“There is a joke where I come from in Spain,” says Vicente Todoli, the director of Tate Modern, “about a farmer who trained his horse to continue ploughing the fields while eating less and less. To begin with it was very economical. But then one day he said: ‘Can you believe it? He was almost there. Almost trained. And then he died.’ It’s the same here. Really. It’s exactly the same. How much can you squeeze and squeeze? Because then it’s going to die.”
Three and a half years ago Todoli took on the job of running Britain’s flagship contemporary art museum. Since its opening, in 2000, it has become a hugely successful tourist attraction, a major employer and a key part of the local economy. Tate Modern is Britain’s answer to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and to the Pompidou Centre in Paris. But while MoMA’s assets are being boosted by the gifts of wealthy Americans, carefully encouraged by US tax incentives, and the Pompidou enjoys buckets of state funding, Tate Modern is being left to wither and die.
Todoli is furious about it. “Our acquisitions budget is tiny. Really tiny. It’s so small, it’s ridiculous. The money we have to buy art is equal to a regional museum in any European country . . . You have to feed a place like this. If you’re not buying there’s no way you can keep this place going. Its lifeblood drains away. There are people who say: ‘Oh you can go back after ten years and maybe catch up.’ No. There’s no way you can go back. By then it’s too late.”
Todoli is 47, streetwise, passionate, pugnacious and very intelligent. He lives in Frith Street, which he loves, and he jogs every morning in St James’s Park. He has huge supplies of energy, talks faster than anyone I have ever met, and possesses a sense of comedy, fortunately, which saves him from walking out on us.
His career is steeped in modern art, most recently an eight-year spell as the artistic director of IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) and then as the founding director of the highly acclaimed Museu Serralves in Oporto, Portugal.
He also knows what he wants for Tate Modern. It takes strong nerves and an uncompromising commitment to shake up an institution such as Tate Modern, but Todoli is clearly capable of fighting for what he believes in. For a start, he has organised a major rehang of the collection as well as a reassessment of the way it should be shown in future. What was it he didn’t like about it? Todoli takes a sip of his umpteenth coffee of the day. Pure caffeine flows in his veins. “As soon as I walked in the door I said: ‘Look, we have to change the way we present the collection.’ It was good while it lasted, but it’s now been there a long time. Also at some points it had become a kind of undistinguished mass. I got lost. I didn’t know if I was in Landscape, or in Matter or in Nudes . . . And I didn’t like this feeling of being in a tube, one thing after another.”
Quite apart from the rehang, Todoli’s attention is also occupied by the construction of a new extension to the Tate, to be designed by Herzog and de Meuron, and to be situated on a site to the south west of the Turbine Hall. The plan is to fill the new building with photography and video. The project will cost over £100 million and will probably open in 2012.
“Tate Modern was designed for 2 million visitors and we are getting 4 million. So if you come here on the weekend, it’s not the best situation. You see more people than art.”
Todoli also intends, thanks to the financial support of UBS, to use the new space made available from demolishing the building’s underground oil tanks for performance art. “Performance is very important. We now have a performance curator, and a performance budget.”
Todoli has not found the bureaucracy of the job easy to negotiate. “Until this job I was always on my own. I never had to consult. I was the conductor of the orchestra. I made the decisions and that was it. Period. No interfering. But here it’s different. It’s a big conglomerate of museums with a corporate structure. At the beginning I thought the sky was going to fall on my head, like Asterix . . . And the committees! I had to come to terms with the culture of committees in this country for the first time. It’s all very democratic, but art and democracy only work to a certain level and then you have to make decisions.”
When Todoli was appointed, replacing Lars Nittve, who had resigned after only a year in the job, many people in the art world wondered how he would get on with Tate’s powerful overall director Sir Nicolas Serota. Enthusiasm for the museum had cooled a little and there were concerns that it was too focused on blockbuster exhibitions and not investing sufficiently in the intellectual fabric of the place.
“We get on perfectly,” Todoli says. “No problem. I’ve known him for many years, but we had never had a close working relationship. But I think we’re very different in nature and in character, but that is becoming complementary in a sense. We have the same objectives, but we get there in different ways. You have to have an empathy with what you believe in for art, and I would say that there we are very close.”
I get a strong sense that this rehang has been masterminded by Todoli, not Serota. Of course, he has had to be cunning in the way he has displayed the collection, because there are huge gaps in it, the result of insufficient acquisitions during the first part of the 20th century. As one insider pointed out, “Impressionism is very weak, Cubism is barely there; early 20th-century Modernism is very patchy. It’s so weak that the Tate can’t mount a real chronological exhibition on its own. It doesn’t really get into its stride until Surrealism, and then it’s the best in Europe.”
“Of course the idea is to hide the gaps and present the strengths,” says Todoli. “It’s common sense. And we have to resort to long-term loans. We have to beg. Please, please will you lend, we say, hoping that the works will eventually be seen to belong here. Also we have to hope that we are not going to make the same mistakes that were made in the past, which resulted in these big gaps.”
Todoli will be in action at the rehang launch party next week, glad-handing for all he’s worth. “Not only can we not compete with other museums, but with private buyers? Forget it. We have to make lots of friends all the time. I have to be an ambassador, shaking hands, out there, every night. I’m there. Absolutely. You hope that one day it might bear fruit. But I do it with pleasure.”
Along with the rest of the art community, spearheaded by the National Art Fund, he is hoping that Gordon Brown will agree to tax incentives for living people to give their art to the nation. The problem with the Government, as Todoli sees it, is one of perception. It appears to be trying to use museums as extensions of its own social policies. His anger bubbles up again.
“Fifty per cent of our budget goes on outreach, education, broadening social access, that kind of thing. All that is fine, but what’s the use if your collection is not growing and you can’t afford to pay for good curators. And then it’s the end of your research facility, your knowledge base, and that’s the beginning of the end. This balance for me is very clear.
“The Government’s problem is a lack of awareness of what culture brings to the productive fabric of the country. It’s fundamental. It’s what I call the immaterial side of production. That’s what makes a difference. But they can’t see that. They cannot weigh it, they cannot measure it, and so it doesn’t exist. It seems to be enough that Tate Modern can be a good café and meeting place. A culture mall. How can you be a success in the long term when politicians are only thinking about elections that come up every four or five years?” Fortunately, Todoli enjoys his job. He is planning to build up the number of photographs in the collection and will put on a big thematic photography exhibition in 2008. He hopes to work more with Latin American artists. “It’s very difficult. But we have to get the best out of what we have. And it’s fun. It’s a challenge.”
The rehang, UBS Openings: Tate Modern Collection, opens on May 23. Tate Modern, South Bank, SE1 (www.tate.org.uk, 020-7887 8000).
