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The British Museum has appointed Nicholas Cullinan its new director. Currently director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, Cullinan now has the tough task of helping lead the institution while it continues to deal with the fallout from last year’s revelation that 2,000 items in the museum’s collection were stolen or damaged, or otherwise went missing.
Cullinan has been the National Portrait Gallery’s director since 2015. He oversaw a three-year, $53 million redevelopment of the institution that increased the museum’s public spaces by approximately 20 percent. He has also worked as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Modern, where a 2014 exhibit on Henri Matisse’s cut-outs that he organized broke attendance records.
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Under Cullinan’s leadership, the National Portrait Gallery has also been criticized by climate activists for its sponsorship agreement with Herbert Smith Freehills, a major law firm that has represented corporations linked to fossil fuels. In 2022, the museum ended its controversial 30-year partnership with the oil giant BP, which had previously sponsored an annual portrait prize.
Last April, the National Portrait Gallery also finalized a landmark £50 million acquisition of Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai (Mai) ca. 1776 through a partnership with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Cullinan called the deal the “largest acquisition the UK has ever made.”
Cullinan comes to the British Museum during an especially fraught period. The museum is trying to recover a significant number of missing items. Meanwhile, it is also tightening its security and inventory records, and is also facing renewed and impassioned calls for the repatriation of objects that many have claimed were looted. Among those objects are the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, both of which have long been main attractions of the British Museum collection.
When the institution listed the high-profile permanent position, it acknowledged “significant challenges” involved with it. This was an unsubtle reference to last year’s theft scandal, which led to the resignations of director Hartwig Fischer and deputy director Jonathan Williams. Mark Jones, a former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, was picked as an interim director.
The announcement of Cullinan’s appointment was also made only a few days after the British Museum filed a lawsuit against former curator Peter Higgs, who the museum claimed stole more than 1,800 items from its collection. A judge has ordered Higgs to list or return any items from the museum still in his possession within four weeks, and to disclose his records of transactions done via eBay and PayPal.
Higgs was fired in July 2023. The museum’s initial announcement in August about the approximately 2,000 missing, stolen, and damaged items did not name Higgs, but news reports in the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph quickly identified the veteran curator of Greek and Roman art. He has continued to deny the allegations.
A press announcement from the British Museum said Cullinan’s appointment received “unanimous approval of the Board of Trustees and the agreement of the Prime Minister.” Cullinan will officially take over the director position from Jones during the summer.