Elizabeth Galvin, curator, British Museum

I am currently looking at 25,000 objects from the Museum’s collection on my desk. These fantastic works detail an important part of human history in Africa and range from beautiful bas-relief cattle to stunning painted representations of women dancing. Yet these items are not from the Museum’s storage facilities: they are saved on a hard drive, as part of the African rock art image project. The project team is cataloguing and uploading these 25,000 digital images of rock art from throughout the continent, so each one of them is being registered into the Museum’s collection as an object in its own right and made available through the Collection Online.

David Coulson (Trust for African Rock Art) photographing rock art in Chad. © TARA/David Coulson

While digital collections are a relatively new area for the museum industry, they are showing new and exciting ways museum visitors can engage with the collections, as well as adding to our scholarship. As part of this project, the digital photographs have allowed the Museum to use new technologies to study, preserve, and enhance the rock art, while leaving it in situ in Africa.

Rock art scene from Tadrat Acacus, Libya 2013,2034.685 © TARA/David Coulson

For example, this digital photograph shows a piece of rock art that has been chipped and faded through natural erosion. With the naked eye, we can see some remnants of a red-brown pigment. Maybe this was the legs of a quadruped or perhaps two abstract human figures. Most of the rock art in this area is thousands of years old, so knowing exactly what it looked like before it was eroded used to be impossible without extensive tests that could have easily destroyed the original work.

Digitally manipulated copy of the above photo (2013,2034.685) showing enhanced elephant image

Now, however, using photo manipulation software, we can run the photograph through a process that enhances the pigments. By focusing on different sets of colours, we can see the layers that were previously hidden to the naked eye. In this one, we can see that the legs belong to an elephant, complete with large ears, a tail and trunk.

Digitally manipulated copy of image 2013,2034.685 showing human figures: hunters with bows and arrows in the top right, swimming in the centre and lower left

Run the same image through another enhancement, and we can see many more human figures that were previously invisible. The elephant is still somewhat visible in the background, highlighted in pink. But the fantastic hunters to the top right of the photo would never have been identifiable in the original rock art. Now we can see them with their bows and arrows in an active hunting scene. ‘Swimming’ figures are now highlighted in the centre of the photograph. At the right of the image, we are also able to see a section of a giraffe, depicted with a spotted coat.

By using new technologies with the digital collections, we are not only able to enhance our study of the rock art, but also to build a database to ensure open access to our work. We are regularly using social media, blogs (like this one), and thematic articles on the main Museum website, both to increase access to these amazing works of rock art, and to facilitate discussion with our online visitors across the world. While the Museum’s physical collections will always be at the core of its work, digital collections are letting us see objects in a new light. After all, a 21st-century museum requires 21st-century collecting.

On Monday 6 October 2014 at 1.30pm, Elizabeth Galvin will be giving a free public lecture on African Rock Art and Photography with renowned photographer David Coulson (from the Trust for African Rock Art),  in the BP lecture Theatre at the British Museum in London. Tickets are free, but booking is recommended via the British Museum website to ensure a place.

For more information about the project, please visit our project pages on the British Museum website: britishmuseum.org/africanrockart.

The African rock art image project is supported by the Arcadia Fund

Aileen Dawson, curator, British Museum

News about the Art Fund’s successful public appeal to save the collections of the Wedgwood Museum is very welcome here at the British Museum. The extensive and fascinating ceramic collection and comprehensive factory archives cared for at Barlaston are undoubtedly of national importance. The British Museum’s connection to Wedgwood stretches right back to the 18th century and, like other museums with collections of these distinctively British wares, we rely on the well-kept factory records to interpret our material.

Portrait medallion of Sir Joseph Banks, English naturalist. Jasper ware (stoneware) dipped blue. Modelled by John Flaxman (fl.1754–1826) , made in the factory of Wedgwood & Bentley (1887,0307,I.60)

When I joined the British Museum, my first project concerned our extensive collection of Wedgwood jasper portrait medallions and plaques, including the large-format portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, one of my heroes, who in his youth accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage. Studying the rest of the Museum’s Wedgwood collection led to a book, Masterpieces of Wedgwood (1984, reprinted 1995). This would have been impossible without the Wedgwood Museum and the superb archive of documents. These alone are a vast treasure house of information on the firm, and deserve to be used by all kinds of historians.

I enjoyed discovering how Josiah Wedgwood established his business from 1759, and how Thomas Bentley inspired his interest in the classical world of Greece and Rome. In the centre of our Enlightenment Gallery (Room 1) you can see many of the Greek and Roman vases sent back to England from Naples by Sir William Hamilton. It is well known that Josiah Wedgewood used the beautifully illustrated publications of these pieces as a source of patterns for the highly fashionable decorative and table wares so typical of the Regency period. The Wedgwood Museum archives reveal that Josiah and his partner Thomas Bentley also went to great lengths to achieve authentic reproductions of the originals. In November 1769 permission was sought take drawings and impressions of the shapes and decoration of the ‘Roman and Etruscan Earthen Ware’ in the British Museum. The Trustees agreed that ‘such Vases or other Monuments as they may want’ should be brought to the reading room for them. This is the earliest recorded moment when Wedgwood was in contact with the British Museum, then only sixteen years old. It was the beginning of a long relationship.

The Portland Vase, jasper ware, a first edition numbered copy, the figures applied in white on a black ground, representing the myth of Peleus and Thetis (1909,1201.88)

While researching the British Museum’s Wedgwood copy of the famous Portland Vase at Barlaston, I was able to piece together the strange story of how, in the years leading up to 1790, Josiah copied the famous Roman cameo glass vase in the completely different material. The Wedgwood Museum has many trial versions of the vase showing the endless problems that challenged the production of the superb jasper ware reproduction.

