Tate Modern

The public’s love affair with this phenomenally successful modern art gallery shows no sign of waning a decade after it opened. Serious art critics have occasionally swiped at its populism, particularly the ‘participatory art’ exhibited in the Turbine Hall (Carl Höller’s funfair-like slides called Test Site; Olafur Eliasson’s arm-flapping The Weather Project; Doris Salcedo’s enormous crack in the floor called Shibboleth and Bodyspacemotionthing; and Robert Morris’ climbable geometric sculpture first exhibited in London in 1971 and recreated here in 2009). But an average five million visitors a year appear to disagree, making it the world’s most popular contemporary art gallery and – almost unbelievably – the most visited sight in London, just ahead of the British Museum.

The critics are right in one sense, though: this ‘Tate Modern effect’ is really more about the building and its location than about the mostly 20th-century art inside. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for their transformation of the empty Bankside Power Station, which was built between 1947 and 1963 and closed in 1981. Leaving the building’s single central chimney, adding a two-storey glass box onto the roof and using the vast Turbine Hall as a dramatic entrance space were three strokes of genius. Then, of course, there are the wonderful views of the Thames and St Paul’s, particularly from the restaurant-bar on the 7th level and the espresso bar on the 4th. There’s also a cafe on the 2nd level, plus places to relax overlooking the Turbine Hall. An 11-storey sloping brick extension to the southwest corner, by the same architects, will be completed in 2012.

Tate Modern’s permanent collection on levels 3 and 5 is now arranged by both theme and chronology. States of Flux is devoted to early-20th-century avant-garde movements, including cubism and futurism. Poetry and Dream examines surrealism through various themes and techniques. Material Gestures features European and American painting and sculpture of the 1940s and ‘50s. The new Energy and Pro-cess gallery will have Arte Povera, revolutionary art of the 1960s, as its main focus.

More than 60,000 works are on constant rotation here, and the curators have at their disposal paintings by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock, as well as pieces by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Rebecca Horn, Claes Oldenburg and Auguste Rodin. Special exhibitions (level 4) in the past have included retrospectives on Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, August Strindberg, Nazism and ‘Degenerate’ Art, local ‘bad boys’ Gilbert & George and the Russian constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. Audioguides, with four different tours, are available for £2. Free guided highlights tours depart at 11am, noon, 2pm and 3pm daily.

The Tate Boat operates between the Bankside Pier at Tate Modern and the Millbank Pier at its sister-museum Tate Britain. Services from the latter depart from 10.30am to 5.10pm daily also at 40-minute intervals. Discounts are available for Travelcard holders.