The Tate Modern is a disappointment. The pictures are fine, the means of identifying them is as appalling as the bridge outside that does not work. Is anyone really pleased that the new museum is attracting a huge audience, most of them not interested in modern art, but as a place to meet, talk and be cool? Moving modern international art to a restored old building could be brilliant. Dividing the art into its subject categories trivialises the artist.
In the 1860s, the French listed Salon prize painting by subject: cows, flowers, landscapes, seascapes, people—and shipped cow pictures to provincial museums.
Now here comes the Tate with such haphazard signing that it is difficult to find the artist and the title of the painting; the labels are off in a corner, or bunched up in a group in small type, frequently hidden by the young people lounging or the older people conversing.
This Tate is a meeting place, not a museum. True, it is the museum’s modern place to educate, but a Cézanne can speak for itself. Does one need a curator, docent, or audio guide to make the case in words for Cézanne’s images? If one is not awed by the painting (it is optional to like or dislike any work of art), all words can do is make the case for cultural correctness or art-historical hierarchies. Art is always seen, not heard.
The Tate’s director and curators are guilty of supplanting the artists with curator-speak. I finally found the wall text for the Cézanne in a corner accompanied by a box, “The big picture”, some historical mumbo-jumbo about the times. I thought at first the Tate was typographically challenged, that this was the biggest type face they could produce, but no: “Please do not touch the pictures” is much bigger, and a quote from Roland Barthes, the French critic, has large and handsome type. Words, not art, are the new Tate’s privileged class.
A suggestion. Why not pretend to be proud of “the big pictures” on the wall by putting on top of the picture, away from the talkers, in very large and visible letters, perhaps in the bright colour of the Barthes quote, “Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906”, with, in the following line, the English and French titles of the picture? That way someone who does not need the curator’s remedial course in art history can immediately take in what the picture is and spend more time looking at it.
Richard Collin
Professor Emeritus of History
University of New Orleans
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Tate Modern: too many words'