Kissing a Grimy Princess

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The clarity and fine scale of this conversion are great for great pieces (Matisse's collage The Snail, for instance, has never looked better on a wall), but they are merciless to lesser ones, and they throw a harsh light on the deficiencies of the Tate's European and American collections, as acquired in the days before Serota. Under previous directors the Tate was always slow and rather grudging in its recognitions. It could, for example, have acquired great collections of Cubism and German Expressionism; it failed to do so, through timidity, ghastly good taste and lapses into daffiness. Serota did not make this mistake, and the quality of Tate Modern's European and American art visibly picks up after the '70s. In turn, the spaces respond. The galleries devoted to the British painter Frank Auerbach and the sculptor Tony Cragg--as brilliant and impressive a figure, in his own medium, as America's Richard Serra--must be among the most beautiful rooms anywhere in Britain today.

Part of the building's invigorating effect (no one calls it a museum, by the way; it's a "gallery," a more demotic title) is the way it honors small works, or small groups of them, with grand spaces. Serota clearly doesn't believe in a big door for the owner, a small one for the cat and a tiny one for the mouse, and the architects agreed. "Nothing should be lower, and nothing should be higher in status," says Pierre de Meuron. Serota insists, "You can never really have too much space above your head." It may seem excessive to use a room with a near 20-ft. ceiling to show drawings, but the expanded breathing really works, as in the gallery containing the Tate's collection of boxes, sculpture and drawings by Joseph Beuys, beautifully lit by Scott's tall sacerdotal slot windows.

In some cases, such as Cornelia Parker's Cold, Dark Matter: An Exploded View, the room's size becomes truly integral to the piece. What Parker did was collect the fragments of an army hut that had been blown up as part of a demolition exercise and hang them from the ceiling on near invisible fish line. It's as though you were looking at an explosion in progress, a stop-frame, magical view of arrested violence that is, at the same time, a collage containing every kind of superimposition and overlay. It is a lavishly dramatic piece, and it wouldn't work nearly as well outside the huge, plain context of Tate Modern.

The place feels right. It isn't a French-style grand projet, called into being with state money, Louis XIV-style, to commemorate a monarch's or a president's sense of grandeur. That isn't what the British do. It was paid for, partly, by the proceeds from a national lottery, which fed $75 million into the relatively modest construction cost of $200 million. With that budget constraint, De Meuron and Herzog couldn't have bombarded you with luxury detailing even if they'd wanted to. Instead, they went for a pleasing austerity--no frills, but no pseudo-industrial kitsch either. This is destined to be a popular building, and it may lift its sometimes difficult contents into popularity as well.