Penelope Curtis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Penelope Curtis
Penelope Curtis British museum director.jpg
museum director
Born1961
London
NationalityUnited Kingdom
EducationOxford University
OccupationArts administrator
EmployerMuseu Calouste Gulbenkian
Known forleading Tate Britain
Parent(s)Adam S. G. Curtis, Ann Curtis
HonoursAspects of Art Lecture (2016)[1][2]

Penelope Curtis is a British arts administrator, director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian from 2015 to 2020, and director of Tate Britain from 2010 to 2015.

Early life[]

Curtis was born in 1961. Her father Adam S. G. Curtis was a biologist whilst her mother "looked after him".[3] She also has a younger sister.[3] Her family moved to Glasgow at the age of 6 where she went to a state school before university.[3]

She studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University from 1979 until 1982. Afterwards, she went InterRailing around Italy, visiting galleries.[3] Curtis completed a masters at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she then took French Sculpture after Rodin as the subject of her doctorate (1983-89).[4] Photographs contributed by Penelope Curtis to the art and architecture Conway Library at the Courtauld are currently being digitised, as part of the Courtauld Connects project.[5]

Career[]

In 1988, Curtis was the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool. In 1994, she took on the leadership of the sculpture collection at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where she then became Curator in 1999.[4] Here, Curtis notably supervised the development of Leeds collections on the acquisition of significant works of Rodin, Epstein and Calder.[4] She left in 2010 to take on the role of directing the Tate Britain art gallery.[6]

Curtis presenting at the Said Business School in 2011

Since 2010 Curtis has been the chair of the judging panel for the Turner Prize.[3] She has served on the Advisory Committee for the Government Art Collection, the Art Commissions Committee for the Imperial War Museum and the British School at Rome.[4]

In March 2015, it was announced that she would leave London's Tate Britain after five years in charge to become the first non-Portuguese Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum.[7]

Curtis had faced some criticism which some like and Portuguese colleagues had put down to misogyny, but that was not the reason for her departure. She had been concerned that the Tate had to put on exhibitions that had popular appeal because these exhibitions balanced the books given the national policy of free entry to museums, but this was not the whole reason either. Curtis said that she left because she was attracted by the opportunity of running the privately funded Gulbenkian Museum.[8] The Portuguese museum attracted only just over half the visitors as Tate Britain but it had ten curators and it was backed by a large and generous foundation.[8]

Curtis has been spending time trying to marry together the modern art collection at the adjacent with the museum collection of 6,000 objects. Curtis has used the challenge to integrate the Islamic collection gathered from several Arabic countries in a new "crossings gallery" in 2018. Curtis notes that the new gallery will be the first substantial change in the museum since 1969.[8] Curtis has noted that with an annual budget of 500,000 Euros it will be necessary for the museum to concentrate of Portuguese culture rather than aspiring to an international collection.[9] She concluded her service as director in 2020.[10]

In the spring of 2021, Curtis took up residence in Washington as the Edmund J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.[11]

Honors and awards[]

  • Balsdon Fellow, British School at Rome, June to August 2003[12]
  • Museum Fellow, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, June to August 2007
  • Paul Mellon Lectures, National Gallery, London[13] and Yale University,[14] January and April 2015
  • Honoris causa, University of York, 2018[15]
  • Honorary Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 2018[16]
  • Officier, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 2019[17]
  • Edmund J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, February to May, 2021.

Bibliography[]

  • Dynamism—The Art of Modern Life Before the Great War, 1991, Tate Gallery.
  • Bernard Meadows, Sculpture and Drawings, 1995, Henry Moore Foundation
  • Sculpture 1900-1945, 1999, Oxford University Press.
  • Patio & Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture, 2007, Ridinghouse/Getty.
  • Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open, 2017, Yale University Press.
  • Tate Britain Companion: A Guide to British Art (editor), 2013, Tate Publishing.
  • Lucia Nogueira: Drawings, 2005, Drawing Room.
  • Sculpture in Painting: The Representation of Sculpture in Painting from Titian to the Present (co-authored), 2009, Henry Moore Institute.
  • Figuring Space: Sculpture/Furniture from Mies to Moore (co-authored), 2007, Henry Moore Sculpture Trust.
  • The Human Factor: Uses of the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture (co-authored), 2014, Hayward Gallery Publishing.
  • Towards a New Laocoon (co-authored), 2007, Henry Moore Institute.

References[]

  1. ^ "Aspects of Art Lectures". The British Academy.
  2. ^ "The inner eye: voyages around the museum by Dr Penelope Curtis". YouTube. The British Academy. 28 February 2017.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e "Penelope Curtis: Matriarch of the museum". The Independent. 18 November 2011. Retrieved 1 December 2015.
  4. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Penelope Curtis". The Center for the Humanities. Retrieved 15 March 2021.
  5. ^ "Who made the Conway Library?". Digital Media. 30 June 2020. Retrieved 16 March 2021.
  6. ^ "Curtis, Dr Penelope, (born 24 Aug. 1961), Director, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, since 2015", Who's Who, Oxford University Press, 1 December 2010, doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u250791
  7. ^ Ellis-Petersen, Hannah (31 March 2015). "Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis to step down after five years in charge". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
  8. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Former Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis remaps Lisbon's Gulbenkian". www.theartnewspaper.com. Retrieved 20 November 2019.
  9. ^ Salema, Isabel. "Penelope Curtis: "O dinheiro não é suficiente para fazer uma colecção internacional"". PÚBLICO (in Portuguese). Retrieved 20 November 2019.
  10. ^ "Penelope Curtis abandona la dirección del Museo Calouste Gulbenkian". Masdearte: Información de exposiciones, museos y artistas (in Spanish). 13 July 2020. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  11. ^ "CASVA Announces 2020–2021 Academic Year Appointments in Virtual Environment". www.nga.gov. 1 September 2020. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
  12. ^ Curtis, Penelope (November 2002). "Balsdon Fellowship: Antiquity and Modernity in Italian Sculpture of the Interwar Period (c. 1920–40)". Papers of the British School at Rome. 70: 363–363. doi:10.1017/S0068246200002221. ISSN 2045-239X.
  13. ^ "Paul Mellon Lectures 2015: Penelope Curtis, Sculpture on the Threshold". Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  14. ^ "Penelope Curtis". The Center for the Humanities. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  15. ^ "University to award 13 Honorary Degrees". University of York. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  16. ^ "The President's Report." The Pelican Record 55 (December 2019): page 7.
  17. ^ "Sir Quentin Blake, Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur | Quentin Blake". www.quentinblake.com. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
Retrieved from ""