Invited to look on Desert Island Discs in October 1991, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who has died aged 85, spoke with the cautious air of 1 choosing her manner throughout ice. Her selections of music had been largely the uninflammatory ones of a girl of tradition – a Bach partita, a Beethoven piano sonata – as was that of her non-Bible guide (TS Eliot’s 4 Quartets). When the presenter, Sue Lawley, lastly addressed the elephant within the room – the close to civil struggle that had raged on the Victoria & Albert Museum following Esteve-Coll’s appointment as its director 4 years earlier – she deftly defused the query by broadening it.
“The entire interval was very tough certainly for everyone inside the museum,” Esteve-Coll allowed. Pressed as to how she herself had survived assaults that had been each private and harsh, she stated: “I’ve a bunch of extraordinarily supportive shut associates, I’ve a small, tight, shut household, they usually closed ranks.” Then, on a crisper word, she ended: “I’m completely sure that the choices taken then had been the proper ones.”
These had included making 9 senior curators redundant in 1989, a few of whom had been on the museum for the reason that Sixties. If Esteve-Coll’s appointment in July 1987 – she took up the put up in January 1988 – had been greeted by the V&A’s outdated guard with dismay, it had primarily stored quiet. Now the gloves had been off.
Inside weeks, her predecessor-but-one as director, the ineffably grand Sir John Pope-Hennessy, wrote to a nationwide paper describing Esteve-Coll as a “vulgar populist … damaging to scholarship”.
There was way more in the identical vein. John Russell, the august English artwork critic of the New York Instances, stated of the abstract nature of her actions that “Robespierre himself was hardly extra expeditious … Belief [in Esteve-Coll] just isn’t prone to stay … if curators are considered disposable, like paper towels.” In an excoriating article within the London Evaluate of Books, the eminent artwork historian Nicholas Penny known as the therapy of the curators “shabby and dishonest”.
Issues weren’t helped by an promoting marketing campaign, commissioned by Esteve-Coll in 1988 and masterminded by the Saatchi & Saatchi company, that bought the V&A as “an ace caff with fairly a very good museum connected”.
With hindsight, this was in poor health judged. As Penny identified, the commercials addressed “youthful and extra refined males for whom a caff is as quaint as a fabric cap … reassuring them that it’s good to be philistine if you happen to make smug jokes about it”.
A few of this criticism was truthful, though a lot was not. Working practices on the V&A had been put in place within the early twentieth century, modelled on these of the military. Enlisted males – cleaners, guards – began work at eight within the morning, NCOs – clerical employees, technicians – at 9, officers – curators, keepers – at 10. Solely the final had keys, in order that no vitrine could possibly be opened till they arrived. The system lent itself to unproductive time-serving.
Extra broadly, the concept of the V&A as an amenity for students and aesthetes had additionally not modified for half a century. When, in 1928, its then director was requested whether or not it had turn out to be “a mere museum for connoisseurs and collectors”, he allowed that this was truthful, “however for the phrase ‘mere’”.
Esteve-Coll had very totally different concepts in regards to the place of the V&A – of tradition – in society. Asserting a “clear-cut separation of scholarship and housekeeping”, she set about professionalising the museum’s publicity, schooling and fundraising departments in order that curators might consider their specialities whereas permitting the V&A to turn out to be extra broadly standard.
This final goal was additionally meant to make it extra financially self-sufficient, whereby lay the rub. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had been elected prime minister. A decade later, loathing for her in cultural circles had grown intense. Thatcher noticed no purpose why any establishment, together with a nationwide assortment, shouldn’t pay its personal manner.
Sadly for Esteve-Coll, she and Thatcher shared sure floor similarities. Each had been from provincial backgrounds – Thatcher’s father was a grocer in Grantham, Esteve-Coll’s a financial institution clerk in Darlington – and each had been the primary ladies to fill their respective roles. Added to that, the chairman of the V&A trustees was Robert (later Lord) Armstrong, cupboard secretary within the first two Thatcher governments and among the many prime minister’s closest confidants. Saatchi & Saatchi was additionally the Conservatives’ company of selection. A lot of the cultural loathing for Thatcher now shifted itself, unfairly, on to Esteve-Coll.
