Tate

The BP Walk through British Art offers a circuit of Tate Britain's unparalleled collection from 1540 to today. The works have been arranged to ensure that the collection's full historical range is always on show. Here, four contemporary artists share their perspectives on this journey through British art.

Walk through time with Tate's curators as they introduce the new displays at Tate Britain, from 1540 to the present. This week, Chris Stephens explores the year 1940.

BP Walk through British Art

Regarded as a founder of Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt devised guidelines and diagrams that allowed for artworks, such as his wall drawings, to be executed by his assistants. This has led rise to the myth that the artist didn't do work himself, when in fact he worked prolifically - in one summer alone painting more than 260 gouaches and often working seven days a week.

Here we learn not just how Lewitt worked, but about the kind of man he was, as remembered by his former assistant Jeremy Ziemman and the curator of the Sol Lewitt Collection, Janet Passehl.

This is an archived version of the 'Cooking Meets Art' Hangout On Air that took place on 1 August, 2013 at Tate Britain.

The Fabulous Baker Brothers, food art historian Janine Catalano, and Tate curator Alison Smith, join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz and online contributors for a lively discussion about cooking and art.

The Fabulous Baker Brothers, Tom and Henry are award-winning bakers who you might have spotted on Channel 4. See what they cooked up when they came to Tate Britain for a bit of artistic inspiration.

A new Tate Britain will be unveiled on 19 November 2013. To celebrate we're asking leading figures from the worlds of cooking, fashion, poetry, film, photography, music and comedy to share the creative processes behind their own work, inspired by 500 years of British art.

As part of our brand new Recreate with Tate Britain project in partnership with Google, over the coming months, we'll also be hosting a monthly series of Google Hangouts On Air. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/love-food-lo...

Chef, restaurateur and wild mushroom expert Antonio Carluccio cooks up a signature risotto dish, in response to the paintings of Patrick Caulfield.


A new Tate Britain will be unveiled on 19 November 2013. To celebrate we're asking leading figures from the worlds of cooking, fashion, poetry, film, photography, music and comedy to share the creative processes behind their own work, inspired by 500 years of British art.

As part of our brand new Recreate with Tate Britain project in partnership with Google, over the coming months, we'll also be hosting a monthly series of Google Hangouts On Air. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/love-food-lo...

The star of the BBCs Little Paris Kitchen, Rachel Khoo creates a seafood taste sensation in homage to the artist JMW Turner.

A new Tate Britain will be unveiled on 19 November 2013. To celebrate we're asking leading figures from the worlds of cooking, fashion, poetry, film, photography, music and comedy to share the creative processes behind their own work, inspired by 500 years of British art.

As part of our brand new Recreate with Tate Britain project in partnership with Google, over the coming months, we'll also be hosting a monthly series of Google Hangouts On Air. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/love-food-lo...

Walk through time with Tate's curators as they introduce the new displays at Tate Britain, from 1540 to the present. This week, Chris Stephens explores the year 1930.

BP Walk through British Art

Often considered El-Salahi's masterpiece, The Inevitable was first conceived by the artist during his wrongful imprisonment. Deprived of paper, El-Salahi would sketch out plans for future paintings on the back of small cement casings, before burying them in the sand whenever a guard would come near. Working in this manner led to the artist developing a new style, one seen in The Inevitable, where a painting spreads out from what he refers to as the 'nucleus', or the germ of an idea, with a meaning hidden even from the artist himself until the work is finished.

Only when he saw The Inevitable completed did El-Salahi realise how clear the message was; that people must rise up and fight tyranny and those that suppress them. This was something he felt was relevant not just to his own life when he created the work in the mid-eighties, but to all of Sudan.

Walk through time with Tate's curators as they introduce the new displays at Tate Britain, from 1540 to the present. This week, Chris Stephens explores the years 1914 & 1915.

BP Walk through British Art

British artist Patrick Caulfield radically re-imagined traditional genres such as still life and domestic interiors to produce paintings of startling originality. This film features Nicolas Serota discussing Caulfield's Interior with a Picture, 1985-86 during the installation of the exhibition at Tate Britain.

