Martin Roth is to step down as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) this autumn after five years in the post. The news came as a surprise and he is leaving at short notice. The Sunday Times broke the story by saying that Roth had become disillusioned with an increasingly insular Britain, post-Brexit.
Roth was one of few UK museum directors to speak out publicly against quitting the European Union. Born in Germany, he is a committed European, recently telling the German broadcaster DW: “Europe always gave hope for a peaceful future, based on sharing, solidarity and tolerance. Dropping out always means creating cultural barriers and that worries me.”
The V&A’s official announcement issued today (5 September) does not give Roth’s reason for resigning, beyond quoting him as saying that “our recent accolade as Art Fund Museum of the Year feels like the perfect moment to draw to a close my mission in London and hand over to a new director to take the V&A forward to an exciting future”. There is no suggestion that he came under any pressure to leave.
Roth, aged 61, plans to move to Berlin, where he will be taking on consultancy projects. Last June he was appointed president of Germany’s Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, although this only requires attending two meetings a year.
While director of the V&A, Roth travelled extensively, effectively acting as an ambassador for the museum and broadening its international links. Under his directorship, the museum thrived, attracting a record 3.5m visitors to South Kensington in 2015-16, a figure boosted by the highly successful Alexander McQueen exhibition. A new £49m extension to the museum is being completed on Exhibition Road and is due to open early next year. V&A-branded galleries are under construction in Dundee (Scotland) and Shenzhen (China). Plans are advancing for a new branch of the museum on the former Olympic site in Stratford, East London.
Nicholas Coleridge, the chairman of the V&A trustees, will now be heading the search for Roth’s replacement, with the post due to be advertised shortly.