Feigning a Relish

Nicholas Penny

• The Tate: A History by Frances Spalding
  Tate Gallery, 308 pp, £25.00, April 1998, ISBN 1 85437 231 9

This useful, well-balanced and at times enthralling history of the Tate Gallery was commissioned for its centenary. It more or less coincides with the obsequies for the Gallery as we have known it and with the baptism — by marketing experts, one supposes – of TGBA and TGMA, twin offspring of the deceased, dedicated to British art and modern art respectively, and already known as Millbank and Bankside. The institution has in fact often changed identity. It began by being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was also responsible for the design of the Duveen Gallery for the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (not, as Spalding claims, destroyed in the Second World War but damaged and re-opened in 1962). The hushed temple in the heart of the Tate was for sculpture which had to be lent by the V & A.