Neil MacGregor

Neil MacGregor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015

Robert Neil MacGregor , OM , AO , FSA (born June 16, 1946 in Glasgow ) is a British art historian . He was director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015 . In May 2015 he was appointed director of the Berlin Humboldt Forum; he held this position until May 2018.

Career

At the age of 16, MacGregor was an exchange student in Hamburg. He first studied French and German at the New College of Oxford University , philosophy at the École normal supérieure in Paris , and law at the University of Edinburgh . He then completed a degree in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London .

After several years as a lecturer in art history and architecture at the University of Reading and the Courtauld Institute of Art, in 1981 he took over the editing of Burlington Magazine , a scientific journal for art and decoration, which he held until 1987. In the same year he became director of the National Gallery in London. From August 2002 until the end of 2015 he was director of the British Museum in London. During his time as director of the British Museum, MacGregor often made a name for himself with spectacular loans to other museums, such as the loan of a figure from the Elgin Marbles to the St. Petersburg Hermitage and the Persian Cyrus cylinder to a museum in Tehran .

Notoriety beyond the scientific audience gained MacGregor through collaborations with the BBC : 2000 was the series Seeing Salvation broadcast over images of Jesus in Western art history, in 2010 he presented on Radio 4 and the World Service series A History of the World in 100 Objects , which on German as a book with the title A History of the World in 100 Objects . This book was named Knowledge Book of the Year 2012. At the end of 2014 he organized the exhibition Germany - memories of a nation in the British Museum in London, which was a great success and one of the visitors was the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In May 2015, MacGregor announced that he would give up his post as director of the British Museum by the end of the year and then take up the post of founding director at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Since Hartmut Dorgerloh was appointed General Director by the Board of Trustees of the Humboldt Forum on June 1, 2018, the founding directorship of Neil MacGregor, Hermann Parzinger and Horst Bredekamp ends .

In addition to his work in Berlin, he works as director of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai and as a writer for the BBC.

Fonts (selection)

• A victim of anonymity. The master of the Saint Bartholomew altarpiece. Thames and Hudson, London 1993. ISBN 0-500-55026-3 .
• Seeing salvation. Images of Christ in art. BBC, London 2000. ISBN 0-563-55111-9 .
• A History of the World in 100 Objects , Allen Lane, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84614-413-4 .
  • German: A history of the world in 100 objects , Beck, Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-406-62147-5 .
• Shakespeare's Restless World. London 2012. ISBN 978-1-846-14675-6
  • Shakespeare's restless world . Translated into German by Klaus Binder, Beck, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-65287-5 .
• Germany: Memories of a Nation , Allen Lane, 2014, ISBN 978-0-241-00833-1 .
  • German: Germany. Memories of a nation . Translation by Klaus Binder . CH Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67920-9 .
• Global collections for globalized cities . Translated from the English by Stefanie Rentsch, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95757-138-0 .

Awards

• In 2003 he was elected as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
• In 2008 he was voted "British of the Year".
• In 2010 he received the International Folkwang Prize, awarded for the first time, by the Museum Association of the Museum Folkwang in Essen.
• In 2014, the German Academy for Language and Poetry announced that it would award MacGregor the Friedrich Gundolf Prize in May 2015 for communicating German culture abroad.
• The German National Foundation awarded him on 16 June 2015 in Berlin the German National Prize for his work to a better understanding of Germany in Britain.
• MacGregor was also awarded the Goethe Medal in 2015.

Web links

Commons : Neil MacGregor  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Lecture by Neil MacGregor "Identity Formation. The Role of Museums in the Creation and Inflection of National Narratives" at LMU Munich

• Literature by and about Neil MacGregor in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Neil MacGregor in the WorldCat bibliographic database

• MacGregor at the National Portrait Gallery

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sabine Vogel: "Show a story around the world". In: Berliner Zeitung , August 31, 2015 (interview with Neil MacGregor).
2. ↑ Gina Thomas: The river god rose ashore on the Neva , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 6, 2014
3. ↑ Who is Neil MacGregor? , Deutschlandradio Kultur, May 5, 2015.
4. ↑ Nicola Kuhn: General Director of the Humboldt Forum Hartmut Dorgerloh is Berlin's new lord of the palace. In: www.tagesspiegel.de. May 15, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018 . 
5. ^ Neil MacGregor to step down as Director of the British Museum at the end of 2015 . British Museum Press Release. May 30, 2015. Accessed March 30, 2019.
6. ^ Andreas Kilb : Weisswurst breakfast with Goethe. Holy Roman Empire, Buchenwald, euro: Neil MacGregor, the new director of the Humboldt Forum, forces together what is far apart . Review, in: FAZ , October 10, 2015, p. L21.
7. ↑ Jürgen König: N. MacGregor: "Memories of a Nation" - German history in a fast run . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . September 18, 2015 ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed August 25, 2018]).
8. ↑ Director of the British Museum receives the German National Prize 2015 PDF, nationalstiftung.de, accessed on June 23, 2015.