Fagg had a long and distinguished career at the
British Museum. In 1938, he was appointed the Assistant Keeper of Ethnography and continued in this post until 1955, when he became the Deputy Keeper of Ethnography and, from 1969 to 1973, he was the Keeper of the Department of Ethnography. In 1969, he oversaw the move of the
Department of Ethnography from the British Museum to
Burlington Gardens where it was known as the Museum of Mankind. Between 1942 and 1945, Fagg had been seconded to the Industries and Manufactures Department of the Board of Trade. On his return to the British Museum after the end of the War, he was given curatorial responsibility for the African collections. Fagg spent a considerable amount of time engaged in fieldwork in Africa: the
Belgian Congo in 1949–1950; Nigeria in 1953, 1958–1959, 1971, and 1981; Cameroon in 1966; and Mali in 1969. His brother,
Bernard Fagg, had been working in
Nigeria since 1939 and in 1952 he had established the first
public museum in West Africa in
Jos, Nigeria, becoming the head of this institution from 1957 until Nigerian independence. In 1956 he was replaced as the
Royal Anthropological Institute's General Secretary by the American anthropologist
Marian Smith. William Fagg purchased Benin art for the newly founded Lagos museum during his 1958–1959 trip to Nigeria. He donated his photographic negatives and related documentation to the Royal Anthropological Institute shortly before his death so they could be used for research purposes by others. William Fagg curated a number of important exhibitions, with a particular focus on Nigerian art. In 1960, he organised an exhibition in London to mark Nigerian Independence for the Art Council, UK. This exhibition travelled to Manchester, Bristol, Munich and Basle. It also led him to write the book 'Nigerian Images' (1963) for which he won the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology. He curated exhibitions on Nigerian art at the First World Congress of Black Arts and Cultures in 1966 held in
Dakar,
Senegal. For his writings associated with this work he won the Grand Prize for the best work on African art and led to his being granted the
CMG in 1967. After the move of the British Museum's Ethnographic collections to Burlington Gardens, Fagg curated many changing exhibitions with the first showcasing the museum's collection of Benin art within a partial reconstruction of the Benin Palace. He was Consulting Fellow in African Art for the
Museum of Primitive Art in New York (now part of the
Metropolitan Museum) from 1957 to 1970. After retirement, he was the tribal art consultant for Christie's in London until 1990. A William Fagg lecture is held annually at the British Museum. ==Publications==