19 Facts About Nicholas Serota

Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota was born on 27 April 1946 and is a British art historian and curator.

Nicholas Serota has been chairman of Arts Council England since February 2017.

Nicholas Serota was chairman of the Turner Prize jury until 2007.

Nicholas Serota was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School and then studied economics at Christ's College, Cambridge, before switching to history of art.

In 1969, Nicholas Serota became chairman of the new Young Friends of the Tate organisation with a membership of 750: they took over a building in Pear Place, south of Waterloo Bridge, arranging lectures and Saturday painting classes for local children.

In 1970, Nicholas Serota joined the Arts Council of Great Britain's Visual Arts Department as a regional exhibitions officer.

In 1976, Nicholas Serota was appointed director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London's East End.

Nicholas Serota assembled at the Whitechapel a staff including Jenni Lomax, Mark Francis and Sheena Wagstaff, and organised exhibitions of Carl Andre, Eva Hesse and Gerhard Richter as well as early exhibitions of then emerging artists such as Antony Gormley.

Nicholas Serota saw many areas of the Tate's operations in need of overhaul, and concluded that the gallery was loved, but not respected enough.

Nicholas Serota is a passionate man, and indeed is quite unusual in this country in his commitment to modern painting and sculpture.

In contrast, Peter Fuller made a scathing attack in Modern Painters magazine, saying that Nicholas Serota would be incapable, by temperament and ability, of maintaining the Tate's historic collection.

In 1998, Nicholas Serota conceived "Operation Cobalt", the secret buy-back of two of the Tate's Turner paintings that had been stolen in 1994 while they were on loan to a gallery in Frankfurt.

Nicholas Serota attributed this to "a failing in his head".

Nicholas Serota has been criticised by Platform and Liberate Tate for inviting increased sponsorship of the Tate from BP.

Since its formation in 1999, the Stuckist art group has campaigned against Serota, who is the subject of the group's co-founder Charles Thomson's satirical painting Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision, one of the best known Stuckist works and a likely "signature piece" for the movement.

Nicholas Serota was dubbed the "least likely visitor" to The Stuckists Punk Victorian show at the Walker Art Gallery in 2004, which included a wall of work satirising him and the Tate, including Thomson's painting.

Nicholas Serota wrote to the Stuckists, saying that the work was not of "sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection", and was accused of "snubbing one of Britain's foremost collections".

In 2001, Stuart Pearson Wright, winner of that year's BP Portrait Award, said that Nicholas Serota should be sacked, because of his advocacy of conceptual art and neglect of figurative painting.

In 1973, Nicholas Serota married Angela Beveridge, having two daughters, Anya and Beth.