John Elderfield has spent 30 years hunting down works for the Museum of Modern Art, but on Monday, at a farewell party in his honor, the tables were turned.

With the all-Bob Dylan soundtrack Mr. Elderfield had selected for the event temporarily halted, the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, presented Mr. Elderfield with a Jasper Johns print.

It was a fitting token of appreciation: One of Mr. Elderfield’s achievements as the museum’s chief curator of paintings and sculpture — one described as “staggering” by Mr. Lowry — has been the acquisition of 10 Johns works in a period of five years.

Alluding to this accomplishment, Mr. Elderfield, 65, said, “This one will stay on Duane Street,” referring to his home in TriBeCa where he lives with his wife, an arts publicist, Jeanne Collins.

In a telephone interview yesterday, after spending most of the day supervising reinstallations in the garden and the lobby, Mr. Elderfield said that the Johns work “Diver” is among his proudest acquisitions, along with Robert Rauschenberg’s “Rebus” and Matisse’s “The Plum Blossoms.”

“Of course, they’re the most expensive,” Mr. Elderfield said.

Under his direction, the museum has acquired 1,206 drawings and, in just the past five years, 348 paintings and sculptures.

Mr. Elderfield’s acquisition prowess is legend.

To describe it to guests, Mr. Lowry recalled sitting “in a very fast car with him, on the way from Munich to some small hamlet in the Bavarian alps, to chase a painting.

Mr. Lowry let Mr. Elderfield drive.

“The next thing I know, my head is slammed back and the car is going 140 miles an hour, and John has a big grin on his face.”

As the curator of more than 25 exhibitions, on topics and artists from Fauvism to Matisse to Manet to Mondrian to Martin Puryear, Mr. Elderfield has also shown great skill at installing paintings — he was responsible for the reinstallation in the museum’s expanded building in 2004 — and also at borrowing paintings.

The most challenging exhibition, Mr. Elderfield said, was the Matisse exhibit, which contained more than 400 objects. “The really tough things were the Russian museums. There were lots and lots of trips and persuasion, and dreary hotels,” Mr. Elderfield said.

A few months before the exhibition opened, the former Soviet Union dissolved, and all the deals were off. Mr. Elderfield had to start over. He persevered, and all the pictures came to New York.

Mr. Elderfield learned to tackle challenges with his first assignment at the museum, to curate a show on Fauvism in eight months. His assistant informed him it could never be done.

“I was so naïve about those things,” Mr. Elderfield said, “I didn’t realize it was preposterous.”

He started in August, finished the catalog by Christmas, and had the exhibit up in April.

“It was a Baptism by fire. It was great,” Mr. Elderfield said.

It was Mr. Elderfield’s first job at a museum. He grew up in a village in the northern England and pursued painting, then the study of art history, before coming to America for a two-year fellowship at Yale University. He wound up spending more time in New York, filing pieces for Art Forum, and hanging out at MoMA.

The first curator he met was at MoMA, in the library: “She said, being a curator is great. You go to lots of parties.”

Mr. Elderfield had returned to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, to work on his dissertation on German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, when a MoMA curator, the late William Rubin, took him to lunch and offered him a job. “I had never seen someone who would eat off your plate without asking,” Mr. Elderfield said. But he adjusted.

Margaret Barr, the widow of MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, helped him along. “She once gave me a seminar about MoMA politics that was very helpful,” Mr. Elderfield said.

Mr. Elderfield is the consummate diplomat and wit. His assistant Sharon Dec recalled a telephone call she received one day from a man who insisted one of the works in a Mondrian show was hung upside down.

“I put the person on hold and I said to John, ‘What am I going to tell this guy?’ In a flash, he said, ‘Tell him there are arrows on the back,'” Ms. Dec said. “And he believed it.”

Other stories at the microphone came from a former president of the museum, Agnes Gund; the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan, and museum trustee David Rockefeller.

Mr. Elderfield’s increased job responsibilities happened quickly. One night, the director of the museum at the time, Richard Oldenberg, invited Mr. Elderfield to have a drink with him, “to talk about general things,” Mr. Elderfield recalled.

“It was a very convivial evening, during which he asked me if I wanted to run the drawings department. I woke up the next morning with a hangover,” he said — and with a new job.

Mr. Elderfield took over as chief curator of paintings and sculpture when the beloved Kirk Varnedoe died. Around that time, the museum was planning an expansion, and the art market was soaring. On the surface, at least, it was not the best time to begin an acquisitions spurt. But that’s just what Mr. Elderfield did.

The museum has had a couple of years recently when the value of acquisitions totaled $100 million each year (Mr. Elderfield carefully noted the museum hasn’t actually shelled out that amount.)

“That’s serious stuff,” Mr. Elderfield said, “It’s at a level unquestionably far above that of any museum in America.”

Mr. Elderfield credited many other than himself for this level of activity, and also noted that it is in the DNA of the museum.

“It has absolutely transformed, from a small group of trustees acquiring things in the early 1930s compared to now. But MoMA has always had this sense of being willing to be very aggressive in its acquisitions, and having trustees who really want to support this,” he said.

Mr. Elderfield is leaving his position at the end of July. A successor has not yet been named, and he is not a part of the search committee to appoint a successor.

“I’ve asked that they tell me who it is once they’ve decided, so that I can call this person and tell them what the job really is like,” Mr. Elderfield said.

Mr. Elderfield plans to curate exhibitions still, as chief curator emeritus. He is working on a DeKooning retrospective that will be on the sixth floor.

He muses about mischief. “I’m starting to harbor this idea that since I will still have a security card in the museum, I need to develop a friendly group of art handlers so I can re-hang parts of the collection at night,” Mr. Elderfield said.

More nights than not, Mr. Elderfield has found himself at one art world party or another. The one on Monday was a rare one, conveying simultaneously the impact one person can have on an institution and vice versa.

“I have to say that it’s a little bit like your friend Bob Dylan: It’s a never ending tour,” the president of the museum, Marie-Josee Kravis, said. “I hope that you’ll always consider this home.”