Name Neil MacGregor | Role Museum director | |
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Full Name Robert Neil MacGregor Alma mater New College, OxfordEcole Normale SuperieureUniversity of EdinburghCourtauld Institute of Art Occupation Art historian and museum director Parent(s) Alexander MacGregorAnna MacGregor Books Germany: Memories of a Nation, A History of the World in 100 Ob, Seeing salvation, Shakespeare's Restless World: An, Shakespeare's Restless World: A | ||
Tour of the exhibition germany memories of a nation with british museum director neil macgregor
Robert Neil MacGregor, OM, AO, FSA (born 16 June 1946) is a British art historian and museum director. He was the editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, then Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, Director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and is currently the founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
Contents
- Tour of the exhibition germany memories of a nation with british museum director neil macgregor
- Neil macgregor 2600 years of history in one object
- Biography
- Directorship of the National Gallery
- Directorship of the British Museum
- Directorship of the Humboldt Forum
- Media projects
- Personal life
- Awards
- References
Neil macgregor 2600 years of history in one object
Biography
Neil MacGregor was born in Glasgow to two doctors, Alexander and Anna MacGregor. At the age of nine, he first saw Salvador Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, newly acquired by Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which had a profound effect on him and sparked his lifelong interest in art. MacGregor was educated at Glasgow Academy and then read modern languages at New College, Oxford, where he is now an honorary fellow.
The period that followed was spent studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (coinciding with the events of May 1968), and as a law student at Edinburgh University, where he received the Green Prize. Despite being called to the bar in 1972, MacGregor next decided to take an art history degree. The following year, on a Courtauld Institute (University of London) summer school in Bavaria, the Courtauld's director Anthony Blunt spotted MacGregor and persuaded him to take a master's degree under his supervision. Blunt later considered MacGregor "the most brilliant pupil he ever taught".
From 1975 to 1981, MacGregor taught History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading. He left to assume the editorship of The Burlington Magazine. He oversaw the transfer of the magazine from the Thomson Corporation to an independent and charitable status.
Directorship of the National Gallery
In 1987 MacGregor became a highly successful director of the National Gallery in London. There he was dubbed "Saint Neil", partly because of his popularity at that institution and partly because of his devout Christianity. During his directorship, MacGregor presented three BBC television series on art: Painting the World in 1995, Making Masterpieces, a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Gallery, in 1997 and Seeing Salvation, on the representation of Jesus in western art, in 2000. He declined the offer of a knighthood in 1999, the first director of the National Gallery to do so.
Directorship of the British Museum
MacGregor was made director of the British Museum in August 2002, at a time when that institution was £5 million in deficit. He has been lauded for his "diplomatic" approach to the post, though MacGregor rejects this description, stating that "diplomat is conventionally taken to mean the promotion of the interests of a particular state and that is not what we are about at all".
Holding his office during a period which has seen the Acropolis Museum constructed in Athens, he has consistently argued against returning the British Museum's sculptures from the Parthenon (the "Elgin Marbles") to Greece. He has stated that it is the British Museum's duty to "preserve the universality of the marbles, and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol" and that "there is no legal system in Europe that would challenge the [British Museum's] legal title" to the works.
In January 2008, MacGregor was appointed chairman of the World Collections programme, for training international curators at British museums. The exhibition The First Emperor, focussing on Qin Shi Huang and including a small number of his Terracotta Warriors, was mounted in 2008 in the British Museum Reading Room. That year MacGregor was invited to succeed Philippe de Montebello as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He declined the offer as the Metropolitan charges its visitors for entry and is thus "not a public institution".
His tenure included many exhibitions that were more provocative than the museum had previously done or told stories from unique perspectives that were notably less Eurocentric than previous exhibits, including a project celebrating the Hajj. He similarly made comments that sparked debate, such as his claim that the ancient Persian empire was greater than Ancient Greece.
In 2010, MacGregor presented a series on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service entitled A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on objects from the British Museum's collection.
From September 2010 to January 2011 the British Museum lent the ancient Persian Cyrus Cylinder to an exhibition in Tehran. This was seen by at least a million visitors by the Museum's estimation, more than any loan exhibition to the United Kingdom had attracted since the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972.
As of 2015, MacGregor was paid a salary of between £190,000 and £194,999 by the British Museum, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time. MacGregor retired from the post in December 2015 and was succeeded in Spring 2016 by Hartwig Fischer, director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Directorship of the Humboldt Forum
On 8 April 2015, MacGregor announced his resignation as Director of the British Museum. It was announced that MacGregor would become founding director and head of the management committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and that he would make recommendations to the German government on how the future museum can draw on the resources of the Berlin collections to "become a place where different narratives of world cultures can be explored and debated". The three-member management committee also includes the co-directors, archaeologist Hermann Parzinger and art historian Horst Bredekamp. One of MacGregor's proposals is to make the museum admission-free, based on the model of the British Museum.
Media projects
MacGregor has made many programmes for British television and radio. In the year 2000, he presented on television Seeing Salvation, about how Jesus had been depicted in famous paintings. More recently, he has made important contributions on BBC Radio Four, including A History of the World in 100 Objects and, in 2012, a series of fifteen-minute programmes after The World at One called Shakespeare's Restless World, discussing themes in the plays of William Shakespeare.
At the end of September 2014 UK domestic transmission started of his similarly formatted Talk Radio series Germany: Memories of a Nation.
MacGregor will work on a BBC Radio Four series on Faith and Society, and liaise with Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Director of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, on the presentation of world cultures.
Personal life
MacGregor was listed in The Independent's 2007 list of "most influential gay people" and was single as of January 2010. On 4 November 2010 MacGregor was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. On 25 March 2013 MacGregor was appointed an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) by the Governor-General of Australia Quentin Bryce, "for service to promoting Australia and Australian art in the United Kingdom".