Masterpieces from the Tate Collection, including Rodin’s The Kiss (1901-14), Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1880-1), Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937) and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962), will come to Liverpool, some for the first time, as part of a major rehang of the Collection at Tate Liverpool sponsored by DLA Piper. The new displays, over three floors of the gallery, have been arranged to celebrate Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008.
A key feature of the new displays will be a special focus on the work of two celebrated British artists: Bridget Riley and Stanley Spencer, including some of their best-known works.
Tate holds the national collection of modern and contemporary art; DLA Piper Series: The Twentieth Century offers visitors to Tate Liverpool the opportunity to see more of the Tate Collection than ever before. Presenting important historic, modern and contemporary works, the displays will explore the history of the past one hundred years of art in a radical new way, by offering a parallel history of abstract and figurative art. DLA Piper Series: The Twentieth Century will include a rich variety of approaches to representational and non-representational art, highlighting key moments and developments, as well as continuities through the 20th and into the 21st century. The displays will follow a chronological framework, but will accommodate some ‘moments’ that juxtapose artists from across the history of Modern and contemporary art.
The first and second floors will be divided thematically: on the first floor a series of titled rooms will look at the various manifestations of representational art and the continuation of figuration within Modern and contemporary art, while the second floor will trace the journey towards abstraction, and examine the complexity and diversity of abstract art. This opposition, one of the most familiar and widespread of approaches to Modern art, is given a more complex reading through these displays, showing that, throughout the history of Modernism, the one responds to, or is informed by, the other.
Among the works included in the displays will be masterpieces by Whistler, Degas, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Modigliani, Kirchner, Mondrian, Spencer, Magritte, Ernst, Moore, Pollock, Giacometti, Bacon, Warhol, Judd, Stella, Kelly, Oiticica, Boetti, Nauman, Riley, Hatoum, Whiteread and others.