The British Museum on Thursday named Nicholas Cullinan, an art historian who currently runs the National Portrait Gallery in London, as its new director, ending an unsettled period in which the august institution lacked a permanent leader.
Cullinan, 46, will step into the role in the summer, the British Museum said in a news release. He will immediately face a host of challenges, including the fallout from an embarrassing scandal in which the museum says a former curator stole over 1,800 items from its storerooms, then sold many of the artifacts on eBay.
Cullinan will also need to lead an extensive fund-raising drive to pay for a major refurbishment to the museum. And he will have to deal with demands for the return of contested artifacts to their countries of origin, including the Parthenon Sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, and a collection of Benin Bronzes.
In the news release, Cullinan said he was looking forward to taking the museum “into a new chapter.” Under his leadership, he expected the museum to undergo “significant transformations, both architectural and intellectual,” he added. “I can’t imagine a better challenge or opportunity to build on that than collectively reimagining the British Museum for the widest possible audience,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the British Museum said Cullinan was unavailable for an interview.
The British Museum has been without a permanent director for seven months, since Hartwig Fischer, a German art historian, resigned last August. Fischer’s departure came shortly after The New York Times and the BBC reported that he had downplayed concerns that a curator was stealing items from the museum. In September, the museum appointed Mark Jones, a former leader of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as Fisher’s interim replacement.
Foreign governments used the thievery scandal as an opportunity to renew calls for restitution. Last year, Lina Mendoni, Greece’s culture minister, said that the thefts proved the Parthenon Sculptures were not safer in Britain than Greece. Since November 2021, George Osborne, the British Museum’s chairman, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece have been having negotiations over a potential deal for the return of some of the sculptures.
Cullinan — who is seen by museum world insiders as an energetic leader, capable of overhauling tired institutions — had been the favorite for the British Museum job. Last year, he reopened the National Portrait Gallery after a highly-praised $53-million renovation.
As the British Museum approaches its own refurbishment, Cullinan’s fund-raising acumen will be needed. Among the donors he brought in to pay for the National Portrait Gallery refurbishment were Leonard Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born businessman, who gave the museum nearly $13 million.
But fund-raising is becoming increasingly difficult for museums, because donors’ business practices and investments are under scrutiny. Activists have both praised and criticized Cullinan for the philanthropists he has worked with.
During the National Portrait Gallery refurbishment, artists and activists praised Cullinan after he turned down a $1.3 million donation from one of the Sackler family’s charitable arms — one of the first British institutions to distance itself from the family linked to the opioid crisis.
Environmental groups also welcomed Cullinan’s decision to end a sponsorship deal with BP, the oil company, although last year, some of those same activists criticized the National Portrait Gallery after it announced a similar sponsorship deal with Herbert Smith Freehills, a law firm with connections to the oil industry.
In an interview with the Times of London, Cullinan defended that sponsorship deal, saying that museums faced an “increasingly challenging” financial environment and would be “hard pressed” to find a bank or legal firm that did not have connections to the oil industry.
Cullinan, who was born in Connecticut but grew up in Britain, studied art history at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He then worked as a curator of international modern art at Tate Modern, before spending two years as the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
At the National Portrait Gallery, he collaborated withAmerican institutions. Last year, the museum reached an innovative deal with the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, to jointly buy Joshua Reynolds’s “Portrait of Mai (Omai),” an important work that the National Portrait Gallery could not afford on its own, and shuttle the painting back and forth between the two museums.
Katherine E. Fleming, the president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said in an email that Cullinan was a great choice for the British Museum. His “impressive experience runs the gamut from capital projects to innovative acquisition strategy,” she said. Cullinan, Fleming added, also had “a great disposition” for the challenges ahead, and will think creatively about how to ensure the museum stayed relevant in a changing world.
When he takes up his new position, Cullinan will become the British Museum’s 23rd director since 1753.
