Sir Norman Reid

Born in Dulwich, south London, during the First World War, Norman Robert Reid's artistic talent was first identified as a student at Wilson's grammar school, Camberwell. There, an art master, Peter Westwater, encouraged his pupil to attend Goldsmiths for life-drawing evening classes at the age of 14.

His parents had little interest in art, and although his father arranged for his son to be apprenticed to a commercial studio when he left school, Reid had secretly applied for, and won, a scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art. Jean Lindsay Bertram, a fellow student at the college, became his wife in 1941. Reid later did a degree at Edinburgh University, having already made his mark as a painter.

The Second World War, however, interrupted his career. Reid was called up and served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, eventually in Italy, reaching the rank of major. Demobbed in 1946 and keen to work in the art world, he joined the understaffed curators at the Tate in London, then under the direction of John (later Sir John) Rothenstein. He later admitted to having taken on Reid chiefly because, as a former major in the Argylls, he would know how to "look after the chaps".

Two weeks after Reid's arrival, Rothenstein went on a six-week tour of Europe with a Turner exhibition, leaving the new recruit in charge of the entire gallery. Reid presided over the return of works that had been sent to refuge houses for the duration of the war, while it also gave him time to acquaint himself with the entire collection, carefully observing its strengths and weaknesses.

Reid became deputy director in 1954 and keeper in 1959, and when Rothenstein retired from the Tate in 1964, Reid was appointed to succeed him as a safe pair of hands. His tastes were modern, and the Tate's acquisitions and physical expansion under his guidance reflected this. He also set about reforming the structure of the collections, while greatly expanding the curatorial staff.

Reid quickly acquired important works by leading European artists such as Mondrian, Dali and Brancusi, and through personal relations with living artists of his own generation negotiated notable donations from Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, as well as Mark Rothko's striking Seagram murals, which were accommodated in their own space, dubbed "The Chapel", in the Tate's new north-east quadrant.

In the late 1960s the gallery began a programme of popular and influential exhibitions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Moore and Ben Nicholson - and an early presentation of Gilbert and George's Living Statues. The success of these exhibitions attracted a new, younger audience to the Tate.

There were also controversies. The artist David Hockney publicly attacked the gallery in the late 1970s, while in 1976 there was prolonged media interest in the so-called Tate "Bricks", more formally known as Carl André's Equivalent VIII.

Reid retired from the Tate in 1979 after 33 years in charge, but later claimed not to have missed it during his long retirement. He served on a number of committees concerned with contemporary art and conservation. He was knighted in 1970, given an honorary degree at the University of East Anglia in 1971 and made an officer of the exotically-named Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle in 1953.

During his time at the Tate, Reid's own artistic career had taken a back seat, although he painted as much as he could in his spare time. Retirement, however, allowed him to prepare a one-man show unveiled in 1990 which revealed the influence of his master, the Scottish artist William Gillies. Examples of his work are now represented, fittingly, in the Tate's own collection and that of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Reid's wife, Jean, died earlier this year, and he is survived by a son and daughter, the latter married to the abstract painter Robyn Denny. DAVID TORRANCE