Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, talks to Ariane Bankes about the planned revamp of the museum and 100 different ways of showing sculpture
The evening after first meeting Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, I bumped into a mutual friend who told me, only half-joking, that she could be frightening. Fair enough, I thought: to become the first woman director of one of Britain’s pre-eminent public galleries you have to frighten a few people along the way. As it happened, I hadn’t found her alarming at all at the press briefing that morning: direct, brisk, purposeful — she was, after all, embarking on a wholesale top-to-toe redesign and rehang of the gallery — but approachable. I wondered a little nervously, however, whether by the end of our forthcoming one-to-one interview I would find her very frightening indeed.
Luckily, this was not the case. When I was ushered into Dr Curtis’s high-ceilinged room in the labyrinthine former hospital that comprises the offices of Tate Britain she greeted me warmly — a slight figure with short, sharply cut hair, a soft voice and level gaze. The room was hung with works from her own collection: a huge and pleasing abstract by an artist she told me (rightly) I would never have heard of, and opposite her desk a mesmerising photo of receding lenses by Keith Wilson, her co-curator of Modern British Sculpture, opening on 22 January at the Royal Academy. Her widely welcomed appointment as director of Tate Britain brings her back to the cultural behemoth she first joined in 1988 as exhibitions officer at a newly opened Tate Liverpool; from there she moved to the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture in Leeds, transforming it into the Henry Moore Institute and presiding over a series of exhibitions that engraved it indelibly on the cultural map.
Since last April she has brought her level gaze and remarkable focus to bear on Tate Britain, just at a point when ambitious plans to reconfigure both galleries and displays clash with government funding cuts of 15 per cent and a general tightening of the financial noose.
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