Pauline Vogelpoel

Director of the Contemporary Art Society

Pauline Vogelpoel, arts administrator: born Lourenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa 24 April 1926; Organising Secretary, Contemporary Art Society 1954-76, Director 1976-82; MBE 1962; Zurich Editor, Harpers and Queen 1982-86; married 1975 David Mann; died Basle, Switzerland 22 December 2002.

Pauline Vogelpoel ran the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) for nearly 30 years, helping museums to acquire the work of living artists, and encouraging greater awareness of contemporary art.

The CAS was founded in 1910 to ensure that public collections in Britain would reflect the most interesting and challenging art of the day. The organisation buys works of art with finances raised by corporate and individual membership, to give to regional and national museums. In the 90 years since the society was established, 5,000 works have been presented to collections, including works by Augustus John, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Anthony Caro, and more recently Richard Long, Damien Hirst, Helen Chadwick and Douglas Gordon.

Vogelpoel took over as Organising Secretary in 1954. This was a golden era for the visual arts. She was the first person to organise candlelit dinners to mark exhibition openings, turning ordinary events into something magical, and what better place to do it but the echoing glamour of the sculpture hall at the Tate Gallery. Vogelpoel also organised and led cultural tours abroad for CAS members, many of whom became life-long friends.

The CAS had grace-and-favour premises in the basement of the Tate, in a delightful vaulted cavern conveniently near the restaurant. The office was filled with strange green plants and baize cloths, which served to conceal Vogepoel's eccentric but flawless filing system. One entire room was devoted to the "addressograph" machine, an old-fashioned printing device which took two and half days to produce the 2,500 address labels needed for a CAS membership mailing.

With her beauty, unsurpassable style and indomitable energy, Vogelpoel quickly became a doyenne of the arts world. She organised a number of imaginative and brave exhibitions for the CAS including British Painting in the Sixties (1963), featuring works by Terry Frost, Howard Hodgkin and Peter Lanyon, and British Sculpture in the Sixties (1965), which included a sculpture by Anthony Caro; these showed at the Whitechapel Art Gallery as well as the Tate Gallery. The first of these also travelled to Zurich, with funding from British Petroleum. This was the start of CAS's relationship with the corporate sector over many years, with Vogelpoel advising Mobil Oil, De Beers and BP on their contemporary art collections.

But the Tate at that time was not altogether a happy place. Roy Strong describes in his diaries the dapper and clever director John Rothenstein as the "Ringmaster" and many doubted his suitability for the position. It was arguably his successor Norman Reid who finally dragged the Tate screaming into the 20th century. Vogelpoel inevitably found herself caught up in what is now known as "The Tate Affair".

She regularly lunched with Rothenstein at the Whistler restaurant, which boasted the best wine cellar and the prettiest waitresses in London. In 1954 Vogelpoel accompanied Rothenstein to the Diaghilev exhibition at Forbes House. Douglas Cooper, a collector of genius and a critic of unparalleled viciousness, had made Rothenstein's life a misery. On this occasion Cooper followed him round the room openly taunting him. Finally Rothenstein flipped and, just as Vogelpoel turned and diplomatically tried to engage him in conversation elsewhere, he punched Cooper twice in the face.

Pauline Vogelpoel was born in 1926 in Lourenço Marques in Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa), where her father, Pieter, worked in the family shipping firm and was the Dutch Consul. When Pieter Vogelpoel died of typhoid in his early thirties, his widow, Yvonne, decided to return to her family home in Cape Town, with her two young children.

Mrs Vogelpoel came from an upper-middle-class Jewish family who had emigrated from France to South Africa. After her husband's death, she formed a relationship with Percy Gain, director of the family trust company. He became her life-long companion, and although they never married and did not live together, he had a powerful role in the children's upbringing. When Pauline was 12, he insisted that she and her brother Louis be baptised.

Both children had a first-class education: Louis Vogelpoel is now an eminent cardiologist in Cape Town, and a world expert on wild flowers with an orchid named after him. Pauline was educated at Herschel, the best girls' school in Cape Town and went on to do a fine arts degree at the University of Cape Town, becoming a successful potter with her own studio. She then worked as an exhibitions organiser at the South African Association of Arts. With her perfect features, tilted nose, brilliant blue eyes and petite but voluptuous figure, she soon became the toast of Cape Town.

After the Nationalist landslide in 1948, Vogelpoel's brother and his wife left for London; in 1950 she decided to follow them. After a period in New York, during which she helped out at the Museum of Modern Art, Vogelpoel returned to London and joined the Contemporary Art Society as Organising Secretary in 1954, becoming Director in 1976.

The chairman of the CAS, Whitney Straight, and his wife Daphne were to play an important part in one of the great love affairs of Vogelpoel's life. It was at one of their New Year's Eve parties that Vogelpoel (a cat person) spotted the saucer eyes of their pug dog peeping out from under the table-cloth. Her change of allegiance from feline to canine was instant. The following day the Straights' chauffeur delivered a pug puppy to her flat.

Corinne Bellow, Rothenstein's assistant at the Tate, described her surprise at the many assorted dogs which used to saunter about the gallery, particularly Vogelpoel's pug Lucas (the first in a long line of Lucases) who used to be let out of the window on a long lead to pee onto the grass by the imposing front entrance, much to the amusement of visitors.

In 1975 Vogelpoel married the banker David Mann. In 1982 he joined a private bank in Basle and she left her job at the CAS to move to Switzerland with him. They lived in an apartment in a baroque palace in the centre of Basle and an enchanting chalet in the mountains. She became the Zurich editor of Harpers and Queen magazine. London's loss was Basle's gain and the couple became the centre of an interesting cultural group, hosting concerts in the hall of their home. They regularly visited London where they gave elegant parties for their old friends at Boodle's club.

In 1997 Vogelpoel joined the International Council of the Tate Gallery. A few years ago she recorded her memories for the National Sound Archive's Artists' Lives project at the British Library.

I first met Pauline Vogelpoel at a dinner party given by Robert Harling, editor of House and Garden, and his wife Phoebe. We soon discovered our mutual love of pugs; hearing my concern that I could not take mine to work with me, she announced, "Then you must come and work for me." Who could resist such an opportunity? My pug was in seventh heaven, sharing Lucas's Rabelaisian meals of the leftovers from the Tate restaurant. Although I had strong connections with the art world, I knew very little about the contemporary art scene but I soon realised Pauline's expertise and sure touch was without precedent. As a young and inexperienced woman searching for a role model, I had struck gold.

Vanessa Hannam