Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll obituary

Invited to appear on Desert Island Discs in October 1991, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who has died aged 85, spoke with the cautious air of one picking her way across ice. Her choices of music were mostly the uninflammatory ones of a woman of culture – a Bach partita, a Beethoven piano sonata – as was that of her non-Bible book (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets). When the presenter, Sue Lawley, finally addressed the elephant in the room – the near civil war that had raged at the Victoria & Albert Museum following Esteve-Coll’s appointment as its director four years earlier – she deftly defused the question by broadening it.

“The whole period was very difficult indeed for everybody within the museum,” Esteve-Coll allowed. Pressed as to how she herself had survived attacks that were both personal and vicious, she said: “I have a group of extremely supportive close friends, I have a small, tight, close family, and they closed ranks.” Then, on a crisper note, she ended: “I am absolutely certain that the decisions taken then were the right ones.”

These had included making nine senior curators redundant in 1989, some of whom had been at the museum since the 1960s. If Esteve-Coll’s appointment in July 1987 – she took up the post in January 1988 – had been greeted by the V&A’s old guard with dismay, it had mainly kept quiet. Now the gloves were off.

Within weeks, her predecessor-but-one as director, the ineffably grand Sir John Pope-Hennessy, wrote to a national paper describing Esteve-Coll as a “vulgar populist … destructive to scholarship”.

There was much more in the same vein. John Russell, the august English art critic of the New York Times, said of the summary nature of her actions that “Robespierre himself was hardly more expeditious … Trust [in Esteve-Coll] is not likely to remain … if curators are regarded as disposable, like paper towels.” In an excoriating article in the London Review of Books, the eminent art historian Nicholas Penny called the treatment of the curators “shabby and dishonest”.

Things were not helped by an advertising campaign, commissioned by Esteve-Coll in 1988 and masterminded by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency, that sold the V&A as “an ace caff with quite a good museum attached”.

With hindsight, this was ill judged. As Penny pointed out, the advertisements addressed “younger and more sophisticated males for whom a caff is as quaint as a cloth cap … reassuring them that it is smart to be philistine if you make smug jokes about it”.

Some of this criticism was fair, although much was not. Working practices at the V&A had been put in place in the early 20th century, modelled on those of the army. Enlisted men – cleaners, guards – started work at eight in the morning, NCOs – clerical staff, technicians – at nine, officers – curators, keepers – at 10. Only the last had keys, so that no vitrine could be opened until they arrived. The system lent itself to unproductive time-serving.

More broadly, the idea of the V&A as an amenity for scholars and aesthetes had also not changed for half a century. When, in 1928, its then director was asked whether it had become “a mere museum for connoisseurs and collectors”, he allowed that this was fair, “but for the word ‘mere’”.

Esteve-Coll had very different ideas about the place of the V&A – of culture – in society. Announcing a “clear-cut separation of scholarship and housekeeping”, she set about professionalising the museum’s publicity, education and fundraising departments so that curators could concentrate on their specialities while allowing the V&A to become more widely popular.

This last aim was also meant to make it more financially self-sufficient, wherein 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 saw no reason why any institution, including a national collection, should not pay its own way.

Unfortunately for Esteve-Coll, she and Thatcher shared certain surface similarities. Both were from provincial backgrounds – Thatcher’s father was a grocer in Grantham, Esteve-Coll’s a bank clerk in Darlington – and both were the first women to fill their respective roles. Added to that, the chairman of the V&A trustees was Robert (later Lord) Armstrong, cabinet secretary in the first two Thatcher governments and among the prime minister’s closest confidants. Saatchi & Saatchi was also the Conservatives’ agency of choice. Much 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 probably never be known. What is beyond doubt is that their aims in throwing them were different. The V&A’s new director was not a Thatcherite bean-counter but an egalitarian who wanted people from her own background to be instilled with the same love for the arts as she had been.

Her parents, Nora (nee Rose) and Percy Kingdon, may not have been born to the Pope-Hennessy purple, but they were, in their daughter’s telling, responsible for her love of classical music and art. On Desert Island Discs, she evoked a Lawrentian childhood of affordable visits to concerts and galleries. Her aim was to make the V&A attractive to people such as her young self.

Born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, she went to Darlington girls’ high school, where she developed a passion for Anglo-Irish literature that led her to study English and Spanish at Trinity College Dublin. It was while doing so that she met a Spanish sea captain, José Esteve-Coll, 30 years her senior. Aged 21, she married him. They spent the 60s sailing the world on a Spanish cargo ship, Elizabeth the only woman in a crew of 40 men. “I got very good at oxyacetylene welding,” she said later.

It was José’s retirement that brought the couple back to London, where Elizabeth signed on to study art history at Birkbeck College (now Birkbeck, University of London). Graduating with a first in 1976, and now the family breadwinner, she took a job as head of learning resources at Kingston School of Art. In 1982, she moved as university librarian to the University of Surrey, from where, in 1985, she was hired by the V&A’s then director, Sir Roy Strong, to re-open the National Art Library, which had been closed for three years as a result of flooding.

José died in 1980. Interviewed a decade later, Esteve-Coll admitted that she would probably never have applied for the job of V&A director had her husband been alive. Appointed to a second term in 1991, she suddenly resigned in 1994 to take up the vice-chancellorship of the University of East Anglia in Norwich the following year. If open warfare had by then died down at the museum, it had been replaced by an uneasy truce.

It was difficult to forget that virtually all of the 120-strong curatorial staff had sided with their nine colleagues, passing a motion of no confidence in Esteve-Coll and demanding her resignation. Nor was it easy to dispel the feeling that some of the initial attacks on her had been prompted by a mix of misogyny and snobbery.

Posterity was kinder to her. In her nearly seven years at the V&A, Esteve-Coll opened eight new galleries and increased visitor numbers from 900,000 to 1.35 million. This was not done at the cost of scholarship: a £12m study centre, also opened under her watch, was glowingly described in the Times Higher Educational Supplement as “the most sophisticated in Europe”. In the five years after she left, attendances at the V&A fell by nearly a quarter.

If she had hoped for a more peaceful life in Norwich, it was not to be. The cost of the revamp of her official UEA residence drew anger from cash-strapped students, whose representative described Esteve-Coll as “pleasant, but out of touch”. She resigned the vice-chancellorship in December 1996, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In 2001, she took up the largely ceremonial role of chancellor at the University of Lincoln, resigning it in turn in 2008.

After that, she retired to the Norfolk market town of Aylsham, where she lived in a converted 19th-century dissenters’ chapel called the Tabernacle with a former UEA colleague, Moya Willson. Frailer with time and illness, she remained a trustee of the UEA’s Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures: in 2005, Esteve-Coll was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for her “outstanding contribution to the promotion of Japanese culture and studies to British people”.

Esteve-Coll was made a dame in 1995. An observant Anglican, in 2014 she was commemorated for her work in Norwich by the installation of a stained-glass window by the artist John McLean in the city’s cathedral.

Willson survives her.

• Elizabeth Anne Loosemore Esteve-Coll, museum director, born 14 October 1938; died 16 September 2024