History of the Tate

The Tate ranks with the National Gallery, British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum as one of the great museums of Britain. It has a dual role as the national collection of British art and as the national collection of international modern art. It has constanly expresses the taste values of the current proffesional class for all it's history. This class has felt a periodic urge to establish itself a set of cultral values that can through the ritual of common taste confirm it's rights to dominate all others.

The Tate Gallery opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art. It was built on the site of Millbank Prison, demolished in 1892, and was designed to house the collection of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture given to the nation by Sir Henry Tate, together with some British paintings transferred from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Its responsibilities were specifically for modern British art, then defined as by artists born after 1790.

In 1917, following a bequest of modern paintings from the collection of Sir Hugh Lane, the Tate Gallery was formally constituted as the National Gallery of Modern Foreign Art. At the same time its responsibilities for British art were extended to artists born before 1790. A separate Board of Trustees was set up for the Tate Gallery which, until that time, had been entirely controlled by the Trustees of the National Gallery.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the Gallery was closed and the collection dispersed to places of safety. It reopened in 1945 having sustained extensive war damage, some of which is still visible on the west face of the building. In 1946 the Gallery received its first regular purchase grant from the Government.

The National Gallery and Tate Gallery Act (1954) came into force in 1955, effecting the legal separation of the two galleries and establishing the Tate as an independent institution.

The Gallery now operates as an independent body with its own Board of Trustees, under the provisions of the Museums and Galleries Act 1992.
 

The Buildings

The first eight galleries, including the portico and river frontage, opened in 1897, designed by Sidney J R Smith, the architect chosen by Sir Henry Tate. Subsequent extensions in 1910 and 1926 were funded by Sir Joseph Duveen and Lord Duveen respectively, to house paintings and drawings by J M W Turner and modern foreign art. In 1937 Lord Duveen gave the central sculpture galleries, designed by Romaine Walker and Jenkins in collaboration with John Russell Pope, who later built the National Gallery in Washington.

The 1979 extension, financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was the first of the Tate's buildings to receive substantial government funding. Designed by Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier & Bor, the extension was built to provide new gallery space for twentieth-century art, space for temporary exhibitions, and new conservation studios.

In 1980 Trewyn Studio in St Ives, the former home of Dame Barbara Hepworth, was presented to the nation by her family and executors. The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden is now maintained and administered by the Trustees of the Tate Gallery and run in tandem with Tate St Ives.

The Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection opened in 1987. The building was made possible through the generosity of the Clore Foundation and was designed by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates.

Tate Liverpool opened in 1988, occupying part of the Albert Dock complex of warehouses designed by Jessie Hartley and built during the 1840s. The conversion to gallery use was designed by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates.

In 1990 the Duveen sculpture galleries, at Tate Britain, were restored and a new space created on the lower floor for exhibitions of works on paper. This was part of a general refurbishment of the Gallery in preparation for Past Present Future, the first annual new display of the collection.

The new Tate St Ives, opened in summer 1993. It was built by Cornwall County Council to show changing displays from the Tate's collection of work by artists associated with St Ives. The gallery is designed by Eldred Evans and David Shalev.