British Museum Director quits
Hartwig Fischer will leave in 2024
* In partnership with ATS
Also in this edition: Met trustee has collections seized, Tate partners with RIBA in Liverpool, Design Museum to celebrate the skateboard, Nero’s ancient theatre unearthed, Gucci exhibition coming.
Happy Friday.
The school summer holidays have arrived. Six blissful weeks of freedom lie ahead for pupils; six weeks of horror and dread lie ahead for parents who need to find things to do for their blissful children over what probably feels more like 60 weeks right about this point.
Museums and galleries are obviously the natural choice of entertainment. But that’s not without problems. The newly reopened Young V&A has reported long queues to enter recently, the Natural History Museum always seems to have a permanent queue (I guess it’s not the UK’s most-visited museum for nothing) and even if you can get in to others, with over 40 days to fill, the pounds can really start to rack up as even visiting a free museum is not a zero-cost event.
So, if you’re currently one of those panicking parents then I very much suggest you sign up to the excellent Museum Mum newsletter. Throughout the summer holidays she’s sending weekly recommendations on FREE cultural things to do. It’s excellent and detailed and you can read the first one here. And if you can’t wait for each week, her MAMMOTH Summer 2023 What’s On Guide is live, with 200+ family friendly events, both paid and unpaid, across the whole holidays and featuring museums, attractions, and much more. It might just make the six weeks go that little bit quicker. Good luck.
Maxwell
Need To Know
Fischer calls it quits
Hartwig Fischer is to step down as Director of the British Museum.
He's led the global institution for eight years, but will quit in 2024. An international search for the next Director of the Museum will begin in this Autumn, and Fischer will support the transition over the coming months. He joined the Museum in April 2016, succeeding Neil MacGregor.
Announcing his departure, Hartwig Fischer said: “In 2016, I was called to the British Museum to prepare the essential renovation of a building in need of rejuvenation, a global icon of museum architecture whose complex architectural substance calls for urgent, large-scale intervention. The renovation work itself will take several decades, but the mission I was given by the Trustees has been accomplished: the foundations of the BM Masterplan are now laid.”
George Osborne, Chair of the British Museum, said: “[Fischer] has been a person of integrity, inquiry and industry who has given everything to the British Museum over these years. The Trustees respect his decision to move on to new ventures next year. The publication of our Masterplan this autumn, and the architectural competition and construction work that follows will be a great challenge.” (Read more)
Met trustee’s house raid
A trustee of the Met Museum has had scores of looted artefacts worth tens of millions of dollars seized from her home over the past two years.
Shelby White, 84, had amassed a huge collection with her late husband. But a lengthy investigation has resulted in 71 items being taken from her home over the past two years in revelations from the New York Times. Another 17 have been removed from the Met itself, where they were on loan from her. White has been a trustee of the museum for nearly 30 years, and gave them $20m in the 1990s to name a refurbished Roman and Greek art gallery after the couple.
There is no suggestion that Ms White, nor her late husband, were aware that the items had been stolen before the pair purchased them. Ms White’s lawyer said she and her late husband had acquired the objects “in good faith, at public auction and from dealers they believed to be reputable”. Investigators later said she had co-operated with their work and assisted in returning the items to their countries of origin. (Read more)
🔗 In depth: At the Met, She Holds Court. At Home, She Held 71 Looted Antiquities
Royal approval
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News from the UK
Interactive exhibition | The Science Museum Group has opened their third Wonderlab gallery. The latest is a £6m addition to the National Railway Museum in York. The 1,500 sq metre gallery has 18 interactive exhibits and is aimed at seven-to 14-year-olds, with the ambition to spark an interest in engineering. Director Judith McNicol said she hoped it would “contribute towards tackling the UK’s shortage in STEM skills.” (Read more)
Temporary Tate | Tate Liverpool is to partner with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to host exhibitions and events while the gallery is closed for a major refurbishment. RIBA North on the city’s waterfront has been shut since the pandemic began, but will reopen due to Tate’s involvement. The announcement also reveals Tate Liverpool will reopen in the autumn of 2025, meaning a two-year closure. (Read more)
Wheely good | With exactly a year to go until Paris 2024, the Design Museum has announced details of its upcoming major exhibition on skateboard design. The sport will make its second Olympic appearance next year, but the show will chart the skateboarding journey from humble beginnings in the 1950s. 90 trailblazing boards will be displayed. (Read more)
Portrait defaced | “The people are mightier than a Lord” has been spray-painted onto a portrait of the King by climate protesters at the National Galleries Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh. One of the protesters held a stencil on the glass covering the painting, while the other sprayed it in pink paint with the slogan. They vowed to continue to target the Scottish Government. The artwork was undamaged. (Read more)
Tapestry return | There are calls for the “Holy Grail of Tudor tapestry” to return to the UK. A British businessman hopes to display the tapestry commissioned by Henry VIII — which was thought to have been destroyed for more than 200 years — in his new Faith Museum at the Auckland Project in County Durham. The Spanish government is selling the work for £3.5m, and a crowd-funding campaign has been launched to complete the purchase. (Read more)
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News from around the world
USA | Jeffrey Gibson has been selected to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is the first Indigenous American artist to do so in a solo capacity. He has promised a series of new and recent works that will “invite reflection on individual and collective identities.” The Biennale kicks off in April. (Read more)
Italy | Ruins of a theatre belonging to the Roman Emperor Nero have been unearthed in the Italian capital just meters from the Vatican. Experts are calling it an “exceptional” find. Its existence had perplexed historians because it was mentioned in Roman texts but its whereabouts were undocumented. The discovery includes elegant marble columns, gold-leaf decorations and storage rooms with remnants of costumes and backdrops. (Read more)
Brazil | A new permanent gallery devoted to artist Yayoi Kusama has just opened at the Inhotim Institute near the city of Belo Horizonte. It features two Kusama installations from Inhotim’s collection, with a third in a newly-created nearby garden. The 15,000 sq. ft gallery was originally due to open in 2020. (Read more)
USA | 300,000 people have seen Kehinde Wiley’s major blockbuster of new works at the de Young Museum in San Francisco over the past few months. It’s been so popular, it’ll now go on tour across America for the next two years. It’ll make stops at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, before heading to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. (Read more)
South Korea | The green light has been given by authorities to build a new art museum to display the collection of Lee Kun-hee, the late Samsung chairman who died in 2020. Expected to open in 2028 in central Seoul, the £72 million museum will display key works from his vast collection. It follows his family’s recent donation of 23,000 works to Korean museums to avoid the country’s largest ever inheritance tax bill. (Read more)
Best of the rest
🔗 The Horniman Museum has been awarded £5.7m by The National Lottery Heritage Fund for a "once-in-a-generation" nature-focussed redevelopment.
🔗 A gamer’s paradise has opened at the Science Museum, as a new permanent arcade gallery offers hundreds of games and 160 consoles all year round.
🔗 Works on the Shetland Islands to construct the UK’s first space rocket launchpad have unearthed an ancient Bronze Age burial ground.
🔗 A big Gucci exhibition curated by artist Es Devlin is coming to London’s 180 Studios this autumn, with never-before-seen archive pieces on show.
🔗 Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch has paid tribute to the Jewish Museum in Camden, which will close on Sunday. He said he’d be “forever grateful” for their 2017 exhibition on the singer.
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