... 
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Tate Research Centre: British Romantic Art
The Centre aims to promote research on British art from around 1770 to 1850. Tate's collection of British art of the Romantic period, which includes the Turner Bequest, the Oppé collection of watercolours and drawings, and major holdings of the work of William Blake and John Constable, is among the greatest in the world. ... Read more
Tate Research Centre: Creative Communities
Building upon the legacy of the St Ives artist colony in Cornwall, the Centre at Tate St Ives aims to encourage research into the origins, activities and future of creative communities in the Britain and elsewhere... Read more
Tate Research Centre: International Avant-Gardes 1960-80
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of changing art practice across the world. Avant-garde artists tested existing orthodoxies, exploring art's materiality and challenging its relationship to art world institutions, politics and commerce... Read more
Tate Research Centre: Surrealism and its Legacies
Surrealism occupies a unique position in the intellectual and cultural history of the twentieth century. Marking a crisis in post-Enlightenment thought, and active in every sphere of creative life, surrealism had enormous influence upon modern culture, and many of its ideas retain a critical force today....
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