Fischer to succeed MacGregor
German art historian and archaeologist Hartwig Fischer will be Director of the British Museum in London from spring 2016.
Announcing Hartwig Fischer’s appointment to the renowned British Museum, the Chair of the Museum’s Trustees called him “a great scholar”. Fischer was “one of the outstanding museum directors in the world”, an experienced administrator with a “global reputation for rethinking and representing great collections”. Fischer was most recently Director General of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (State Art Collections) Dresden. Before that he had been in charge of the Folkwang Museum in Essen. He began his career as a curator at the Kunstmuseum (Museum of Art) in Basel. Fischer will officially take up his new post in London in the spring of 2016. He will succeed Neil MacGregor, who had been the museum’s director since 2002 and will now chair an advisory board to help shape the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
Hartwig Fischer said he was honoured by the appointment. Britain had always been present in his family life, he said, even when he was growing up in Hamburg: “I never dreamt that I would be invited to be responsible for this great British institution,” said the 53-year-old art historian and archaeologist. The British Museum was a “model of public engagement, critical scholarship and international outreach”.
