Did Sir Nicholas Serota spring fully fledged as a museum director from the womb? The question posed by Serota’s opposite number at the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith, referred to the precocious CV of a man who was running his first museum at the age of 27, transformed the now über-trendy Whitechapel Gallery in his thirties and by 54 had launched what would become the most successful gallery of modern art in the world.

Today, however, Serota’s Tate (which embraces Tates Modern, Britain, Liverpool and St Ives) is criticised for purchasing works of art from serving trustees.

But we run ahead. Serota was born in 1946 to Jewish parents; his mother Beatrice was a Labour peer and sent the young Nicholas to Haberdashers’ Aske’s School. He did economics at Cambridge but swapped to history of art and did his masters degree under the supervision of Anthony Blunt.

Employed by the Government for his “deep and scholarly knowledge of contemporary art” as well as marketing chutzpah, Serota got the Tate gig in 1988 and, at the dawn of the millennium, opened Tate Modern in the old Bankside Power Station.

He attracted instant controversy by dispensing with the conventional method of displaying art chronologically, instead hanging his 20th-century collection according to themes. This year he changed the hanging but kept to themes, saying that young people were used to absorbing information by “looking at snippets” — which led one critic to observe that visiting Tate Modern was dangerously akin to net-surfing.

But his blockbuster temporary exhibitions — Picasso, Warhol, Matisse — and the single monumental works housed in the vast Turbine Hall have attracted four million visitors a year. Still the critics have sniffed at his success, claiming that he is ratingsdriven and fills his “cathedral of cool” with callow youth who know nothing about art.

As chairman of the Turner Prize, Serota is regularly in the firing line for promoting “modern rubbish”. But as long as he is criticised for being both populist and “austere and elitist”, surely he must be doing something right.

Little is known of Serota’s private life except that he likes sailing and Little Richard and was married for more than 20 years to the former ballerina Angela Beveridge, with whom he has two grown-up daughters. He is now married to Teresa Gleadowe, who worked for him at the Tate.