Briton of the Year: Neil MacGregor'Saint' whose charm and enthusiasm had a curative effect on the British Museum
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Chief Art Critic
(photo : Graeme Robertson | The Guardian)
Neil MacGregor at the British Museum, where in his six years as director the institution has been transformed into the country's most popular attraction
Saint Neil is his nickname. And we are blessed to have him. The British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, is far more than just the highly successful administrator of an iconic national establishment. He is a committed idealist who, in a world in which culture is increasingly presented as the acceptable face of politics, has pioneered a broader, more open, more peaceable way forward.
This year we almost lost him. He was being courted to replace Philippe de Montebello as the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It was easy to see why the Americans would covet him. Here was a man who had managed – by what often felt like charm and enthusiasm alone – to turn a financial basket case back into a cultural jewel.
When he took up his post in 2002, the British Museum was £5 million in deficit. Morale was at rock bottom. Visitor numbers had plummeted. A third of the galleries were closed and the staff that had not yet been sacked were on strike. Six years later, under MacGregor’s auspices, it has six million visitors a year and heads the list of our cultural attractions, trumping even Blackpool’s time-honoured mass-market mecca, the Pleasure Beach.
Who wouldn’t value a man who could convince the masses that carved lumps of old rock are more worth visiting than the Pepsi Max Big One? But MacGregor stayed in Britain. He declined the Met on principle. It was not a public institution, he said. And he wanted to stay at a museum that was free to everyone. MacGregor, it would appear, is profoundly democratic. Refocusing upon the founding ideals of the institution that was established by Act of Parliament in 1753 as a museum for the world, he has radically redefined the role that it can play in public life.
By emphasising the importance of an international community of inquiry, of a “republic of letters” as it would have been called in its Enlightment roots, he has helped to create a global society that is quite separate from others that constantly get caught up in the squabblings of government and politics.
Through this society he has managed, over the years, to create important cultural links with countries – including, perhaps most notably, China, Iraq and Iran – that have not enjoyed the warmest of political relations with the West.
With shows such asThe First Emperor in which he negotiated the largest loan of the terracotta soldiers from their Sha’anxi mausoleum, he not only brought us some of the world’s most spectacular objects but showed us that these objects were about far more than mere craftsmanship or beauty. They showed us an historical perspective with which we have to engage if we are to understand the modern-day Chinese.
Take the issue of political liberty in China, for example. The First Emperor exhibition was all about the control of the State and that State’s acute sense of its own indivisibility.
This idea of oneness, MacGregor emphasised, persisted against all the odds. And when we see how important and enduring this particular aspect of Chinese culture is it makes it much easier to understand things from the Chinese point of view.
Helping to release the power that lies implicit in the world’s ancient artefacts, MacGregor has turned the British Museum into an arena in which some of our most fraught and contentious contemporary political debates can be approached with a freshened sensitivity and depth of understanding that can surely be a great help in fostering peace.
MacGregor was born in 1946 into a Glaswegian family in which, by tradition, there were only three professions – medicine, the law and the Church. He studied languages at New College, Oxford, and philosophy in Paris – he was out on the streets with his fellow students in 1968 – before settling to retrain for the Scottish Bar.
It must have come as a shock to his parents, both doctors, when he dropped out after five years in favour of taking an MA in art at the Courtauld Institute.
It seems that his deep engagement with artworks – which anyone will recognise from his many television and radio appearances – was awakened when he was very young.
He remembers standing entranced before the eerily astounding Salvador DalÍ image of the Crucifixion that Kelvingrove Gallery first showed in 1952. He bought a postcard and kept it under his bed for years.
And he treasures the thrill of having touched the Rossetta Stone for the first time on that journey through London.
It is this sense of emotional engagement with art that runs like electricity through his career.
MacGregor started lecturing in art history at Reading University in 1975 before moving on to edit the fine arts periodical The Burlington Magazine in 1981. Five years later, he was a highly controversial choice as director of the National Gallery. Having been called in to advise the board of trustees, they were so taken by his learning and conviction that he was offered the job after the leading contender pulled out. He had no experience and the future of the gallery was fraught with problems from leaking roofs to an outbreak of legionnaires’ disease. But MacGregor proved himself not only highly capable but extremely popular. He was, says his successor Charles Saumarez-Smith, “one of the most able, intelligent and intellectually supportive people I have ever known, with an extraordinary ability to get on with people of all sorts”.
It is hard not to be charmed by the slight, dark and handsome director who patrols his museum every morning, familiarising himself with one or other of the seven million items as well as their custodians, whom he invites to weekly breakfast meetings to discuss plans and progress. MacGregor is a man of great erudition, deep spiritual conviction (hisSeeing Salvation show at the National Gallery was stunning), profound personal integrity and a delightfully irreverent giggle.
He appears to have little interest in the trappings of his position. He is the first director not to live in a grand apartment on the premises of the British Museum. He owns few paintings – he was spoilt by his time at the National Gallery, he jokes. He turned down a knighthood, though he does not discuss it. And he appears to find his satisfaction and reward in the simple fulfilment of a civic duty.
But he is also a skilled political mover and a confidant of the former Labour leader Tony Blair. He invited Gordon Brown to open The First Emperorand Boris Johnson, the classicist, to open its successor, Hadrian. An accomplished cultural diplomat – though he hates the term: “diplomat is conventionally taken to mean the promotion of the interests of a particular state and that is not what we are about at all” – he is also a highly skilled media presence.
These charms are as much part of his job as his erudition and passion. This is the man who could work with the Iraqis even during the war, trying to instigate a programme to protect their national treasures, or who managed to coax the Iranians into allowing the museum to stage a huge show about Persia by persuading the hostile President Ahmadinejad to counter all that Ancient Greek propaganda that the Persians were barbarians at the gate.
But perhaps most of all MacGregor is a teacher. His mission is to put across that moving human message that lies within our ancient historical artefacts. He wants to disseminate the wisdom of history. And next year we can look forward to two blockbusting British Museum shows, on Shah Abbas and Montezuma, both of which will explore the creation of national identity. They are about aspects of history with which we must engage if we are to have any hope of understanding the world today.
Saint Neil is clearly a man of faith. And, as far as his career is concerned, his most profound belief is that the British Museum was established for the benefit of all nations.
Curriculum vitaeJune 1946 Born in Glasgow
1975-81 Lecturer in art history at the University of Reading
1981-86 Editor of The Burlington Magazine
1986-2002 Director of the National Gallery
2002-date Director of the British Museum
