Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “If anyone tells me something isn’t possible, I’ll go all the more into making it happen.” Nicholas Cullinan has a way of making almost portentous statements so quietly that they seem part of everyday chat. It’s the same when he says that at the British Museum, where he became director in March, he is overseeing the most ambitious museum reconstruction ever attempted — “a complete holistic transformation, top to bottom, inside out, buildings, collection, visual identity”. And when he doesn’t miss a beat at my questions about the rumoured reconstruction bill, a staggering £1bn.The startling statistics about Britain’s biggest cultural institution are no exaggeration, though: with around 3,500 rooms and some 8mn objects in its collection, it is, according to former trustee Antony Gormley, “[one of] the last unmodernised great museums in Europe”. Add to that its recent reputational bashing: last year’s scandal over thefts from the collection, perpetual arguments about sources of philanthropy and funding, and the seemingly insoluble conundrum about repatriation, in particular of the Parthenon Marbles. Given all this, Cullinan looks remarkably relaxed, young for his 46 years, when we sit down for lunch at a tiny corner table in Café Deco, a few minutes’ walk from the British Museum.“I come here quite a lot, it’s a favourite,” he says. From the outside, it’s hardly distinguishable from the dozens of modest lunchtime eateries in Bloomsbury. Inside, though still simple, there’s a classier vibe, not least among the clientele. As I arrive, Cullinan is already there, chatting to a museum colleague, the curator of the current show of work by Hew Locke, a contemporary artist responding to the museum’s collections and shining a sometimes harsh light on their origins in colonialism and slavery. Simultaneously, the museum is showing Silk Roads, an exhibition that reveals the astonishing intercontinental trade and cultural exchange during what we used to call the Dark Ages. Yes, it’s a colossal undertaking — but it’s exciting! When I comment that this is a nifty two-hander, in terms of programming, Cullinan replies: “Yes, it’s important to have those discussions and collaborations, and be very open and honest.” This, it turns out, is going to be the theme of our conversations. But first — given that he has recently taken on what some would consider an unenviable role, with elephant traps at every turn — have there been any big surprises so far? “Given everything that’s happened,” he says, “I’d braced myself for a much tougher time, but in fact it’s the friendliest place I’ve ever worked — that was a big surprise.”By “everything that’s happened”, he means the widely publicised thefts, over a number of years, of some 2,000 uncatalogued small objects from the BM’s enormous storerooms.“As a curator, this [theft] is your worst nightmare,” he says, with feeling. For directors too: the ongoing row over the museum’s handling of the robberies led to the hasty departure of Hartwig Fischer, the previous director. And the opportunity for Cullinan to make the big jump from his previous role as director of the National Portrait Gallery, which he joined in 2015.Now, Cullinan tells me, the recovery team, based in the Greece and Rome department, are doing an amazing job in tracking down every single item — “but on a personal level, of course it’s very hard, because it involves close colleagues. We’ve made huge progress, which is great.” More than 600 objects have been safely recovered, and further objects identified in a deep detective operation.Always the optimist, he points to the positive outcome from those shocking revelations: an immediate plan, already under way, of digitising the entire holdings. The museum aims to complete this immense task within five years, and £5mn of the cost has already been met by fundraising. When it’s complete, it will be, Cullinan says, “one of the greatest museum online resources in the world”, a fantastic international database for scholars and the public alike.And it would seem that the museum’s credibility suffered no lasting damage, given that a spectacular gift of Chinese porcelain, 1,700 pieces from the Sir Percival David Foundation apparently worth £1bn, has just been announced.Were there more surprises, as he explored his new empire? “The word that comes to mind is depth,” he says. “The depth of the collections, the depth of expertise. I’ve worked in other encyclopedic museums, such as the Met” — he was curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 2013 to 2015 — “but this is of a different order, quite extraordinary.” His first six weeks, spent meeting all the staff and discovering the multiple departments, were “like being back at university, every single day — discovering the incredible range of research projects, for instance, and the international reach. That was the second surprise, how much the museum does beyond its walls.