FIVE YEARS AGO, in a blaze of publicity, Tate Modern opened in the former Bankside Power Station overlooking the Thames. Since then, twenty million visitors have made their way down the Gallery’s wide, sloping Turbine Hall towards the escalators that serve the three levels devoted to the permanent collection and the temporary exhibition galleries. In the latter, Matisse Picasso (2002) and Edward Hopper (2004) attained the highest attendance figures of the twenty-eight shows mounted since then, with well over 400,000 viewers each. The whole enterprise has been an extraordinary success and a visit to Tate Modern is now as much part of the London tourist itinerary as the Eye, the Tower, the Abbey and the National Gallery. Since 2000, the soaring east end of the Turbine Hall has seen five spectacular, consecutive installations by Louise Bourgeois, Juan Muñoz, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Bruce Nauman. All these were part of the brilliantly conceived Unilever Series which continues next autumn with a commission to Rachel Whiteread. At present, however, there is something very different on view, a sprawling exhibition celebrating the work of the architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron who were responsible, of course, for the building of Tate Modern. But this project, which immeasurably increased the firm’s international profile, is minimally represented in the show. On the multitude of tables bearing the plans, related materials and models that testify to the firm’s accelerating, worldwide commissions, Tate Modern is not easy to find. This is all the more surprising given the fact that the same firm has been selected for the ‘completion’ of Bankside, as announced earlier this year. This will involve reclaimed areas from the electricity substation to the south of the Turbine Hall and further new structures. Although other architects were considered, the choice of Herzog & de Meuron to continue the work seems a logical outcome.

But the larger question of whether or not this ‘completion’ is necessary has been little aired. Tate Modern is vast; acquisitions, as the Tate Director constantly reminds us, are limited; further financial obligations, for an institution that is already underfunded, would follow on from the cost of the building itself. Is bigger necessarily better? Apparently there is a curatorial desire for different sorts of exhibition space in which video works, architecture, performance and photography could be presented more suitably than they are in the currently available galleries. This argument has something in its favour, although it does not seem entirely convincing when the well-known adaptability of the current spaces is taken into account.

When Tate Modern opened, the thematic layout of its permanent collection received considerable criticism.1 Yet the four chief categories remain the same today: History/Memory/Society; Nude/Action/Body; Landscape/Matter/Environment and Still Life/Object/Real Life. Five years have done little to endorse the effectiveness of these fuzzy-edged divisions – often perplexing for a first-time visitor, increasingly irritating for a regular one. It is true that there are fewer jarring juxtapositions of works than was formerly the case and there are now several rooms of considerable power. Rodin’s The kiss, originally shoehorned into a corner outside the main galleries, is beautifully housed with Matisse’s four bronze Backs (but the latter’s L’Escargot is still poorly billeted); less crowded rooms are a distinct advantage; there is an excellent display of post-War Italian art; Beuys and Kiefer are eloquently paired; Dubuffet and Giacometti hit it off. But many mixed rooms, under socio-historical umbrella titles such as ‘Degenerate Art’, ‘Shattered Visions’, ‘Inner Worlds’, tie works down and limit their meanings and impact. Monet’s Water-lilies refuses to breathe in lodgings shared with Olitski, Louis and Gorky, as though the French artist were only a precursor of American abstraction. This is paper-thin art history. The constant jumping from room to room, necessitating abrupt changes in looking, mood and information, does little to encourage contemplation. The scattering of works by a particular artist throughout the two levels of display – Picasso is an obvious example – prevents the emergence of any sustained impression or cumulative knowledge. Surely some balance could be achieved between rotating displays and rooms of a more stable and coherent chronology that magisterially emphasise the strengths of the Gallery’s holdings. But best of all would be to jettison the whole, already dated concept.

In October last year the Tate launched an appeal to augment the permanent collection through gifts and bequests of works of art, donations and legacies, in the face of ‘declining public resources’. As part of this appeal, British artists in particular were asked to shake a leg of generosity and give works to the nation. Inevitably some were flattered by this ‘your-country-needs-you’ approach; others have declined. To see such responses in context, we have only to examine Bankside’s current representation of modern British art. Although works by just over twenty British artists are on view, few are by household names (Durst, Skeaping, Gear and Agar less than others). It is difficult to think of comparable museums devoted to modern art which exclude the national schools to the extent now apparent at Tate Modern. Is there a curatorial reluctance to exhibit British art there for fear of seeming over-patriotic, even provincial? At present there is nothing on show by Moore, Bomberg, Lewis, Sutherland, Hepworth, Nicholson, Nash, Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Riley, Hockney or Long. Works by some of these artists can of course be seen at Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool (and have been on view in earlier Bankside displays), but that is no reason why they should be omitted from the wider picture of the art of the last hundred years. Now that the taboo against British artists receiving retrospectives at Tate Modern is to be broken next year with a major show there devoted to Gilbert & George, it is high time for a similar change of attitude to the display of the permanent collection.

1  See the Editorial, ‘The Tates: structures and themes’, in this Magazine, 142 (2000), pp.479–80. The recent thematic re-hang of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, will be the subject of a future Editorial.