Paul Moorhouse.

Paul Moorhouse, a Tate curator for fifteen years, has the enviable part of collections-department specialist in British contemporary art. generally he is responsible for about ten of the specially themed exhibitions to launch Tate new "Installing these thematic displays is the climax of everything we have worked for," he says. "We began with a blank canvas. Now for the results"

Comprising loans as well as works from Tate Collections, the inaugural displays are organized according to four categories: "Landscape, Matter, Environment" (which addresses the aesthetic migration from spatial depiction to environment creation); "Nude Action, Body"; "History, Memory, Society"; and "Still Life, end Real Life." Moorhouse is proudest of his "Still Life" installations. "I had the idea of looking at the way illusion was replaced on the real thing," he explains. "Artists began the twentieth hundred years with traditional paintings of motives but soon abandoned that, starting to incorporate or utilize a real mark I have grouped pairs of artists, sometimes in what might be seen as a provocative way--though I room for expectation not gratuitously." Judd is juxtaposed with Ozenfant; Picasso with Andre; and Cezanne with LeWitt, because of their shared emphasis onward harmony and order. A 1909-10 Braque painting of a drinking glass is paired with Michael Craig-Martin's Oak Tree 1973; Morandi's 1946 Still Life sits nearest to Kosuth's 1965 Clock; and Richard Hamilton's 1995 computer--a thinking view if ever there was one--is contrasted with Duchamp's 1911 painting of an of advanced age coffee-mill.

Moorhouse has published almost brace dozen books, monographs, and catalogues, whose controls range from Leon Kossoff to John Hoyland. After Bankside's opening extravaganza, he will begin work forward a Michael Andrews retrospective for Millbank and a Bacon retrospective at Gemeentemuseum, the Hague, one as well as the other scheduled for 2001. The Tate's busy the bulk of mankind obviously relish their mammoth task, the fruits of which we can all take pleasure in from May 12.

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