“It’s basically a giant research organisation with a museum attached.” By now we’ve decided on our lunch order. Cullinan knows the menu well and plumps for the beetroot borscht, followed by wild mushroom quiche. I choose a starter of broccoli with brown butter hollandaise, and decide to join him in the quiche. And some pink fir apple potatoes, to share? Neither of us is vegetarian but somehow this all seems like comfort food for a grey wintry day.That dispatched, we’re back to the BM and its international reach: he mentions projects in Mexico, in India, in Nigeria. But however fascinating all that is, the domestic projects seem more pressing. It’s well known that the beloved old institution in Bloomsbury is crumbling and urgently needs help, but is the figure that has been circulating in the press — a terrifying £1bn — anywhere near accurate?“First of all,” he says, “yes, it’s a colossal undertaking — but it’s exciting! Those numbers have been bandied around. Plans for a complete revitalisation of the British Museum have been in progress for about seven years now, under Hartwig. The first step is the Western Range, which is all the galleries west of the Great Court.” They are, he says, “galleries that urgently need attention, they can’t wait” — currently a muddled warren of rooms, a third of the total exhibition space, constantly reconfigured over the years. He is looking for a solution that’s “visionary”. Five architect-led teams have been shortlisted for this stage of the renovations; a decision is due to be made in March. Once again, the stats are exceptional: this phase alone is projected to take 10 years. And when I push him on the cost — surely, there’s a budget? — he dances nimbly around the question. “What’s different about this competition is that here we’re not asking the architect to come up with a finished design, we’re appointing a team to work with them and to shape what we actually want to do — so any figure is very provisional. It’s a conversation, one where we shape it together.” Now more than ever, all of us around the world need a focus on coexistence and cultural exchangeBut won’t it be hard to raise a mountain of money without a plan or a target budget yet in place? Again, Cullinan seems unfazed. He “can’t imagine it will be less than £500mn, because the scale is huge”, and appears to accept that the figure could be a long way north of that.In tandem, a scheme to revitalise every gallery across the whole museum over 20 years will be in hand. Plus, more immediately, a new visitor welcome pavilion (currently it’s a rather miserable sort of airport-style security shed) and, at the back of the building, scheduled for completion in 2029, a new “energy centre” to make the current antiquated and cumbersome arrangements (there are more than 130 boilers) more efficient and more green-aware. Cullinan has form when it comes to remaking museums: at the National Portrait Gallery he masterminded a £41mn overhaul. It included a three-year closure, luckily partly over the pandemic years, and on its reopening (on time!) in 2023, it was hailed as an architectural and curatorial success. The broccoli has arrived, as has the borscht — more a vegetable stew than a soup, and gleaming scarlet in a way that seems quite a threat to Cullinan’s crisp white shirt. He is dressed in director uniform: perfect neat dark suit, suitably restrained knitted tie striped in navy and maroon. The only clue to a more dandyish style in his off-duty moments is a beautiful ornate carnelian ring on his left hand. I ask him a little about his unusual background. After his toddler years in America, where he was born, he and his three elder sisters were homeschooled by their parents, father a construction worker, mother a homemaker and sometime nurse, in a small community in the north of England, in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. “We could have gone to school if we’d wanted to,” he says, and his A-levels were at a local sixth-form college. It was a working-class home with very limited means, but these remarkable-sounding parents took him to museums and expanded his horizons, with even a trip to Venice that resulted, he says, in his “lightbulb moment” — a decision to study art history.He describes taking the overnight bus from Yorkshire to London to save money, arriving sleepless and dishevelled at his interview for the Courtauld Institute — but it led to a BA, MA and PhD at the prestigious central London academy. In career terms, “I never had an actual plan,” he says — yet he then crowd-surfed the competition from one leading art institution to another: studies at the British School in Rome, then on to a Guggenheim international fellowship. Next came Tate Modern, in London, where from 2007 to 2013 he was curator of international modern art before moving to New York. Not bad for a man without a plan. For the institution he’s leading, though, he is certainly planning — “all the way through to our 300th birthday in 2053. It’s exciting.” If one of Cullinan’s favourite words is “exciting” — which seems to mean anything from mildly challenging to downright terrifying — his watchword is collaboration. It’s a principle he comes back to again and again. He quotes Hans Sloane, the 18th-century founder of the British Museum, whose 1749 will decreed that the 70,000 objects in his personal collection should be available “for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons”. “So the question now, in a global and digital age, is how we respond to this — I’m very much focused on