The extent to which Armstrong rolled the snowballs that Esteve-Coll later threw will most likely by no means be recognized. What’s past doubt is that their goals in throwing them had been totally different. The V&A’s new director was not a Thatcherite bean-counter however an egalitarian who needed individuals from her personal background to be instilled with the identical love for the humanities as she had been.
Her dad and mom, Nora (nee Rose) and Percy Kingdon, could not have been born to the Pope-Hennessy purple, however they had been, of their daughter’s telling, accountable for her love of classical music and artwork. On Desert Island Discs, she evoked a Lawrentian childhood of inexpensive visits to live shows and galleries. Her goal was to make the V&A enticing to individuals reminiscent of her younger self.
Born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, she went to Darlington women’ highschool, the place she developed a ardour for Anglo-Irish literature that led her to review English and Spanish at Trinity Faculty Dublin. It was whereas doing in order that she met a Spanish sea captain, José Esteve-Coll, 30 years her senior. Aged 21, she married him. They spent the 60s crusing the world on a Spanish cargo ship, Elizabeth the one girl in a crew of 40 males. “I acquired superb at oxyacetylene welding,” she stated later.
It was José’s retirement that introduced the couple again to London, the place Elizabeth signed on to review artwork historical past at Birkbeck Faculty (now Birkbeck, College of London). Graduating with a primary in 1976, and now the household breadwinner, she took a job as head of studying assets at Kingston College of Artwork. In 1982, she moved as college librarian to the College of Surrey, from the place, in 1985, she was employed by the V&A’s then director, Sir Roy Robust, to re-open the Nationwide Artwork Library, which had been closed for 3 years on account of flooding.
José died in 1980. Interviewed a decade later, Esteve-Coll admitted that she would most likely by no means have utilized for the job of V&A director had her husband been alive. Appointed to a second time period in 1991, she abruptly resigned in 1994 to take up the vice-chancellorship of the College of East Anglia in Norwich the next 12 months. If open warfare had by then died down on the museum, it had been changed by an uneasy truce.
It was tough to overlook that just about all the 120-strong curatorial employees had sided with their 9 colleagues, passing a movement of no confidence in Esteve-Coll and demanding her resignation. Nor was it simple to dispel the sensation that among the preliminary assaults on her had been prompted by a mixture of misogyny and snobbery.
Posterity was kinder to her. In her almost seven years on the V&A, Esteve-Coll opened eight new galleries and elevated customer numbers from 900,000 to 1.35 million. This was not finished at the price of scholarship: a £12m research centre, additionally opened underneath her watch, was glowingly described within the Instances Greater Academic Complement as “essentially the most refined in Europe”. Within the 5 years after she left, attendances on the V&A fell by almost 1 / 4.
If she had hoped for a extra peaceable life in Norwich, it was to not be. The price of the revamp of her official UEA residence drew anger from cash-strapped college students, whose consultant described Esteve-Coll as “nice, however out of contact”. She resigned the vice-chancellorship in December 1996, having been recognized with a number of sclerosis. In 2001, she took up the largely ceremonial position of chancellor on the College of Lincoln, resigning it in flip in 2008.
After that, she retired to the Norfolk market city of Aylsham, the place she lived in a transformed Nineteenth-century dissenters’ chapel known as the Tabernacle with a former UEA colleague, Moya Willson. Frailer with time and sickness, she remained a trustee of the UEA’s Sainsbury Institute for the Examine of Japanese Arts and Cultures: in 2005, Esteve-Coll was awarded the Order of the Rising Solar for her “excellent contribution to the promotion of Japanese tradition and research to British individuals”.
Esteve-Coll was made a dame in 1995. An observant Anglican, in 2014 she was commemorated for her work in Norwich by the set up of a stained-glass window by the artist John McLean within the metropolis’s cathedral.
Willson survives her.
