In 1969, Serota became Chairman of the new Young Friends of the Tate organisation with a membership of 750: they took over a building in Pear Place, south of Waterloo Bridge, arranging lectures and Saturday painting classes for local children. The Young Friends staged their own shows and applied for an Arts Councilgrant, but were asked to desist by the Tate Chairman and Trustees, who were concerned with the appearance of official backing for these ventures. Serota and his committee resigned, which precipitated the end of the Young Friends, whose accommodation was taken over for rehearsals by the National Theatre.[11]
The shows, where Serota was helped by his administrator Loveday Shewell, often received adverse reviews in the press, which reacted with an uncharacteristic dislike for contemporary avant-gardeart. Thus Serota remained somewhat distanced from the English establishment, although developing a growing reputation internationally in the art world.[14]
In 1984–1985, Serota shut down the Whitechapel for over 12 months' extensive refurbishment. A strip of land had been acquired, which allowed a design by architects Colquhoun & Miller for a first-floor gallery, restaurant, lecture theatre and other rooms. Although receiving wide approbation, the scheme was in deficit by £250,000. In 1987, Serota raised £1.4 million in an auction of work, which he had asked artists to donate, paying off the debt, and creating an endowment fund to allow future exhibitions of more unconventional work, unlikely to attract a commercial sponsor.
The short-listed candidates for the Tatedirectorship, who included Norman Rosenthal and Julian Spalding, were asked to prepare a seven-year scheme for the Tate. Serota's submission, on two sides of A4 paper, was titled "Grasping the Nettle". It analysed the various areas of Tate work and proposed future stratagems to deal with the imminent crisis caused by restricted government financial support, changing public sector management expectations and increasing art market prices. He saw many areas of the Tate's operations in need of overhaul, and concluded that the gallery was loved, but not respected enough. Tate Chairman, Sir Richard Rogers considered this by far the best proposal submitted.[14]
News of Serota's appointment as Tate Director in 1988 was received enthusiastially by Howard Hodgkin, who wrote in The Sunday Times, "Nick Serota has enormous energy and demonstrated at the Whitechapel a tremendous sense of diplomacy. He is a passionate man, and indeed is quite unusual in this country in his commitment to modern painting and sculpture."[14]
In contrast, Peter Fuller made a scathing attack in Modern Painters magazine, saying that Serota would be incapable, by temperament and ability, of maintaining the Tate's historic collection.[14]
Major expansion of the Tate Gallery had been seen as inevitable for two decades. In 1993, the creation of the National Lottery made it possible to anticipate the availability of major public funding for an enlarged Gallery.[15]
In 1995, Tate received £52 million towards the conversion of the former BanksidePower Station to create Tate Modern. The final cost was £135 million; Serota managed to secure the funds to make up the shortfall from a range of private sources. Tate Modern opened in May 2000 and quickly became a major tourist fixture of London. As well as housing acclaimed new works by Louise Bourgeois and Anish Kapoor, the Gallery has also provided the base for successful exhibitions of Donald Judd, Picasso, Matisse and Edward Hopper.[16]
On 21 November 2000, Serota gave the Dimbleby Lecture in London starting by telling of a 1987 Civil Service enquiry which ranked the pay of the Tate Gallery director with that of larger museums such as the National Gallery, because the former "has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art."[17] He explained it thus:
For in spite of much greater public interest in all aspects of visual culture, including design and architecture, the challenge posed by contemporary art has not evaporated. We have only to recall the headlines for last year's Turner Prize. "Eminence without merit" (The Sunday Telegraph). "Tate trendies blow a raspberry" (Eastern Daily Press), and my favourite, "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled bed threaten to make barbarians of us all" (The Daily Mail). Are these papers speaking the minds of their readers? I have no delusions. People may be attracted by the spectacle of new buildings, they may enjoy the social experience of visiting a museum, taking in the view, an espresso or glass of wine, purchasing a book or an artist designed t-shirt. Many are delighted to praise the museum, but remain deeply suspicious of the contents.[17]
In 2016, Serota received a salary of between £165,000 and £169,999 from the Tate, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the UK public sector then, at the lower end of the senior officials 'high earners' list and well below what similar executives in public health, transport or government administrative top roles were earning.[18]
In 1998, Serota conceived "Operation Cobalt", the secret buy-back of two of the Tate's Turnerpaintings that had been stolen in 1994 while they were on loan to a gallery in Frankfurt. The paintings were recovered in 2000 and 2002.
