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News that Jessica Morgan will succeed Maria Balshaw as Tate’s director to become the most powerful figure in British art comes as no surprise. Earlier this year, at the Venice Biennale, almost everyone I chatted to assumed she’d already got the job. Even Morgan herself grinned playfully when I asked whether she was poised to take over at Tate, as we stood amid her classy show of work by minimalist Korean artist Lee Ufan, which, in her capacity as director of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation (which she has led since 2015), she had curated in a suite of galleries overlooking Piazza San Marco.
I remember sensing a similar streak of winning mischief in London-born Morgan many years ago, when she was still an up-and-coming curator at Tate (where she worked from 2002 to 2014). I once shadowed her while she was visiting the Frieze art fair to acquire new work for the gallery. “Ninety per cent of what you see here,” she told me, referring to the swanky art on every side, “will be forgotten about within five years.” She wasn’t wrong.
My impression is that Morgan is an immaculate, inspiring curator who commands international respect, and, crucially, should win the confidence of artists, as well as patrons, donors and Tate’s staff. Given that she will probably be taking a significant pay cut to come to Tate from Dia (where she reportedly receives a base salary worth more than £600,000), Morgan, who will start in her new role on January 1, may be motivated by public duty, too. Quite where her appointment leaves senior internal figures at Tate who, I understand, were gunning for the job, is a question for another day.
Appointing someone from inside Tate would have been a mistake; in recent years, the institution has stumbled. Admittedly, with the Covid-19 pandemic, Balshaw was dealt an unlucky hand, but, in the annals of Tate’s history, her nine-year tenure will not go down as a success. Under her, Tate lost visitors and money, and there were strikes. In its bid to expand the canon, the institution became too agenda-driven, and it no longer seems to value some of the Western art in its care that it should be championing.
Recently, an ex-museum director who used to work at Tate pointed out to me that, when he visited Tate Modern at the start of this year, he noted that many important Western masterpieces – he counted more than 80 – weren’t on display. Some are still absent: The Kiss (1901-1904) by Auguste Rodin, The Sick Child (1907) by Edvard Munch, and Pierre Bonnard’s Coffee (1915), to name only three. By contrast, last year’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, by an indigenous artist from the Arctic, was abysmal.
It’s hard, for a museum director, to navigate between the often opposed values of an institution’s older, conservative trustees and donors and a younger, sometimes radical workforce. But that’s the job. Ultimately, I sense, Balshaw alienated both factions. I’ve also heard that Balshaw, who came from Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, reportedly didn’t like being surrounded by smart, talented people who knew Tate well.
It is unclear what Morgan proposed to gain the support of Tate’s board and win former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s approval. I assume that her vision involved reappraising the division between Tates Modern and Britain, which no longer works. British art can feel ghettoised on Millbank.
To my mind, this is the moment to rethink Tate’s entire collection and its display, and present it chronologically, without artificially differentiating between British art and art from everywhere else, beginning in what is now Tate Britain. With its dramatic, industrial galleries, Tate Modern is perfectly suited to display art from 1960 onwards, which often takes more expansive forms such as installation and video. There should be greater emphasis on scholarship, in general, and artists could be more involved in decision-making.
I can imagine a scenario, too, in which Morgan would oversee a team of artistic directors at each of Tate’s various institutions, working in concert rather than in competition. For now, though, Tate should be grateful that it has an energetic incoming leader whose taste and judgment – as well as fundraising ability – it can trust.
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