London Guide
Southwark
Tate Modern
Opening time: Daily 10am–6pm, Fri & Sat until 10pm
Price: Free
Website: www.tate.org.uk
Bankside is dominated by the austere power station of the same name, transformed by the Swiss duo Herzog & de Meu-ron into the Tate Modern. The masterful conversion has left plenty of the original, industrial feel, while providing wonderfully light and spacious galleries in which to show off the Tate's vast international twentieth-century art collection. The best way to enter is down the ramp from the west, so you get the full effect of the stupendously large turbine hall. It's easy enough to find your way around the galleries, with levels 3 and 5 displaying the permanent collection, level 4 used for fee-paying temporary exhibitions, and level 7 home to a café with a great view over the Thames.
Given that Tate Modern is the largest modern art gallery in the world, you need to spend the best part of a day here to do justice to the place, or be very selective. Pick up a plan (and, for an extra £1, an audioguide), and take the escalator to level 3. The curators have eschewed the usual chronological approach through the "isms", preferring to group works together thematically. On the whole this works very well, though the early twentieth-century canvases in their gilded frames do struggle when made to compete with contemporary installations.
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, Cubist pioneers Picasso and Braque, Surrealists such as Dalí, abstract artists like Mondrian, Bridget Riley and Pollock, and Pop supremos Warhol and Lichtenstein. There are seminal works such as a replica of Duchamp's urinal, entitled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt" and Yves Klein's totally blue paintings. 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.