Penelope Curtis is to leave her role as the director of Tate Britain to lead the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal.
Curtis has experienced mixed fortunes since joining Tate Britain in 2010. She led the £45m redevelopment of the gallery but was criticised in the national newspapers for some of the exhibitions she oversaw, including the recent Sculpture Victorious exhibition.
And last year, Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak said Curtis should leave the gallery, arguing that she had been a “disaster”.
But Curtis also had her supporters, such as the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment, who wrote in 2014 that “Curtis has already done more to change Tate Britain for the better than any director since the great Sir Nicholas Serota himself”.
According to figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, visitor figures at Tate Britain were 1.6m in 2010-11, falling to 1.46m the following year and 1.39m in 2013-14. For the first 11 months of 2014-15, there were 1.27m visits to the gallery.
Curtis will take up her new role in the autumn. She said: “I look forward to working in Portugal and working with a strong institution which is looking for change. I want to keep all that is good about the museum, which I admire deeply, while developing ways in which it can make more of its context and position, especially in relation to the neighbouring Modern Art Centre, and more widely.”
Curtis joined Tate Britain from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where she had worked since 1999. She was also the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool when it opened in 1988.
Curtis has experienced mixed fortunes since joining Tate Britain in 2010. She led the £45m redevelopment of the gallery but was criticised in the national newspapers for some of the exhibitions she oversaw, including the recent Sculpture Victorious exhibition.
And last year, Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak said Curtis should leave the gallery, arguing that she had been a “disaster”.
But Curtis also had her supporters, such as the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment, who wrote in 2014 that “Curtis has already done more to change Tate Britain for the better than any director since the great Sir Nicholas Serota himself”.
According to figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, visitor figures at Tate Britain were 1.6m in 2010-11, falling to 1.46m the following year and 1.39m in 2013-14. For the first 11 months of 2014-15, there were 1.27m visits to the gallery.
Curtis will take up her new role in the autumn. She said: “I look forward to working in Portugal and working with a strong institution which is looking for change. I want to keep all that is good about the museum, which I admire deeply, while developing ways in which it can make more of its context and position, especially in relation to the neighbouring Modern Art Centre, and more widely.”
Curtis joined Tate Britain from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where she had worked since 1999. She was also the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool when it opened in 1988.