The artist Dexter Dalwood chose Dining Recess, 1972 as a favourite work of Caulfield's to discuss. The painting is seen here at a conservation studio in south London, ahead of its installation in the exhibition, and by chance TateShots was also able to film the preparatory drawing for this fantastic work.

Walk through time with Tate's curators as they introduce the new displays at Tate Britain, from 1540 to the present. This week, Chris Stephens explores the period 1910-1914.

BP Walk through British Art

On display at Tate Modern, Richard Tuttle's artwork almost disappears before your eyes. Its a large white octagonal shape, cut from paper and glued against the white gallery wall. It feels like the antithesis of painting. Richard Tuttle came to prominence in the 1960s as part of a generation of Post-Minimalist artists, including Bruce Nauman and Eve Hesse, who questioned dominant trends of Minimalism by embracing an improvisational approach to art-making using everyday, often ephemeral materials. TateShots met Tuttle at the Getty in Lost Angeles, where he is currently artist in residence to hear about his philosophy of art.

Walk through time with Tate's curators as they introduce the new displays at Tate Britain, from 1540 to the present. This week, Carol Jacobi explores the period 1840-1890.

BP Walk through British Art

On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2011, Gerhard Richter talks about his life and work with Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate.

Due to technical issues the film disappeared from our channel. Original upload date 03.11.2011

An exclusive interview with photographer William Klein and a first-ever glimpse behind the scenes at his Paris studio.

'Almost everything is coincidence and luck and chance.' William Klein is one of the twentieth century's most important photographers and film-makers and in this interview for Tate Media, he discusses his experience photographing on the streets of New York, the challenges in publishing his first New York book and how he worked with filmmaker Federico Fellini.

Klein's work is featured in the exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern, 10 October 2012--20 January 2013.

Meschac Gaba's 'Museum of Contemporary African Art' is an immersive twelve-room installation, a 'museum within a museum', which is currently sprawling through Tate Modern. It includes its own shop, library and restaurant as well as less conventional museum spaces such as a Salon, Music Room and Art and Religion Room - where you can sit down to relax, play the piano or have your tarot cards read.

Gaba began working on the Museum of Contemporary African Art in 1997 during a residency in Amsterdam because he felt there was no space in Europe or Africa for the type of work he wished to make. As the work developed over several years and at various locations, Gaba also incorporated expressions of his own biography, including a Marriage Room containing photos, gifts and his wife's wedding dress from their marriage ceremony, which was conducted inside the museum. The Library also contains an audio work in which the artist imagines what his late father might say about his son's life.

The 'Museum of Contemporary African Art' is 'not a model...it's only a question', says Gaba. As much a conceptual space as a physical one, it stands as a provocation to the Western art establishment to attend to contemporary African art.

Whilst interned in a camp during the Second World War, and in his later life in Britain, Schwitters made hundreds of portraits to earn a living.

Choosing to leave Germany in 1937 after his work was condemned as 'degenerate' by the Nazi government, Schwitters settled in Norway for three years. He escaped to Britain in June 1940 after the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Schwitters was one of many German exiles, including a significant number of artists, to be interned on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. Whilst in the camp he produced over 200 works, including many portraits. On release in 1941 he became involved with the London art scene, and continued to make portraits of those around him. TateShots went to meet some of his sitters.

'Lowry is Britain's preeminent painter of the industrial city' says Tate curator Helen Little, as she introduces the exhibition 'Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life'.

For Lowry, modern painting needed to represent the remaining rituals of public life: football matches and protest marches, evictions and fist-fights, workers going to and from the mill. Without his pictures, Britain would arguably lack an account in paint of the experiences of the 20th-century working class.

As a modern painter Lowry wished to show what the industrial revolution had made of the world, yet his dominant status in British art coincided with a disappearance of the industrialised world he engaged with.

Curator Helen Little takes us on a tour of the Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain in this TateShots video.