'Cultural explosions' fill Tate Modern

Tokyo features Encounter by Yamashita Kikuji [1971]

London's Tate Modern is featuring key moments of "cultural creativity" from nine cities across the world at its first major temporary exhibition.

The international show, which spans the globe from Paris to Bombay, aims to illustrate defining moments of modern art and culture.

The gallery said Century City shows how the creative flashpoints produced a "cultural explosion in which art, architecture, cinema, dance, fashion, music and theatre flourished".

It opens in the Paris of 1910 with Picasso's Cubism, and ends in 2001 with London's artists using city life as both inspiration and raw material.

London calling: The Bank 1996-97 [magazine cover]

Tate Modern's Iwona Blazwick said it was the first time the gallery was able "look globally" and represent the four major continents.

She said it showed there was no single "origin of creativity", and that there were "multiple modernisms sparking all over the globe".

British artist Tracey Emin, one of the stars featured in the London section, said her work has been the "complete antithesis" to the "knock-on effect from the 80s - big and glossy and Perspex and looking like it was full of money".

She told the BBC: "We knew we were doing something quite radical at the time, but for us it was a lot of pleasure and hard work."

As well as featuring the French and UK capitals, the show's other seven cities are:

• 1910s Vienna - The city of Freud, featuring Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, and the music of Schoenber

• 1920s Moscow: The painting and sculpture of the Russian Revolution

  
  

  Untiltled 2000 by Bhupen Khakhar features in the Bombay section
  

• 1950s Rio de Janeiro: Post-war architecture, art and design suffused with the sounds of the Bossa Nova

• Lagos 1955-1970: Post-colonial growth featuring African music and vibrant culture of photography

• 1970s New York: Intense artistic and social experimentation, where pop, minimalism, and conceptual art clashed

• 1970s Tokyo: A decisive shift away from modernism to a new contemporary understanding

• 1990s Bombay/Mumbai: Vigorous economic and cultural globalisation during intercommunal rioting in 1992-3, which resulted in new architecture, art, and literature, and the Bombay film industry

Tate Modern's spokesperson added the bars frequented by artists in urban areas were "the conditions the metropolis has provided for artistic and intellectual invention across the 20th and 21st Centuries".

The exhibition is running from 1 February until 29 April 2001.