Andre Frederic Cournand

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Tate Gallery, London. The national collection of British art from the mid-16th century onwards and of modern art from the late 19th century to the present day. It is named after Sir Henry Tate (1819–99), the sugar tycoon, who in 1889 offered the nation his collection, consisting mainly of the work of Victorian contemporaries, on condition that the government found a suitable site for the gallery. Following great controversy over where it should be located, the Tate Gallery opened at Millbank, overlooking the Thames, in 1897, on a site previously occupied by part of Millbank Prison. The building is an undistinguished classical structure designed by Sidney R. J. Smith, an architect who is otherwise virtually unknown. It originally had eight galleries and housed Tate's gift of 67 paintings and three bronze sculptures, together with about 100 other works, including 18 of his own paintings presented by George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), the Grand Old Man of British art.

At the time of its opening, the Tate was not the independent gallery that had been envisaged by its founder. It was subordinate to the National Gallery and was intended only for recent British art (its official title was the National Gallery of British Art, although it was referred to as the Tate Gallery from the beginning and this name was formalized in 1932). Complete independence from the National Gallery did not come until 1954, but the Tate was given its own board of trustees in 1917, by which time it had begun to take on its dual character of historical British collection and general modern collection. Two key developments in this respect were, first, the opening of a wing in 1910 to accommodate most of the paintings left by J. M. W. Turner in his studio at his death (1851), which had previously been housed (but in the main unexhibited) at the National Gallery; and secondly, the deliberations of the Curzon Committee (chaired by Lord Curzon), set up in 1911 to enquire into various matters concerned with the nation's art collections. The Committee published its report in 1915, and two of its recommendations were that the Tate should extend its coverage to become ‘a National Gallery of British Art in all its branches’ and that a gallery of modern foreign art should be added on vacant land behind the Tate. Caution was expressed, however, over what kind of modern art should be displayed there: ‘We have not in our mind any idea of experimentalising by rash purchase in the occasionally ill-disciplined productions of some contemporaneous continental schools, whose work might exercise a disturbing and even deleterious influence upon our younger painters.’

The Curzon Committee's report happily coincided with Sir Hugh Lane's bequest of 39 modern paintings, mainly French, including outstanding Impressionist works. Lane's collection went on show at the Tate in 1917 and made a powerful impact on Samuel Courtauld, who in 1923 gave the Tate £50,000 for the purchase of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures. Thanks to Lane and Courtauld, the Tate had an excellent representation in this field by the time the new galleries for the display of modern foreign art opened in 1926 (they were paid for by the picture dealer Sir Joseph Duveen (1869–1939), later Lord Duveen of Millbank). The first significant influx of 20th-century art came in 1933, with the bequest of the Dutch-born collector Frank Stoop, which included works by Braque, Cézanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, and Rousseau. However, Stoop's taste was generally confined to the period before the First World War, and when an abstract by Kandinsky (Cossacks, 1910–11) was presented to the Tate in 1938 (by Hazel McKinley, Peggy Guggenheim's sister), Kandinsky remarked that it was ‘the first truly modern painting in the famous museum in London'. (It was also the first German Expressionist painting to enter a public collection in Britain.)

During the Second World War the Tate concentrated on building up the British collections (an understandable policy at a time of patriotic fervour and when the country was isolated from the Continent), and it was not until 1949 that a really positive attitude towards acquiring modern foreign works began to emerge. In that year the gallery bought two Cubist Picassos, a Léger, a Matisse, a Rouault, and two paintings and a sculpture by Giacometti (a sculpture gallery had been added in 1937, paid for by Lord Duveen). During the 1950s the Tate started venturing into post-war art—first mainly École de Paris, later American—and at the same time many of the finest 19th-century paintings were moved in stages to the National Gallery. In 1958 the Friends of the Tate Gallery was founded to raise funds to help with the purchase of works, and from about this time there began a sustained attempt to build up a modern collection that was representative of the range and variety of modern art, containing as far as possible works from all the major movements and leading artists (during the 1960s, 20th-century British works were absorbed into the modern collection, taking their place in an international context).

Considering its limited funds in a time of rocketing prices for art, the Tate has succeeded well in its aim of broad coverage, although many other museums have richer collections in specific areas. Nevertheless, the gallery has often been attacked for purchasing works that are outside (or ahead of) public taste. The most famous example is the outcry in 1976 over Carl Andre's ‘Tate bricks', but this was preceded by anger and abuse directed at works that have now taken their places in the pantheon of 20th-century art, notably Matisse's L'Escargot (bought in 1962) and Picasso's The Three Dancers (bought in 1965). In addition to purchases, the Tate's holdings have been enhanced by several outstanding bequests from collectors and artists: in 1968–9, for example, Mark Rothko presented nine of his paintings, and in 1977 Naum Gabo gave a large collection of his work in various media.

In 1974 the Tate established a Print Department (before this, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum had more or less divided the national responsibility for collecting prints). The core of the collection was presented by the Institute of Contemporary Prints, a charitable trust set up in 1972 under the chairmanship of Alistair McAlpine, who had already been a generous benefactor to the Tate (see NEW GENERATION). Among the other departments of the Tate are the Archive and the Library—major resources for scholarship in 20th-century art. The enormous postwar growth in the size of the gallery's collections and the scope of its activities has posed severe problems of space, in spite of several extensions to the building. In 1988 a branch of the Tate was opened in Liverpool and in 1993 another one in St Ives, but most of the gallery's holdings still remained in storage. In 1994 the Trustees therefore announced a bold decision to create a new museum devoted to modern art in the decommissioned Bankside Power Station, a huge, starkly magnificent building occupying a prime site on the Thames opposite St Paul's Cathedral. It was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and built in 1947–63; the remodelling into a gallery was carried out by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The building opened to the public in 2000, with the original gallery at Millbank then becoming known as Tate Britain.

The first keeper of the Tate Gallery, 1897–1906, was Sir Charles Holroyd (1861–1917), a painter, etcher (he was a favourite pupil of Legros), and writer on art. He left to become director of the National Gallery and was succeeded at the Tate by D. S. MacColl, keeper from 1906 until 1911, when he moved to the Wallace Collection. The next keeper (who during his tenure, 1911–30, assumed the title of director) was Charles Aitken, previously in charge of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He was succeeded as director by J. B. Manson, 1930–8; Sir John Rothenstein, 1938–64; Sir Norman Reid, 1964–79; Sir Alan Bowness, 1980–8; and Sir Nicholas Serota (1946– ), appointed in 1988; previously Serota had been director successively of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

André Frederic Cournand , 1895–1988, American physician and physiologist, b. France, B.A. Sorbonne, 1913, M.D. Univ. of Paris, 1930. He emigrated to the United States in 1930 and was naturalized in 1941. He was associated with the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia Univ. after 1935, and became a full professor in 1951. He shared with Werner Forssmann and Dickinson W. Richards the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work in developing cardiac catheterization. This technique, whereby a catheter is inserted through a vein into the heart, facilitates study of both the diseased and healthy heart and often aids in determining the advisability of heart surgery. His autobiography was published in 1986.