Representing Britain

The twenty-first-century Tate is launched in London on March 24th, 2000. This is not the day on which the new museum of international modern art, Tate Modern, opens at the transformed power station at Bankside. That happens in May. It is instead the re-launch of the Tate’s existing Millbank site as a new entity, Tate Britain, whose remit is to display and interpret art in Britain from 1500 to the present.

In some respects this marks a return to the vision of Sir Henry Tate, the Gallery’s founding father who had in 1897 established Millbank as a national gallery of British art. More specifically, he wanted it to be a gallery of modern British art, for his personal interest was in mid- and late-nineteenth-century painting: all artists born before 1790 were to be excluded (though exceptions were made for Turner and Constable). But by the end of the First World War the collecting parameters had been formally extended to include contemporary and modern art from abroad and – for British art – work from the earlier centuries too. Today’s new division into Tate Modern and Tate Britain is the logical extension of this development.