Two new senior posts created to take the Tate Gallery into the next century were announced today.
Stephen Deuchar (40) has been appointed Director of the Tate Gallery of British Art. He is currently Director of the Neptune Court Project at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich where he is leading the £20 million redevelopment of the museum’s main complex. He joined the museum in 1985 as Curator of Paintings and organiser the popular Armada exhibition, becoming Curator of Pictures 1988-90 and Head of Exhibitions and Displays from 1993 to 1995. He is an acknowledged scholar and author and his publications include Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History, Yale University Press 1988, a highly acclaimed book which has become a standard teaching work. He has a strong interest in contemporary art and initiated the National Maritime Museum’s New Visions of the Sea programme, a series of contemporary art commissions for the museum’s 1999 re-opening from artists including Tacita Dean, Bill Fontana and Lucy Blackstad.
Jeremy Lewison (42) has been appointed the Tate Gallery’s Director of Collections. In this role he will act as the Gallery’s academic leader, setting the standard for research and intellectual inquiry around the works in the Collections in addition to developing the gallery’s acquisitions policy. Before joining the Tate in 1983, he was Curator of Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge. He is an established scholar, with particular interests in English art between the wars, Abstract Expressionism, contemporary art and contemporary prints. He has written a detailed study of the work of Ben Nicholson, the catalogues raisonnés of Sol LeWitt and Brice Marsden, and a catalogue on Anish Kapoor’s drawings. He is currently working on Jackson Pollock and has contributed many articles and catalogues for British and foreign institutions and journals. He taught a paper on Neo-Classical and Romantic French and British Art at the University of Cambridge from 1980 to 1983. At the Tate Gallery he became Assistant Keeper in the Modern Collection and Head of Prints and Drawings in 1987 and he has been Acting Keeper of the Modern Collection since 1996. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Committee of Museums of Modern Art.