Neil MacGregor

This article is about Neil MacGregor, art historian. For Neil McGregor, footballer, see Neil McGregor.
Neil MacGregor

Neil MacGregor at the British Museum in 2009
Born 16 June 1946
Glasgow, Scotland
Occupation Art historian and museum director
Parent(s) Alexander MacGregor
Anna 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, the Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, and was appointed Director of the British Museum 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 became a best-selling book.[1]

He has announced that he will step down as Director of the British Museum on 15th December 2015.[2]

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.[3] Blunt later considered MacGregor "the most brilliant pupil he ever taught".[4]

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.[5]

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, 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 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

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 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"[7] and that "there is no legal system in Europe that would challenge the [British 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 museums.[9] 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".[6]

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.[10]

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.[11] On 4 November 2010 MacGregor was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.[12] On 25 March 2013 MacGregor was appointed an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) by the Governor General of Australia Quentin Bryce. Shakespeare's Restless World was published in 2013.

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.[13]

At the end of September 2014 UK domestic transmission started of his similarly formatted Talk Radio series Germany: Memories of a Nation.[14]

Personal life

He was listed in The Independent's 2007 list of "most influential gay people"[15] and was single as of January 2010.[16]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Books

Reviews and Criticism of MacGregor's work

A history of the world in 100 objects
  • Gerard Vaughan (June 2011). "A good place to start : radio inspires a volume of transcendent objects". Australian Book Review (332): 47–48.

References

  1. ↑ "The Story of Humanity Told Through '100 Objects'". PBS NewsHour. [PBS]. 7 November 2011. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
  2. ↑ theguardian.com 8.4.2015
  3. ↑ Carter, Miranda (8 November 2001). "Spy who came in from the Courtauld". The Independent (London). Retrieved 12 August 2009.
  4. ↑ Adams, Tim (8 June 2003). "His place in history". The Observer (London). Retrieved 18 July 2009.
  5. ↑ "(Robert) Neil MacGregor". National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved 6 February 2011.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Campbell-Johnson, Rachel (27 December 2008). "Briton of the Year: Neil MacGregor". The Times (London). Retrieved 18 July 2009.
  7. ↑ Pierce, Andrew (11 May 2009). "Greek government unveils new home for Elgin Marbles". The Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved 4 November 2014.
  8. ↑ Lacayo, Richard (5 November 2007). "A Talk: With Neil MacGregor". Time. Retrieved 4 November 2014.
  9. ↑ "Neil Macgregor to chair 'World collections programme', to share British cultural excellence with Africa and Asia". United Kingdom Government News. 18 January 2008. Retrieved 6 February 2011.
  10. ↑ Jonathan Jones, Neil MacGregor saved the British Museum. It’s time to reinvent it again, the Guardian, 8 April 2015.
  11. ↑ Hoyle, Ben (18 April 2008). "Negotiations over first bill of rights allows access to Ahmedinejad regime". The Times (Syndicated in The Australian). Retrieved 19 April 2011.
  12. ↑ Buckingham Palace. "Mr Neil MacGregor appointed to the Order of Merit, 4 November 2010". The Royal Household. Retrieved 4 November 2010.
  13. ↑ "Shakespeare's Restless World". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
  14. ↑ Neil MacGregorBBC Radio 4. "Germany: Memories of a Nation". Retrieved 1 October 2014.
  15. ↑ "The pink list 2007: The IoS annual celebration of the great and the gay". The Independent (London). 6 May 2007.
  16. ↑ Susanna Rustin (2 January 2010). "The greatest exhibition you could have | Culture". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 29 May 2011.

External links