Neil MacGregor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Neil MacGregor (born June 16, 1946 in Glasgow, Scotland) is an art historian and museum director. He is the Director of the British Museum and Chairman of World Collections, a British diplomatic post created in 2008.

[edit] 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 apparently had a profound effect on him and sparked his lifelong interest in art. MacGregor read modern languages at New College, Oxford, and is now an honorary fellow there. The period that followed was spent studying philosophy at the École Normale Superieure in Paris (coinciding with the historic strike of "May '68"), and as a law student at Edinburgh University, where he received the Green Prize. In 1972 he was called to the Bar. Finally, he studied for a master's degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art under Anthony Blunt.

He taught History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading until he left to assume the position of editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 until 1987, when he became a highly successful director of the National Gallery in London. At the National Gallery 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. He was also the first director of the National Gallery to decline the offer of a knighthood. 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.

After reversing the fortunes of the National Gallery, he was made director of the British Museum in 2002, at a time when the latter institution was in a financial crisis. MacGregor has thus far proved himself to be a diplomatic director of the British Museum, opening discussions with Greece about the Elgin Marbles and sending curators to Iraq in 2003 to assess the damage done to the country's museums during the Iraq War. The Museum, a documentary series on the inner workings of the British Museum, aired on BBC Two in 2007.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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