LARS NITTVE.

In the early '90s, I asked the astute British critic Stuart Morgan what he thought of the work of Lars Nittve, then director of the Rooseum in Malmo. "Well," said Stuart, "he won't be in Malmo for long." And Nittve's ascendant career trajectory, culminating in his recent appointment to the directorship of Tate Modern, has certainly borne out the prediction.

I first met Nittve in the early '80s, when he briefly stayed in New York as a visiting Stockholm newspaper critic and began writing regularly for Artforum. Returning home, he was named a curator at the Moderna Museet, then, in 1990, moved to Malmo, in southern Sweden, to open the Rooseum. Nittve's thematic shows--perhaps most notably "Implosion--A Postmodern Perspective," 1986, in Stockholm, and "Trans/Mission," 1991, in Malmo--won him an international reputation, and he moved to increasingly visible posts: in 1995, to the Louisiana, outside Copenhagen; and now to the Tate, where he oversees Tate Modern's brand-new home, the former Bankside Power Station in South London.

The Tate Gallery, Nittve remarks, has been restructured in crucial ways. "The Tate at Millbank used to be the big mother ship, where everything sat-curators, administration, conservation, etc. Now we're moving to something more like a federation." The Tate's four branches (in St. Ives, Liverpool, and now two in London) will share the collection as a common resource; in other words, Tate Modern is to have its own Exhibitions and Display department, which will show the modern parts of the collection (as will the old Tate Gallery, now called Tate Britain) and run its own exhibition program. Nittve has hired Iwona Blazwick to head that department, which also includes the American Donna De Salvo, a recent appointment; Emma Dexter, from the London ICA; the respected Tate curator Frances Morris; and other staffers.

Nittve has a reputation for organizing shows that lay a conceptual foundation for new art, but he wants his Tate to be "a classic museum, with great scholarship in the modernist masters. We're trying to develop an organization and a culture that allow two tempi: one slow and scholarly, another fast, where you can make quick decisions, work with living artists, take risks." "Century City," Tate Modern's first major exhibition of work from outside the collection (slated for January 2001), seems a fusion of the two possibilities: "We will look at cities," says Nittve, "at moments when they were hot spots, when art, design, architecture, dance, music, and literature converged in an intense moment: Paris 1905-15, Moscow in the '20s, Lagos and Rio in the '50s and '60s, New York in the '70s, London now. For that part we will also encourage our audience to see what's happening in the East End scene" [see page 49].

Not the least of Nittve's challenges will be running his own building. He will have three main floors of gallery space, but the room to set the character of his museum will surely be the massive Turbine Hall, "an industrial cathedral7" as Nittve remarks. Such a space will condition the work shown in it. Nittve will begin with a large.scale commission from Louise Bourgeois, but wants to figure out how to show works with a variety of material impacts. He likes the way the space announces the public character of the museum, but adds that "Tate Modern isn't about the building; it's about the art. We're there to create a good meeting space."