Tate Modern boss to leave for leading role at Berlin's Volksbühne theatre
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Version 0 of 1. The director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, is to leave the gallery to take charge of Berlin’s experimental Volksbühne theatre. It will be announced in Germany on Friday afternoon that Dercon, who is Belgian, has been lured to take over from Frank Castorf in 2017, another coup for the country’s culture ministry which also persuaded the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor to move the city to take charge of the committee overseeing the new Humboldt-Forum cultural centre. Dercon’s departure means Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate’s director, has lost his two senior lieutenants in as many months. In March it was announced that Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, was leaving to take charge of the Calouste Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon. The timing, however, would appear to be coincidence rather than a sign of any deeper malaise. Serota said: “Chris Dercon is helping to open Tate Modern to a wider world and more diverse audiences through his support for a more international programme, photography, live performance and film. We look forward to working with him on the opening of the new Tate Modern and until he takes up his appointment in Berlin in 2017.” The Volksbühne post is a massive, once-in-a-lifetime job and Dercon, who studied art history and theatre studies at university, makes no secret of his love of Berlin’s artistic vibrancy. Related: As its director quits, Tate Britain must find the fun factor – or shut its doors The fact that he is staying at Tate Modern until 2017 and curating a major exhibition for that year suggests the departure is amicable. The circumstances are different in the case of Curtis. Her five-year-tenure has been far more turbulent, far less fun, perhaps, than the four years Dercon has been at Tate Modern. She oversaw a successful rehang of the entire collection and a £45m redevelopment that helped secure a nomination for the Art Fund museum of the year prize in 2014. But the exhibition programme was bitterly criticised by some, with the Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak calling her a “disaster” and someone who “has to go”. Curtis will leave Tate Britain in the summer after co-curating a major Barbara Hepworth exhibition opening in June. Dercon, meanwhile, is not taking over at the Volksbühne until 2017 and will continue overseeing the Tanks extension, due to open in 2016. The Tanks will give Tate Modern far more space to stage live and performance art, a regular feature at the gallery which, ironically, may have attracted the Volksbühne in the first place. News of Dercon’s departure broke in Germany on Thursday night before an official announcement but rumours had been flying for weeks. Asked by the Guardian earlier this month whether he was heading to Berlin, Dercon said he was “flattered ... but my mind is at and with Tate”. The appointment of someone at the top of his field in visual arts, rather than theatre, will not be universally welcomed. Claus Peymann, artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble and enfant terrible of the German stage, said earlier this month: “Chris Dercon is great for the Tate gallery, completely wrong for the Volksbühne. We don’t need any curators and project developers.” In the daily Die Welt, the arts writer Manuel Brug said he had nothing against Dercon himself – “a good man, splendidly well-connected, glamorous but intellectual, contemporary but reputable” – but wondered what business he had running a theatre. Berlin already has plenty of “hip, zeitgeist-chasing curators”, he wrote. |