partnerships and collaborations.” Looking back to his nine-year tenure at the National Portrait Gallery, he points to a three-way show of work by Tacita Dean that involved the NPG, the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Gallery — a first in collaborative terms.The approach “meant we could reach far beyond the limits of our modest resources”, he says. He also cites one of his undoubted masterstrokes: the joint acquisition of the mighty “Portrait of Mai” by Joshua Reynolds, one of the first and finest portraits in western art of a free person of colour. The purchase was made in partnership with the J Paul Getty Trust, which would otherwise have simply bought the work and moved it permanently to the US. Cullinan negotiated a shared display agreement, simultaneously scoring a masterwork centrepiece for his reopening of the NPG, keeping an important British work in the country (at least part-time) and establishing links with a major rich institutional partner, a previous competitor. Triple whammy.For him, it went beyond the practical and curatorial: not just the “poetry” of a real meeting of two worlds, but “a collaboration of scholarship and research as well, exchanging ideas as well as objects.“I was told again and again, it’s impossible, it can’t be done, there’s no precedent, it’s a bad idea . . . but it has worked absolutely brilliantly, and not just because the picture is still here, still on the walls, but because we have formed such a good relationship with the Getty.” These things that apparently “can’t be done” point to the direction of Cullinan’s thinking when it comes to the other knotty questions of his reign at the BM: those surrounding restitution or repatriation of irregularly or violently acquired objects. “There’s a problem of perception versus reality in museums,” he says. “The perception is that sometimes conversations will be very difficult, and it’s not possible to find common ground, and that’s really not the case. With good faith and a lot of listening, conversations can begin.” Our wild mushroom quiches have come and gone, as well as the sinfully delicious buttery potatoes. The noisy, cosy café sometimes makes it hard to hear each other, but the lunchtime crowd is thinning a little now. The quiet staff refill our sparkling water. Pud? Well, why not. After some consultation with the waitress, Cullinan decides on a pear frangipane galette with crème fraîche. I go for apple fritters. I find competition quite restricting. I like to collaborate, it’s much more interestingBy now, we’ve left behind the nitty-gritty of budgets and heating systems and we’re musing enjoyably on wider issues about the museum world. He has after all taken on an institution whose very premise is under debate: restitution purists claim that universal museums such as the BM are colonialist by their very nature. Of course Cullinan is vividly aware of today’s debates about whether it’s still a valid model, but he’s in no doubt about where he stands. “Those are the right questions to ask — but now more than ever all of us around the world need a focus on coexistence and cultural exchange. I think encyclopedic museums really have a role to play.” In all the outreach projects, though, “it’s very important that the relationships should be reciprocal and equal. For instance, we’ve asked CSMVS [museum in Mumbai] to curate a project for us next year.” A kind of return match. “It makes visible some of the work that we’re doing. That’s very important, because so much of it is invisible.” The café is almost empty now and our desserts have arrived. (My fritters are a bit daunting — luckily, my guest is happy to take half of them on.) But we have been circling around the museum’s most public and controversial debate: the possible return to Greece of the Parthenon Marbles. It’s a political hot potato, especially since UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy recently went public with her support for repatriation reforms that might require changes to the law forbidding national museums from deaccessioning the objects in their care.So, what does he think? Cullinan is typically diplomatic, and typically optimistic . . . “I think everyone would like to see a really exciting, innovative solution. No, solution is the wrong word — response. Something outside the usual framework . . . I’m starting with the idea that everything is possible, and we’ll deal with reality as it evolves. Let’s not start with the idea that certain things can’t be done.” Oh, come on, that’s a bit too diplomatic. I can see from your face, I say, that you actually do have a plan. He cracks a broad grin. “Plans are taking shape . . . a principle is the first thing to establish for yourself, and in a conversation to have with your partner. I’d like to talk more about a partnership rather than debating ownership. “I find competition quite restricting: I like to collaborate, it’s much more interesting. If we’re serious about world culture, we should be working together. I don’t have a solution as such, and nor should I — it’s a conversation to be had.” As with his 30-year plans for his museum, Cullinan is playing a very long game.Jan Dalley is an FT contributing editorFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
