Background Information
When Tate first opened its doors to the public in 1897 it had just one site, displaying a small collection of British artworks. Today Tate has four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks.
In 1889 Henry Tate, an industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, offered his collection of British art to the nation. There was no space for it in theNational Gallery and the creation of a new gallery dedicated to British art was seen as a worthwhile aim and the search for a suitable site began.
In the 1980s Alan Bowness, then director of Tate, decided to create a ‘Tate of the North’, as the project became known. This would be a gallery with a distinct identity, dedicated to showing modern art and encouraging a new, younger audience through an active education programme.
A warehouse at the disused Albert Dockin Liverpool was chosen as the site for the new gallery. The dock, once a bustling site crammed with rich cargos from Asia, tea, silk, tobacco and spirits, was derelict. In 1981 the dockyard underwent a rejuvenation, with theMaritime Museum leasing one of the warehouses and restaurants and bars opening.
In 1985, James Stirling was commissioned to design the new Tate Gallery at Liverpool. His designs left the exterior of the brick and stone building built over a colonnade of sturdy Doric columns almost untouched, but transformed the interior into an arrangement of simple, elegant galleries suitable for the display of modern art. It opened to the public in May 1988.
2008 marked the year Liverpoolwas named European Capital of Culture. To celebrate this, in 2007 the gallery hosted the Turner Prize, the first time the competition was held outside London. More than one million people a year visit Tate Liverpool, cementing its position as a venue for major European exhibitions of modern art.
Grosz was drafted into the German army in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War. His experiences in the trenches deepened his intense loathing for German society. Discharged from the army for medical reasons, he produced savagely satirical paintings and drawings that ‘expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment’. This work shows dogs roaming past the abandoned bodies of suicides in red nocturnal streets. The inclusion of an aged client visiting a prostitute reflects the pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years.
Bridget Riley - Hesitate 1964
Hesitate is one of a group of black and white paintings made by Riley in 1964 in which the titles imply emotional tension, for example Disturbance, Chill, Loss and Pause. The shapes were drawn first using a compass, and with templates for the larger ellipses; the smaller ones were drawn freehand. The shades of grey were judged by eye. Pause, 1964 (private collection) is similar in design to Hesitate, but with the ellipses forming a vertical line and the changes of tone reversed. Pause itself develops an idea in an earlier painting Movement in Squares, 1961 (Arts Council Collection), but with the rectangles replaced by ellipses and circles, and with the addition of the changes of tone.
Riley was concerned that the painting should be seen as a whole, as a 'field', and the individual parts not noticed. She described Pause (conversation of 11 April 1986), with its vertical fold, as associated with the human figure, and Hesitate in contrast as like a landscape. The overall size of each painting is crucial to the placing of the fold and to the visual effect, which depends on an awareness of the contrast between different parts at the same time.
Alexander Calder - Untitled 1937
As the title suggests, Standing Mobile uses a stable structure to support its extended mobile arms. The trio of angled legs are welded to the inside of the cone, from within the point of which the main curving upright springs. The upright is forged from the same grade of rod as the legs, but beaten-out to become finer as it rises and curves. One arm is suspended from this upright by a looped ‘S’ of metal, typical of Calder’s elegant forms. The red disc at the end of this first arm provides the counter-weight for the second arm, which balances organic green and yellow forms. With an elegance born out of the necessity to establish these balances, Calder used progressively thinner grades of rod for the legs and arms. The tripod stand also does away with the necessity to suspend a large and relatively heavy work from the ceiling, which had generally been his solution up to this period.
Although coming from a family of Pennsylvania sculptors, Alexander Calder turned to sculpture only in the late 1920s. He soon became absorbed by the new aesthetics and technical experimentation of modernism. His first success was the whimsical Circus, 1926-31 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) in which he manipulated wire figures in an elaborate performance. Still working on Circus, he moved to Paris in 1928, visiting the studios of Piet Mondrian (1874-1944) and Joan Miró (1893-1983), whose work – in very different ways – influenced his own shift into abstraction. Movement was always a key element. Calder developed hand-cranked works before embarking, in 1932, upon the series of hanging works that were dubbed mobiles (reputedly by Marcel Duchamp). The variety and subtlety of his mobiles, with painted organic forms suspended from tiers of linked rods, served to define and dominate the form.
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