Director Who Resigned From British Museum in Scandal Has a New Job

Last summer, Hartwig Fischer resigned as the director of the British Museum, just days after it emerged that the museum had fired a curator who was suspected of looting gems from its storerooms.

Less than a year later, Fischer is back at the top of the museum world.

This week, the Saudi Museums Commission announced in a news release that it had appointed Fischer, a German art historian, as the founding director of its museum of world cultures, scheduled to open in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2026.

In the release, the commission said it had chosen Fischer, 61, because of his “global expertise in leading international cultural institutions and museums.” It did not mention Fischer’s time at the British Museum.

Fischer took the top job at the London institution in 2016, having previously run the State Art Collections of Dresden, a major group of German museums.

His tenure at Britain’s most-visited tourist attraction, which houses renowned artifacts including the Parthenon Sculptures (known as the Elgin Marbles) and the Rosetta Stone, was relatively smooth until last August, when the museum announced it had fired a curator in its Greek and Roman antiquities department on suspicion of looting jewels from its stores. In a news release at the time, Fischer said he was “determined to put things right” at the museum, but a string of revelations soon undermined his position.

Later that month, The New York Times and the BBC published extracts from emails showing that Fischer had downplayed the concerns about potential thefts raised by Ittai Gradel, an antiquities dealer based in Denmark.