Best in show | 15 January 2011

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.