Free Entry Into Tate Modern Gallery in London
Take a Tour Round London's Tate Modern Free of Charge
Jun 3, 2009
It is quite easy to spend a whole day at Tate Modern. Situated along the Queen's Walk by the side of the Thames looking out to St. Pauls Cathedral, there are plenty of quaint eating areas both indoors and outdoors. If you don't wish to take your own food there is a café at the Gallery and a number of other places nearby.
The Tate Modern building is a former power station and although it is somewhat unsightly from the outside, the Modern renovations to the interior are much more welcoming without losing some of the buildings original characteristics. The Gallery has a vast permanent collection which covers two floors and is home to some outstanding works of art by many well known artists of the 20th century.
Free Admission into Tate Modern's Permanent Collection
The permanent collection is split into four separate exhibitions, each displaying particular art forms from abstract to Vorticism. The categories are Poetry and Dreams, Material Gestures, States of Flux and Idea and Object. A free guided tour is offered for each.
Free Guided Tours at the Tate Modern
The first tour begins at 11.00 on the 3rd floor taking visitors around the Poetry and Dreams collection which fundamentally focuses on surrealism. Even though the art work on display in the Tate is changed periodically, you are most likely to find many fascinating works of art from much loved artists such as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso.
The second tour starts at 12.00 and focuses on Material Gestures in the opposite end of the gallery. This exhibition focuses mainly on abstract expressionism and Fauvism. The collection includes Claude Monet's famous 'The Water-lily Pond' as well as work from two of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Picasso and Matisse. One of the most popular attractions of this particular exhibition is Chris Ofili's, 'No Woman No Cry,' titled after the Bob Marley song and dedicated to the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who's death in 1993 caused controversy having exposing the British Police Force as being institutionally racist. The picture is propped up on stands made from elephant dung.
Tours resume again at 14.00 on the fifth floor. Here we see evidence of the Dada movement and other artists desperate to break away from conventionalism. The early Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque is evidence of artist's needing to change the way art is produced on canvas as a direct response to photography which could capture an exact replica of an image. In this exhibition you will also find Futurist works which started in Italy with the likes of Giacomo Balla and also Vorticism, such as Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's apocalyptic take on the First World War trenches in 'A Star Shell.' Needless to say when the painting was first exhibited in 1916, it provoked controversy amongst the bourgeois.
Other famous pieces amongst this fascinating collection include Rodin's iconic sculpture, 'The Kiss,' the comic book 'Whaam' by Roy Liechtenstein and a room dedicated to celebrity pop artist, Andy Warhol.
At 15.00 the tour crosses over to the Ideas and Objects exhibition which features many weird and wonderful pieces portrayed in different art forms including household items, nature, sound and vision. Some pieces are fascinating, others are breathtaking and dominate the whole room, whilst the rest leave you somewhat bewildered.
The opening hours for the Gallery are Sunday-Thursday 10.00-18.00 and Friday and Saturday 10.00 - 22.00.
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG. Phone: 020 7887 8888. E-mail: www.tate.org.uk
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