The Tate Modern Highlights Tour

At the west Entrance to Tate Modern at the top of the slope

Guided by Rick Jones

Walk Times

Day	Walk Type	Start Time	End Time
Wednesday	Weekly	2.30 pm	4.30 pm	Winter Summer	Reserve Online

N.B. this walk will not take place on the following dates:

01-11-2023 15-11-2023

Short read: Greatest Show on Earth in London.

Long read: “Tate Modern, take one, was the ordinary made extraordinary… A few years on, the strangeness was cranked up a notch with the arrival of one of the most enigmatic buildings London has ever seen.”

As for the art… it’s about modern art and contemporary art with masterpieces from around the world.

Surreal, kinetic sculptures. A year collapsed into a document of only six minutes and four seconds. Behold 2009 (steel car bumpers and 4,000 metres of human hair). Bodily deformations to express heightened emotions (Picasso). An archive of misunderstandings, crises and ambivalences. Hommage à Chrysler Corp. 1957.

Let alone Bonnard, Matisse, Braque, Magritte, Mondrian, Moore, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Duchamp…..

Blue Badge Guide and Secretary of the Critics Circle, Rick Jones knows the art, knows his way round the “enigmatic building” it’s folded into.

Translation read: 1) best possible introduction to a landmark building and art that is a series of flashpoints across the last century; 2) crash course in modern art (know your Dali from the Dali Llama).

The Tate Modern Walking Tour – The Practicals

The Tate Modern Highlights Tour is led by arts journalist Rick Jones, Secretary of the Critics Circle every Wednesday at 2.30pm.

Meeting point: The guided tour begins at the Entrance to Turbine Hall at the western end of the building. The Turbine Hall – as entrances go, it’s surely the most spectacular one in London (if not the United Kingdom).

Tate Modern is by the banks of the River Thames on Bankside, London SE1 9TG. It comprises the Blavatnik Building (Sumner Street), Turbine Hall and the Natalie Bell Building (Holland Street). It has St Paul’s cathedral opposite it on the other side of the Thames, and historic Southwark to its south. It has great accessibility via public transportation with London Bridge, Southwark, Blackfriars, Cannon Street and St Paul’s stations within walking distance.

Formerly the Bankside Power Station, it was selected as a new Tate gallery site in 1994 and opened in 2000. The power plant building was stripped back to its original steel and brick structure. The boiler house became the Tate collection galleries whilst the turbine hall was cast as a dramatic entrance and display area.

Bring an open mind.

Rick visits the big names in the gallery like Henri Matisse who created, on a vast scale, L’Escargot (the snail, above) in 1953 when he was too old to wield a paintbrush. It recalls the violent clashing colours of his ‘wild animal’ youth.

To the Dutch, there was first Rembrandt, second Van Gogh and third Piet Mondrian whose Composition C (above) painted in 1935, is the ultimate in abstract purity and is seen today on handbags and fabrics all over the world.

Jackson Pollock was a drug addict and an alcoholic who in 1941 expressed his wild inner turmoil in Birth (above). Critics described his talent as ‘volcanic…unpredictable….raw…undisciplined’ and put him on the cover of Time magazine.

Then came Pop Art in the 1950s inspired by advertising, comic books and strip cartoons. The massive dimensions of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam (above) make it an ironic statement on the bald excitement of war.

To some, the entire art movement of the twentieth century might as well be thrown down the toilet – which makes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (above) of 1917 strangely prophetic.

All of these works and more you can see on Rick’s Tate Modern Tour every Wednesday at 2.30 pm.

Tate galleries now comprise Tate Britain (Millbank, London), Tate Liverpool (Royal Albert Dock), Tate St Ives (Cornwall) and Tate Modern (Bankside, London).

There is plenty more to learn about art in London so check out our artistic London tours.

Plus our museum tours, including Victoria & Albert Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Museum