Remembering Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, groundbreaking director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London

Elizabeth Esteve-Coll is best known in the art world for having been a charismatic but at the time much criticised director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), in London, from 1988 to 1995, a turbulent period in its history; but she should also be remembered as a professional librarian at Kingston University and the University of Surrey, then keeper of the National Art Library from 1985 to 1988, as well as a briefer period as vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia (UEA) from 1995 to 1997.

After retiring as a result of multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1997, she remained an active figure in the affairs of the Sainsbury Centre at UEA, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the arts panel of the Wolfson Foundation and Norwich Cathedral, as well as serving as chancellor of the University of Lincoln from 2001 to 2008.

Elizabeth Kingdon was born in Ripon in 1938, an only child. Her father, Percy Kingdon, worked for the National Provincial Bank, later the NatWest, in Middlesbrough, Darlington, Loftus, Hull and Bedale, while also serving in the army during the Second World War. Her family was bookish, keen on poetry, with strong musical interests, and her parents took her on visits to country houses, cathedrals and castles as well as weekend visits to her grandmother in Whitby.

She was head girl at her grammar school in Darlington. After a year doing her A levels at a crammer in Oxford, she went to Trinity College Dublin to read English and Spanish, and fell in love with a Spanish sea captain, José Esteve-Coll, known as Alex, an exile from Franco’s Spain who had served in British intelligence during the war and then in the British merchant navy. She married him in 1960. Records, including a later appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, suggest she spent the whole of the 1960s reading, learning languages and travelling the world, but in the mid-60s at least, the couple were living in Muswell Hill, north London, in a flat belonging to Maurice de Sausmarez, author of Basic Design.

In the early 1970s she went to evening classes at Birkbeck College, in London, where, with her wide reading and good knowledge of languages, she got a first in history and history of art. This led her to a job as an information librarian in the School of Art at Kingston Polytechnic (now University). From there she was appointed director of the University of Surrey Library. She was an immensely capable, hard-working, professional librarian, knowledgeable about new developments in library science and, in 1985, was appointed keeper of the National Art Library at the V&A by Roy Strong. She could not have been less like the other keepers—relatively young, very dedicated, a breath of fresh air. She changed the atmosphere of the library and its working methods with extreme efficiency. Older members of staff were sent on management training courses. Younger staff were promoted to positions of greater responsibility.

This was why, when Strong resigned in 1987, so many of the staff were keen for Esteve-Coll to succeed him: they felt that she could reform the museum in the way that she had the National Art Library. But a big, old-fashioned, hierarchical museum with entrenched ways of working was harder to change. She may not have had the same premeditated confidence as to what needed to be done. So, she established a committee under John Murdoch, keeper of the Department of Paintings, Prints and Drawings, which came up with a multitude of different ways as to how the museum should be reformed, but no consensus. Meanwhile, she consulted friends, colleagues and management experts as to how best to introduce change.

At the heart of what she proposed was a clearer separation between research and collections management. This idea, never fully explained, was based on her realisation that many of the curatorial staff devoted too much time on unfocused private research, leading to publications not necessarily related to the museum’s holdings, while relatively little was spent on their core responsibility of looking after, managing and cataloguing the collection, particularly objects in store, and making information about the collection available to a wide public.

Esteve-Coll took up her post at the V&A in early 1988. Following a critical report of the conditions of storage by the National Audit Committee, she faced a hearing in front of the Public Accounts Committee in which she was attacked by committee members and asked what she proposed to do. HM Treasury made funds available for a package of senior redundancies on condition that they were spent by the end of the financial year.

On 9 February 1989, nine keepers of the museum were summoned to her office and offered voluntary redundancy. It was a radical way of managing change by top-slicing senior management and caused a widespread outcry, including amongst the Board of Trustees who felt they had not been adequately told what had been planned. Martin Kemp, professor of art history at the University of Oxford, resigned. Michael Podro, professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex, made strenuous efforts behind the scenes to mitigate the damage. Robert Armstrong, the chair of trustees, stayed silent and may not have provided the psychological support Esteve-Coll needed. Esteve-Coll paid a heavy price as the odium of the art world was heaped upon her, including a particularly vicious attack by John Pope-Hennessy, her predecessor but one.

A revolution that needed to happen

In practice, the revolution was not as extreme as first feared. The majority of the existing departments remained semi-intact under Gwyn Miles, a conservator, as surveyor of collections with responsibility for looking after the collections. A research department was created to raise external funding and enable staff from within the museum, as well as outside, to focus on substantial research projects, including exhibitions and publications. The education department was given more responsibility and funding to encourage public interpretation.

In retrospect, it was a revolution that needed to happen. Esteve-Coll retained the devoted loyalty of those staff who liked and admired her and supported her reform, but not of the wider museum community. It was not an easy period for the museum or for her as it experimented with new types of exhibition, new ways of advertising itself, and began the important task of updating and re-presenting its galleries. The Nehru Gallery of Indian Art opened in 1990, the T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese Art in 1991, the Samsung Gallery of Korean Art in 1992 and a new Glass Gallery in 1994. In the long term, her changes have, as she intended, produced a museum that is better run, more professional, and focused on the interests of a non-specialist public.

In 1995, she left the V&A and became vice-chancellor of UEA, a post for which she was ideally suited. By now she was suffering from MS. Two years later she resigned. She remained astonishingly active in spite of increasing immobility, travelling back and forth between Norfolk, Corfu and France, still lively, vigorous, always with a strong sense of humour, very direct and down to earth. She lived in Aylsham, north of Norwich, with Moya Willson, a former pro-vice-chancellor at UEA.

Elizabeth Anne Loosemore Kingdon; born Ripon, North Yorkshire, 14 October 1938; keeper, National Art Library 1985-88; director, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1988-95; vice-chancellor, University of East Anglia 1995-97; DBE 1995; chancellor, University of Lincoln 2001-08; married 1960 José Alexander Timothy (Alex) Esteve-Coll (died 1980); partner of Moya Willson; died Aylsham, Norfolk, 16 September 2024.