In December 2005, Serota admitted that he had submitted an application form with false information to the Art Fund (NACF) for a £75,000 grant to go towards buying the painting The Upper Room, stating that the Tate had made no commitment to purchase the work (a requirement of the grant), whereas they had already paid a first instalment of £250,000 several months previously. He attributed this to "a failing in his head". The NACF allowed the Tate to keep the grant.[19] In 2006, the Charity Commission ruled the Tate had broken charity law (but not criminal law)[20] over the purchase and similar trustee purchases, including ones made before Serota's directorship.[21]The Daily Telegraph called the verdict "one of the most serious indictments of the running of one of the nation's major cultural institutions in living memory". In April 2008, Stuckist artist Charles Thomson started a petition on the Prime Minister's website against Serota's Tate directorship.[22]
In September 2016, the Tate announced that Serota would step down as director in 2017, and he would become director of Arts Council England,[3] for the term 1 February 2017 to 31 January 2025.[23] Serota was succeeded at the Tate by Maria Balshaw.[24]
Reactions
Serota has been criticised by Platform and Liberate Tate for inviting increased sponsorship of the Tate from BP. Their demands were supported by 8,000 Tate members and visitors, and artists including Conrad Atkinson.[25] When questioned about BP sponsorship during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Serota responded "We all recognise they have a difficulty at the moment but you don't abandon your friends because they have what we consider to be a temporary difficulty."[26]
The art critic Brian Sewell coined the critical phrase 'the Serota tendency' to refer to the popular BritArt movement of the 1990s that was favoured by Serota's Tate and collectors such as Charles Saatchi.[27][28]
Since its formation in 1999, the Stuckist art group has campaigned against Serota,[29] who is the subject of the group's co-founder Charles Thomson's satirical painting Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision (2000),[30] one of the best known Stuckist works[31] and a likely "signature piece" for the movement.[32] Serota was dubbed the "least likely visitor" to The Stuckists Punk Victorian show at the Walker Art Gallery in 2004,[33] which included a wall of work satirising him and the Tate, including Thomson's painting.[34] In fact, he did visit and met the artists, describing the work as "lively".[35] In 2005, the Stuckists offered 160 paintings from the Walker show as a donation to the Tate. Serota wrote to the Stuckists,[36] saying that the work was not of "sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection", and was accused of "snubbing one of Britain's foremost collections".[36]
In 1973, Serota married Angela Beveridge (divorced 1995),[44] having two daughters, Anya and Beth.[45] In 1997, he married Teresa Gleadowe, a curator and arts administrator, with whom he has two stepdaughters.[45]
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art. By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Remodernism is an artistic and philosophical movement aimed at reviving aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, in a manner that both follows after and contrasts against postmodernism. The movement was initiated in 2000 by stuckists Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, with a manifesto, Remodernism in an attempt to introduce a period of new "spirituality" into art, culture and society to replace postmodernism, which they said was cynical and spiritually bankrupt. In 2002, a remodernism art show in Albuquerque was accompanied by an essay from University of California, Berkeley art professor, Kevin Radley, who said there was a renewal of artists working without the limitation of irony and cynicism, and that there was a renewal of the sense of beauty. Adherents of remodernism advocate it as a forward and radical, not reactionary, impetus.
The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible. The prize is awarded at Tate Britain every other year, with various venues outside of London being used in alternate years. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the UK's most publicised art award. The award represents all media.
