Fighter, schmoozer, art-lover … Nicholas Serota Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
There has only ever really been one director of Tate, and that has been Serota. Sat facing him at a recent dinner, I was asked by a European collector how it was that I had been seated opposite God. Before Serota, there was only the Tate at Millbank. No Tate Modern nor St Ives. Tate Liverpool opened just as he joined in 1988. Since then, he has successfully reinvented the Tate name, steering a somewhat fusty and guarded institution into the 21st century. Directors of Tate’s branches have come and gone. Serota has remained. He has largely invented the role from which he now steps down.
Serota has good relationships with artists, has names and faces at his fingertips and a prodigious memory, filing away stories and foibles, social connections and networks. You are as likely to find him trawling small galleries on a weekend and showing up at openings in London’s East End, in Nottingham, Newcastle or Glasgow, as you are at the world’s biennales.
He runs a huge, multilevelled bureaucracy, but never forgets what the art itself needs. Good at fighting his corner with a succession of governments, he is equally adept at schmoozing collectors around the world in order to procure loans and donations. Best of all he likes the company of artists of all kinds, and enjoys curating exhibitions. His career – at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art and running the Whitechapel – before he replaced Alan Bowness as director of Tate, was more about collaborating with artists than building a collection. Bringing Jasper Johns’s drawings to Oxford, or mounting major shows by Gerhard Richter and Eva Hesse at the Whitechapel, he was making exhibitions that Tate, at that time, did not have the vision to do.
Tate Modern became a major tourist attraction as well as a gallery. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters
The success of Tate Modern, which he had the ambition and the clout to get housed in the former Bankside Power Station, is down to Serota. So too is the desire to make it one of the world’s great museums. He has made Tate truly international. The popularity of Tate Modern took Serota by surprise. No one expected such numbers. Serota thought he had an art museum; what he got was a major tourist attraction. But he never forgot that Tate must stay serious, as well as providing the public with an experience of art on its own terms. Serota is respected because he also respects art, embracing and fostering the new, and its antithetical demands.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions (first with the support of Unilever, now with Hyundai) have also been a midwife to ways of making art that are ever more theatrical, sometimes even grandiose. Their success has been emulated worldwide, most notably at Paris’s Monumenta in the belle epoch Grand Palais, and at Park Avenue Armory in New York.
It was perhaps predictable that Serota would announce his departure after the recent opening of Tate Modern’s extension, and the appointment of Frances Morris as its director. But in the light of the Brexit referendum, and last week’s surprise announcement of the departure of the V&A’s German director Martin Roth, his resignation feels precipitous. The announcement of Brexit shocked Serota, coming the week the extension of Tate Modern opened.
Tate Modern’s Switch House extension opened in June. Photograph: Jeff Blackler/Rex/Shutterstock
How can Tate keep up with other museums around the world in terms of its collection? The provision of international collaborations may well be affected. Loans may be more difficult to procure. London, as a capital of international art, and as home to young artists from around the world who have enriched our cultural life (winners of Tate’s Turner prize have included German artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Tomma Abts and French artist Laure Prouvost), is in doubt.
Who will fill Serota’s shoes, and have the political and cultural nous to maintain Tate’s global significance? The institution doesn’t just reflect the importance of visual art (and art that, increasingly, goes beyond the visual), it encourages it. The entertaining parlour game of who would replace Chris Dercon as director of Tate Modern (Tate curator Morris got the job), or Penelope Curtis as director of Tate Britain (Alex Farquharson from Nottingham Contemporary), are small beer compared to who might replace Sir Nick.
Who'd want the job now? The pay is poor, the politics frightening in light of Brexit and Britain's cultural conservatism
I can think of no one in the UK who can direct Tate as Serota has done. Looking at museum chiefs around the world, I ask myself: who would want the job? Who would want to come to London now? The pay (compared with Tate’s peer institutions around the world) is poor; the politics frightening in light of Brexit, recession, and Britain’s increasing cultural conservatism and insularity.
Serota has managed to rise above most of the controversies that have marked his leadership, including the ongoing protests about Tate’s sponsorship by BP. The museum itself was founded on money derived from Henry Tate’s fortune in the sugar trade and, ultimately, from slavery. Tate cannot survive on public money alone, but the origin of private sponsorship is an increasingly contentious ethical issue. The institution needs the goodwill of artists and of the public, many of whom find such sponsorship deals morally repugnant and unjustifiable.
Like all British museums, Tate finds it increasingly difficult to fund purchases in the overheated art market. It also faces criticism about the pay offered to its curatorial and programming staff. Where is the money to come from, to attract the best and the most ambitious? Tate’s new director will have to deal with all of this, and run a museum too.
Sigmar Polke’s Alice in Wonderland at Tate Liverpool, 1995. Photograph: Tate Photography/© Estate of Sigmar Polke/DACS 2014, photograph © Tate Photography
Serota’s five greatest Tate hits
Richard Serra: Weight and Measure (Tate Britain, 1992)
In the winter of 1992, the American sculptor installed two large blocks of forged steel on the floor of Tate. Two massive, imponderable blocks occupied an otherwise empty space. Set at a distance from one another (their weight of 35 and 39 tons supported beneath the floor), they created an almost living tension. I thought of them when Martin Creed has his runners traversing the same space in 2008, and when Mark Wallinger’s State Britain was there in 2007. Serra’s work continues to weigh and measure everything that has been here since. The force field is still there.
Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots (Tate Liverpool, 1995)
Polke has had three big Tate shows, the last a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2014. This, the German artist’s first major UK retrospective, was a dizzying revelation of dots, devils, tea-towels, kitsch and capitalist realism. The best show Tate Liverpool has ever had.
Bridget Riley (Tate Britain, 2003)
A wonderful retrospective in Tate Britain’s top-lit galleries, this gave us the full measure of Riley’s talents, and the rigours and pleasures of a painter who is so much more than an Op Artist of the 1960s. Her late wall drawings were a revelation.
Doris Salcedo Shibboleth (Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2007)
The Turbine Hall commissions have delighted and confounded audiences ever since Tate Modern opened. From Juan Muñoz’s 2001 Double Bind to the forthcoming work by the brilliant Philippe Parreno, the Turbine Hall remains one of art’s great challenges. In 2007, Salcedo dug a crevasse the length of the Turbine Hall, a great fissure with a resounding presence. Shibboleth was a gesture that felt as baroque as it was minimal, leaving its scar, and an invitation, in the concrete to this day.
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (Tate Modern, 2014)
Co-curated by Nicholas Serota and Nicholas Cullinan of MoMA (now director of London’s National Portrait Gallery), this compendious exhibition of Matisse’s late work received more than half a million visitors, the largest ever for any Tate show. It deserved it. Matisse’s vitality never flagged, and the cut-outs were both a surprise and joyous summation of the French colourist’s long career.
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition, at Tate Modern in 2014. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex
