The British Museum Gets a New Director
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By day he hosts the Princess of Wales for royal visits. By night he walks red carpets in black tie with best friend Courtney Love, who calls him her soulmate and “family for life.” In the same breath he can give you the provenance of a Roman cameo glass amphora that dates back to the 1st century, and then tell you about his love of Mean Girls. Nicholas Cullinan is a modern Renaissance man, no doubt, but there is so much more to him.
The art historian and curator was educated at London’s Courtauld Institute and went on to earn his blue-chip stripes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern before stepping into the top job at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015. During his tenure he spearheaded a three-year, $53 million renovation, the NPG’s first comprehensive update since 1896. And he won plenty of fans along the way, through key acquisitions such as Joshua Reynolds’s 1776 painting Portrait of Mai (Omai), one of British art’s most significant paintings of a person of color, and his dedication to doing the right thing: He turned down a $1.3 million donation from the Sacklers.
Over at the British Museum, the board of trustees took notice. A series of scandals, such as the one in which they discovered that a veteran curator had stolen more than 1,800 antiquities and sold them on eBay, had left the oldest national public museum in the world without a capable leader. It found one in Cullinan; he was named director of the grande dame institution in March, just a few months after King Charles gave him an OBE.
In his new post Cullinan inherits 271 years of art history and a trove of some 8 million objects—more than fives times the number in the Met’s permanent collection. He inherits less glamorous things, too, like a leaking roof, outdated infrastructure, and crumbling buildings, which means it’s now on him to raise the staggering $1.3 billion needed for the British Museum’s long overdue facelift. And then there’s the ongoing matter of the Elgin Marbles. Since 2021 Greece has petitioned for the return of these ancient treasures, which once adorned the Parthenon. No resolution has yet been reached, but we think Cullinan’s track record offers promising clues.
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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