Wanted! Lost portraits

Criminals can turn into detectives: consider the career of Eugène-François Vidocq, thief, convict and subsequently head of the Paris Sûreté. And, as we have seen recently in London, political journalists can metamorphose into successful politicians. So it is not all that surprising that, once in a while, an art critic should cross the line and turn curator.

After many years of writing about exhibitions, for the first time I am organising one myself (or, more precisely, co-arranging it with Anne Lyles of Tate Britain). Even less amazing, I suppose, is that the job turns out to be rather different from what I had imagined. Previously, I’d always thought that making an exhibition roughly broke down into three parts: think of a good subject, select the right works and place them handsomely in the galleries. All of those are, of course, highly desirable objectives. What I had not foreseen was the difficulty of finding the exhibits in the first place.