LONDON — The British Museum on Thursday appointed Nationwide Portrait Gallery chief Nicholas Cullinan as its new director, because the 265-year-old establishment grapples with the obvious theft of tons of of artifacts and rising worldwide scrutiny of its assortment.
Earlier director Hartwig Fischer resigned in August after the museum disclosed that greater than 1,800 gadgets have been lacking in an obvious case of insider theft. Most of the gadgets had been supplied on the market on-line.
Mark Jones, former head of the Victoria and Albert Museum, has served as interim director since then. Cullinan will substitute him in the summertime.
Cullinan has been director of the Nationwide Portrait Gallery since 2015, overseeing a serious refurbishment of the constructing beside London’s Trafalgar Sq.. He has beforehand labored at Tate Fashionable in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York.
His appointment was authorised by the British Museum’s trustees and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Cullinan mentioned it was an honor to change into director of “one of many biggest museums on the earth.”
He mentioned he appeared ahead to main the establishment by way of “probably the most important transformations, each architectural and mental, occurring in any museum globally, to proceed making the British Museum probably the most engaged and collaborative it may be.”
The museum fired a longstanding curator, Paul Higgs, over the lacking gadgets, and is suing him on the Excessive Court docket. Attorneys for the museum say Higgs “abused his place of belief” to steal historical gems, gold jewellery and different items from storerooms over the course of a decade.
Higgs, who labored within the museum’s Greece and Rome division for greater than twenty years, denies the allegations and intends to dispute the museum’s authorized declare.
Police are additionally investigating, however nobody has been charged.
The 18th-century museum in central London’s Bloomsbury district is one in every of Britain’s largest vacationer sights, visited by 6 million folks a 12 months. They arrive to see a set that ranges from Egyptian mummies and historical Greek statues to Viking hoards, scrolls bearing Twelfth-century Chinese language poetry and masks created by the Indigenous peoples of Canada.
The museum faces rising stress over gadgets taken from different international locations throughout the interval of the British Empire -– particularly the Parthenon Marbles, 2,500-year-old sculptures that have been taken from Athens within the early nineteenth century by British diplomat Lord Elgin.
Greece has campaigned for many years for the marbles to be returned. The British Museum is banned by legislation from giving the sculptures again to Greece, however its leaders have held talks with Greek officers a few compromise, reminiscent of a long-term mortgage.
These efforts suffered a setback in November, when a diplomatic spat erupted over the marbles, and Prime Minister Sunak abruptly canceled a deliberate assembly along with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
British Museum Chairman George Osborne mentioned that with Cullinan’s appointment, the establishment was getting into “a brand new chapter within the lengthy story of the British Museum with confidence, and again on the entrance foot.”
