The British Museum will quickly be in want of recent management after its director Hartwig Fischer introduced he’ll step down in 2024. The flagship London establishment will start the applying course of for its subsequent director this autumn after Fischer introduced his resignation.
Fischer started his tenure in April 2016, and began work on, within the museum’s personal phrases, a “badly wanted renovation of the historic constructing”. Particulars of the renovation work—referred to internally on the museum as ‘the masterplan’—are because of be printed this autumn, with a world architectural competitors to comply with.
Fischer additionally drove the creation of a brand new analysis and storage facility—the British Museum Archaeological Analysis Assortment—which is scheduled to open subsequent 12 months in Studying.
“In 2016, I used to be known as to the British Museum to arrange the important renovation of a constructing in want of rejuvenation, a worldwide icon of museum structure whose complicated architectural substance requires pressing, large-scale intervention,” Fischer mentioned in a press release. “The renovation work itself will take a number of many years, however the mission I used to be given by the Trustees has been completed: the foundations of the BM Masterplan are actually laid.”
George Osborne, chair of the British Museum, says of Fischer’s tenure: “He has led the devoted workers of the Museum via troublesome intervals, such because the Covid lockdowns and at present’s inflation pressures.”
The museum’s new director will you should definitely have a busy in-tray, with the future of the Parthenon Marbles, one of many museum’s most prized shows, nonetheless an unresolved difficulty. Fischer was concerned in negotiations with the present Greek authorities over a proposed loan-based scheme whereby the museum would share the marbles with the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Past the Parthenon Marbles, requires the restitution of lots of the museum’s contested gadgets are unlikely to decrease. The museum has in its assortment greater than 6,000 human stays originating from everywhere in the world.
The museum’s new director will even need to take care of the thorny difficulty of sponsorship, and can probably need to confront the after-effects of the museum’s 27-year affiliation with the fossil gasoline big British Petroleum (BP).
In June 2023, in accordance with paperwork obtained by freedom of data requests, the campaigning group Tradition Unstained revealed BP’s sponsorship of the British Museum appeared to have ended, bringing to an in depth one of many highest-profile and controversial sponsorship offers within the UK’s cultural sector. It stays to be seen who the museum will search subsequent to make up the income hole.
