The British Museum names Nicholas Cullinan its new director because it tries to recover from a rocky patch

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 a whole bunch 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 objects had been lacking in an obvious case of insider theft. Most of the objects 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 significant refurbishment of the constructing beside London’s Trafalgar Sq.. He has beforehand labored at Tate Trendy 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 turn out to be director of “one of many biggest museums on the planet.”

He mentioned he seemed ahead to main the establishment by “essentially the most important transformations, each architectural and mental, taking place in any museum globally, to proceed making the British Museum essentially the most engaged and collaborative it may be.”

The museum fired a longstanding curator, Paul Higgs, over the lacking objects, and is suing him on the Excessive Courtroom. 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 20 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 certainly one of Britain’s largest vacationer sights, visited by 6 million individuals a yr. 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 objects taken from different nations throughout the interval of the British Empire -– particularly the Parthenon Marbles, 2,500-year-old sculptures that had 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 regulation from giving the sculptures again to Greece, however its leaders have held talks with Greek officers a few compromise, equivalent to 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 together with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

British Museum Chairman George Osborne mentioned that with Cullinan’s appointment, the establishment was coming into “a brand new chapter within the lengthy story of the British Museum with confidence, and again on the entrance foot.”