This month's museum pick...

The Tate Performs Magic,
Transforming A Hulking Sow’s Ear into a Silk Purse

Now that the world has had two years to ooh and ah over the free-form coruscations of Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, it may be time to take a break and praise what some Swiss architects have done on behalf of the venerable Tate Museum in London.

On the south bank of the Thames, the firm of Herzog & de Meuron has transformed the former Bankside Power Station, a hulking, brooding, ugly brown-brick behemoth that was erected in 1947 when the British were still in a deep funk about World War II. The brute is now the Tate Modern, still massive and hulking (850 feet long and 115 feet high, with a 325-foot high chimney) but made much more civil with the addition of a two-story roof-top “light box” that runs the entire length of the building and caps it with a glowing crown at night.

Inside, the huge spaces, now stripped of their turbines and dynamos, have been converted into a series of galleries that some critics say are the best use of industrial spaces for displaying art seen in the past generation. The most dazzling of all the spaces is Turbine Hall, a 500-foot-long, 12-story-high expanse that probably has no equal in the United States aside from, perhaps, the interior of Grand Central Station.

This is where the Tate has chosen to display its modern collection, gambling that the public will overlook the old Bankside’s lack of visual finesse and stream in to see art that has been “liberated” by the luxury of so much space. Here, pieces are not jammed together and parts of the collection are not stored offsite for lack of space. Sculptures or paintings that depend on a large envelope of space or rely on a juxtaposition with only one or two other pieces for maximum effect, have it in almost reckless abundance.

The gamble has worked. Attendance, projected to be 2 million the first year, will probably top 4 million. The museum’s site, across the Thames from St. Paul’s Cathedral, has been a down-at-the-heels industrial slum for many years. No more. — Patrick Totty