Picture this National Gallery is on a roll, but could Tate have lost its mojo?

When a national institution sounds like Spinal Tap, you know it's in trouble.

- Jonathan Jones

When a national institution sounds like Spinal Tap, you know it's in trouble. Recently, Tate channeled the mythic rock band's claim that its audience was not shrinking, just "becoming more selective".

In response to a decline in visitor numbers and a cash crisis leading to redundancies, the museum group emphasized "record numbers of young visitors" to Tate Modern, for who cares about all those uncool, absent visitors above the age of 35?

Yet in the summer, the Tate director, Maria Balshaw, blamed the museum group's problems on a dearth of 16-24 year old visitors from continental Europe. So they appeal to youth, but the wrong youth?

At last, this week, Tate Modern will open a blockbuster show that might attract paying adults. But Theatre Picasso draws almost entirely on its own collection of the modernist giant's works, which should be on permanent view in its free displays anyway, albeit for some time they have not.

It's a far cry from past exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse, Gauguin, Rauschenberg, and in 2022 Cézanne, boasting superb loans from museums all over the world. Why has Tate seemed to become so small?