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Doors open today on best of British art from 1500
New name, new image in first stage of Tate shake-up
While a lone protester condemned the exercise as an act of "gross decadence", the Tate gallery in London was renamed Tate Britain yesterday and declared the greatest collection of "admittedly mostly English" art in the world.
You could tell something important was happening because the artist Tracey Emin had crawled out of her bed for the early morning relaunch to pose with 50 other British painters and sculptors on the steps of the gallery on Millbank. Damien Hirst and the rest of the Brit art young turks, however, were notable by their absence.
The doors open today on a radically rearranged collection of the best British art from 1500 to the present, with further changes this spring when a £32m redevelopment of the building will create a third more space to show the large part of the Tate's collection now in storage.
With the validity of a British identity being challenged daily, the gallery's new director, Stephen Deuchar, said: "For me this is the perfect time to launch Tate Britain, when the very notion is being questioned because of devolution and our relations with Europe."
The shake-up is the first part of the restructuring. The Tate Modern museum opens in May. The Tate's guiding Svengali, Nicholas Serota, insisted that its new sister gallery in the converted Bankside power station farther down the Thames would not steal the old museum's thunder.
The arts minister, Alan Howarth, said that, far from being overshadowed, Tate Britain was at last becoming "truly the national gallery of British art" that its founder, the sugar tycoon Sir Henry Tate, had envisioned in 1898. British art was now in the "unfamiliar position" of surpassing the French and Italians, whom it had traditionally deferred to.
He hoped that the "bowler-hatted functionaries of MI6 who gaze upon Tate Britain from their headquarters across the river" might investigate the meaning of the neon sign proclaiming "the whole world + the work = the whole world" which the artist Martin Creed has placed across the front of the museum.
Mr Deucher, who worked through the night to complete the re-hang, has abandoned convention and organised the new gallery to point up contrasts and themes. A cartoon on the BSE crisis by the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell - "the Gillray of the modern day", as he called him - is hung next to Hogarth's virulently anti-French The Roast Beef of Old England, while Jacob Epstein's sculpture of a soldier/robot, The Rock Drill, is placed near the fiercely patriotic Death of Major Peirson.
There are three large sculptures by the Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum and rooms dedicated to nudes, David Hockney, Ben Nicholson as well as the Tate stalwarts Turner and Blake.
The Turner Prize show will remain at Millbank, and a big show of work by young artists, New British Art 2000, opens in July. The first big exhibition in 20 years of paintings and drawings by the romantic poet William Blake is planned for the winter.