Neil MacGregor From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

5 Robert Neil MacGregor, OM, AO, FSA (born 16 June 1946) is a British art historian and director. He was the Editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, the Director of the , London, from 1987 to 2002, and was appointed Director of the in 2002. He has presented three television series on art and the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, which aired in 2010 and later 10 became a best-selling book.[1]

He has announced that he will step down as Director of the British Museum on 15th December 2015. Biography 15 Neil MacGregor was born in 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 20 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 25 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 () summer school in Bavaria, the Courtauld's director spotted MacGregor and persuaded him to take a master's degree under his supervision.[3] Blunt later considered MacGregor "the most brilliant pupil he 30 ever taught".[4]

From 1975 to 1981, MacGregor taught History of Art and Architecture at the . 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 35 charitable status.[5]

Directorship of the National Gallery

In 1987 MacGregor became a highly successful director of the National Gallery in 40 London. There he was dubbed "Saint Neil", partly because of his popularity at that institution and partly because of his devout Christianity, and the nickname stuck after his departure from the Gallery. 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 45 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.[6]

Directorship of the British Museum

50 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".[6] Holding his office during a period which has 55 seen the constructed in Athens, he has consistently argued against returning the British Museum's sculptures from the (the "") 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"[7] and that "there is no legal system in Europe that would challenge the [British 60 Museum's] legal title" to the works.[8]

In January 2008, MacGregor was appointed chairman of the World Collections programme, for training international curators at British ...That year MacGregor was invited to succeed Philippe de Montebello as the Director of the 65 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 70 eurocentric than previous exhibits, including a project celebrating the Hajj. He similarly made comments that sparked debate, …..

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 75 collection.....

Media projects

MacGregor has made many programmes for British television and radio. In the year 2000, 80 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 .[13] 85 At the end of September 2014 UK domestic transmission started of his similarly formatted Talk Radio series : Memories of a Nation.

Retirement 90 On 8 April 2015, MacGregor announced his resignation as Director of the British Museum. In a statement issued by the British Museum, MacGregor reported that in retirement he will be chairing an Advisory Board to make recommendations to the German Minister of Culture, Monika Grütters, on how the Palace–Humboldtforum Foundation, drawing 95 on the Berlin collections, can become a place where world cultures can be explored and debated. In addition, he will be working BBC Radio Four series on Faith and Society, and liaising with Mr. Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Director of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, on the presentation of world cultures. Personal life 100 He was listed in 's 2007 list of "most influential gay people"[17] and was single as of January 2010