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the first publicly funded galleries for temporary exhibitions in London. The building is a notable example of the British Modern Style. In 2009 the gallery approximately doubled in size by incorporating the adjacent former Passmore Edwards library building. It exhibits the work of contemporary artists and organizes retrospective exhibitions and other art shows.
Charles Thomson is an English artist, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art gallery, stood for parliament and reported Charles Saatchi to the OFT. He is frequently quoted in the media as an opponent of conceptual art. He was briefly married to artist Stella Vine.
Joe Machine is an English artist, poet and writer. He is a founding member of the Stuckists art group.
Paul Arthur Harvey is a British musician and Stuckist artist, whose work was used to promote the Stuckists' 2004 show at the Liverpool Biennial. His paintings draw on pop art and the work of Alphonse Mucha, and often depict celebrities, including Madonna.
The Stuckists Punk Victorian was the first national gallery exhibition of Stuckist art. It was held at the Walker Art Gallery and Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool from 18 September 2004 to 20 February 2005 and was part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.
John Bourne is a British artist and painter, living and working in Wales, and a member of the Stuckists art movement. He founded the Wrexham Stuckists group in 2001 and has been exhibited in the group's shows since then, including The Stuckists Punk Victorian. He has also taken part in Stuckist demonstrations against the Turner Prize. The subject matter for his paintings, which are done in a simplified style, comes from his memories.
Elsa Dax is a French painter and a member of the Stuckists art movement. Major themes in her work are myth, legend and fairytale.
The Upper Room is an installation of 13 paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys by English artist Chris Ofili in a specially-designed room. It was bought by the Tate gallery in 2005 from the Victoria Miro Gallery and was the cause of a media furore after a campaign initiated by the Stuckist art group as Ofili was on the board of Tate trustees at the time of the purchase. In 2006 the Charity Commission censured the Tate for the purchase, but did not revoke it.
Stuckism is an art movement that began in London, England, in 1999. In 2000, Melbourne artist Regan Tamanui started the first international branch of the movement. As of 2010, there are seven Australian Stuckist groups, who have held shows—sometimes concurrently with UK activities—received coverage in the Australian press and on TV, and also been represented in UK shows. The Stuckists take a strong pro-painting and anti-conceptual art stance, and were co-founded by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish.
Stuckist demonstrations since 2000 have been a key part of the Stuckist art group's activities and have succeeded in giving them a high-profile both in Britain and abroad. Their primary agenda is the promotion of figurative painting and opposition to conceptual art.
Regan Tamanui is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. In October 2000, he founded the Melbourne Stuckists, the fourth Stuckist of the original Stuckist groups and the first outside the United Kingdom. He has also painted prolifically as a street artist under the tag name HA-HA.
Go West is the title of the first exhibition by Stuckist artists in a commercial London West End gallery. It was staged in Spectrum London gallery in October 2006. The show attracted media interest for its location, for the use of a painting satirising Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate gallery, and for two paintings of a stripper by Charles Thomson based on his former wife, artist Stella Vine.
Spectrum London was a London art gallery which showed contemporary figurative painting, photography and sculpture. It staged Go West, the first commercial West End show of the Stuckists, and a retrospective by Sebastian Horsley. It closed in 2008.
Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision is one of the paintings that was made as a part of the Stuckism art movement, and is recognized as a "signature piece" for the movement, It was painted by the Stuckism co-founder Charles Thomson in 2000, and has been exhibited in a number of shows since, as well as being featured on placards during Stuckist demonstrations against the Turner Prize.
The A Gallery was a contemporary art gallery in Wimbledon, London run by Fraser Kee Scott.
↑ Visual Arts: Saying knickers to Sir Nicholas; The Stuckist art movement has, at last, been granted a major show in a national gallery: Cripps, Charlotte. The Independent [London (UK)] 7 September 2004: p. 18.
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