Charmer: Penny said it was an honour to be invited to return to the National
Herbivore curators, their necks aching from stooping to keep below the parapet, their voices hoarse from apologising for their very existence, are straightening up and looking around in astonishment: the academics have taken over the asylum.
Yesterday's confirmation by the government of the worst-guarded news in recent arts history, that Nicholas Penny is the new director of the National Gallery - the building he left sadly for Washington only seven years ago after failing to get the top job last time round - also confirms what is becoming a startling pattern.
Penny is a charmer, very well liked by his former colleagues with whom he has carefully maintained contact.
He was quoted yesterday saying it was an honour to be invited to return. "Few institutions enjoy such popular affection within Britain or such esteem abroad. I consider it a duty to maintain that affection and esteem, but hope to extend and deepen the ways in which the gallery serves its public and the great art within its care."
Penny is also an academic and a scholar from his slightly askew tie to his finger tips, with an impeccable curatorial track record and a tower block of highbrow publications to his credit, both of which mightily impressed the trustees.
Culture secretary James Purnell praised his "fine mixture of innovation, professionalism and scholastic integrity".
This is not how it was supposed to be. Only a few years ago, when the power shoulders and stiletto heels of the merchant banker and City investment broker, Lawton Fitt and Suzanna Taverne, were sent in to knock financial acumen into the Royal Academy and the British Museum respectively, it was clear that the shambolic but well meaning academic curator, rumple-haired and leather-elbow-patched, was joining the dodo and the passenger pigeon in the ante-room of history.
Paul Evans, with a background in leisure industries and the pub trade got the top job at the Royal Armouries, and Lindsay Sharp was seen as the wind of change blowing pizza counters and Star Trek exhibitions into the stuffy old Science Museum. Art historian Richard Ormond was replaced at the National Maritime Museum by brisk, no-nonsense Rear Admiral Roy Clare.
The theory was that a few carefully preserved curators would be allowed to potter on among their objects provided they didn't get in the way, while the grown-ups showed them how to cut deficits, cut overheads, increase visitor spend and lure in hordes of private philanthropists and corporate donors with deep pockets.
It hasn't turned out like that. Of the above batch, only Paul Evans remains in post. Suzanna Taverne, leaving the British Museum with a multiplied deficit and a strike imminent, wrote a bitter memo that was gleefully circulated, about the "priesthood of curators" who were running the institution on to the rocks of financial ruin.
Instead, Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate, Sandy Nairne - Oxford rowing blue and scholar - at the National Portrait Gallery, Mark Jones - ex National Museum of Scotland, ex British Museum - at the V&A - and the master of the dark arts of schmoozing and sincere flattery, Neil MacGregor at the British Museum, have demonstrated a startling combination of charm, political nous, financial savvy and ratlike cunning. The nattiness of Charles Saumarez Smith's braces have blinded some to the sharpness of the mind now in Ms Fitt's old office at the Royal Academy, and as for the academy's Norman Rosenthal, nobody ever has doubted his intellectual strength because he'd knock them down and rip their eyeballs out if they did. Nicholas Penny will fit into the gang like a blackjack into a hitman's fist. If Gordon Brown, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or the directors of Northern Rock, want any lessons in political and financial tight-rope walking, they know where to turn.
Incidentally, it was apparently Penny's passion to get to grips with the National's website which swung it with the trustees. Who'd have thought it, eh?
