Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
part of a day to do it justice - or be very selective. It's easy enough to find your way around:
pick up a plan (and, for an extra £4, a multimedia guide), and take the escalator to level 2.
This, and levels 3 and 4, display the
permanent collection
; levels 2 and 3 are also used for
fee-paying temporary exhibitions, and level 6 has a rooftop restaurant with a great view over
the Thames.
The curators have eschewed the usual chronological approach and gone instead for
hanging works according to -isms. On the whole this works very well, though the early
twentieth-century canvases, in their gilded frames, do struggle when made to compete with
the attention-grabbing conceptual stuff.
Although the displays change every six months or so, you're still pretty much guaranteed
to see at least some works by
Monet
and Bonnard, Modigliani, Cubist pioneers
Picasso
and
Braque, Surrealists such as
Dalí
, abstract artists like
Mondrian
, Bridget Riley and Jackson
Pollock, and Pop supremos
Warhol
and Lichtenstein. There are seminal works such as a
replica of the
Duchamp
's urinal entitled
Fountain
and signed “R. Mutt”, Yves Klein's
totally blue paintings, and Carl André's infamous “Bricks” (officially entitled
Equivalent
VIII
). And such is the space here that several artists get whole rooms to themselves, among
them
Joseph Beuys
and his shamanistic wax and furs, and
Mark Rothko
, whose abstract
Seagram Murals
, originally destined for a posh restaurant in New York, have their own
shrine-like room in the heart of the collection. There's usually a few surprises, too, such as
sections on Soviet graphics or Vienna's violent
Aktionismus
movement, plus plenty of video
installations by contemporary artists. You'll also find quite a bit of overlap with Tate Bri-
tain, with works by British artists such as Stanley Spencer, Francis Bacon, David Hockney,
Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Lucian Freud.
