Robert Neil MacGregor, FSA (born 16 June 1946 in Glasgow, Scotland) is an art historian and museum director. He was the Director of the National Gallery in London from 1987 to 2002, and then became Director of the British Museum. In 2008 he was appointed chairman of the 'World Collections Programme', for training international curators at British museums.
Neil MacGregor was born in Glasgow to two doctors, Alexander and Anna MacGregor. At the age of nine he first saw Salvador DalÃ'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 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 événements 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 summer school in Bavaria, the Courtauld's director Anthony Blunt spotted MacGregor and persuaded him to take a master's degree under his supervision.[1] Blunt later considered MacGregor "the most brilliant pupil he ever taught".[2]
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. In 1987 he 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 two BBC television series on art: 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.
MacGregor was made director of the British Museum in 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".[3] He opened discussions with Greece about the Elgin Marbles and sent curators to Iraq in 2003 to assess the damage done to the country's museums during the Iraq War.[4] During his directorship he was interviewed for the BBC Television documentaries Our Top Ten Treasures (2003) and The Museum (2007). The exhibition The First Emperor, focussing on Qin Shi Huang and including a small number of his Terracotta Warriors, was mounted in 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".[3]
In 2009, MacGregor will present a series on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service entitled A History of the World in One Hundred Objects, based on objects taken from the British Museum's collection.[5]
| Cultural offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Michael Levey |
Director of the National
Gallery 1987–2002 |
Succeeded by Charles Saumarez Smith |
| Preceded by Robert Anderson |
Director of the British
Museum 2002–present |
Incumbent |
   | ''Guardian'' profile, 2007 - Profile: Neil MacGregor | UK news | The Guardian |
| | ''Guardian Education'' profile, 2003 - His place in history | Art and design | The Observer |
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