Copy of the Portland Vase, jasper ware coloured blue and ornamented with applied white reliefs (1802,0312.1)

We also have a blue version the vase presented by Josiah’s son John in 1802. It is on display in the gallery Europe 1800–1900 (Room 47), where it looks perfect, but closer scrutiny shows that it has a ‘dint’ or slight indentation, which might have meant it could not be sold, after many hours of work and several firings. Because so few blue jasper versions were made, it is particularly rare and precious.

The Pegasus Vase. Pale blue jasper ware with applied white reliefs (1786,0527.1)

Wedgwood’s endless invention and his use of artists such as John Flaxman Jr has been a source of fascination to me. In 1786, Josiah generously gave a copy of his Pegasus Vase to the British Museum. It is a stunning conception. This famous vase has only left Bloomsbury once, in 1979, when it was in an exhibition devoted to Flaxman at the Royal Academy, which also travelled to Copenhagen. Accompanying this fragile and precious vase in a lorry overnight from Harwich to Esjberg was an unforgettable journey.

When I was invited in 2011 to speak in Sydney at a celebratory Wedgwood Society of New South Wales conference, I travelled to Barlaston to see the new Wedgwood Museum to take news of it to the other side of the world. I thought it one of the best new museums I had ever visited, and have recommended it ever since. I am so delighted that its marvellous collection, which reveals so much about the Industrial Revolution, as well as 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century British tastes and material culture, has found the support it needs to be enjoyed by future generations.

The Wedgwood Museum is in Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent.

Alexander Weber, Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London

Martin Luther (1483-1546), portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), 1529. Oil on wood. © Deutsches Historisches Museum

What attracted me – to be honest, a reluctant blogger – to contribute to the British Museum’s blog, is the historical connection between Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, the British Museum and my own profession as an academic teacher of German in England. Long before the universities discovered my discipline, German grammars and textbooks had been produced by generations of curators and librarians at the British Museum. From the eighteenth century onwards, German protestant pastors preached to emerging German communities in London on Sundays and during the week catalogued the great treasures of ancient Biblical manuscripts (such as the Codex Alexandrinus) still in the British Library today. They were leading experts on the textual history of the Old and New Testament mainly because they followed in the footsteps of Martin Luther. Luther believed in the authority of scripture and not the dogma of the Roman church and to prove his point he immersed himself in careful critical study of the best original sources available to him in Greek and Hebrew. His formula of restoring the freshness of the original and then expressing it in the spoken language of ordinary Germans of his time brought the great stories of the Bible to life.

The opening of the Book of Genesis from the Gutenberg Bible, 1455. © The British Library Board C.9.d.3, 4v-5

It was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, however, which disseminated Luther’s writings to a mass audience. One of the best places in the world to study the link between the media revolution of the printing press and the Reformation is the British Library. The German pastors in London were also involved in building up the great collection of Luther editions. They had inherited the enthusiasm for studying and cultivating their own language from Luther and fostered it in Britain through private lessons. They taught German in the royal household.

The front end paper of Luther’s 1541 Bible with portraits of Luther and Johannes Bugenhagen and Luther’s transcription from the 21st psalm and signature. Biblia, das ist, die gantze Heilige Schrift: Deudsch auffs new zugericht. D. Mart. Luth., etc. (Wittemberg, 1541). © British Library 679.i.15.

Before Luther the German language was regarded as too crude and fragmented into provincial rough dialects to be used in any cultivated discourse. In learned circles, Latin was used – both in writing and speech. The Lutheran Bible changed all this, becoming the benchmark of modern German. An unprecedented number of authorized copies and countless pirated editions were circulated in Germany. It is estimated that a very large proportion of literate households possessed a copy, and in many cases it remained the only or at least the most treasured book in the house for several generations. Even the tide of polemics against Luther had to use his language in order to reach the huge readership which the new medium had created.

How did Luther overcome the strong regional differences which had emerged through waves of sound shifts during the long history of the German language? Since his childhood he had moved across these linguistic borders and managed to balance the extremes of dialect in his own speech. He also built on a common language of officialdom, the chancelleries which issued decrees which had to be understood across the whole of Germany. He looked towards areas where the population had mixed through migration and where a more common version of the German language was beginning to emerge. I am not persuaded, though, by the argument that these developments would have happened anyway. What intrigues me most about this story is that an individual can change something as universal as a whole language. In fact, we all leave linguistic traces behind through mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of our speech, our individual linguistic fingerprint, if you like. The historical circumstances may have been favourable, but Luther was a character of greatness and literary genius, possessing a truly exceptional power to coin phrases and expressions which have become the nuts and bolts of the modern German idiom. In my view, Luther was a giant, a figure of supreme confidence in the power of the thinking self to turn the tables against lazy dogma and sophistry.

The two cornerstones of Luther’s theology are two existential faculties of the self: the use of logos, i.e. language, and faith; logos and faith alone can redeem us. His emphasis on the individual was so strong that Protestantism became increasingly subjective, which resulted in modern relativism. History gained a lot through Luther, especially because he encouraged ordinary people to get involved in serious matters of public life. This defining shift also fostered the German idea of nationhood. The republicans who gave this movement its direction often referred to Luther as their ideological starting point. Historically there was a loss, too. The universality of the Latin world of education and the church was undermined. The supranational identity of European Christianity was diminished and replaced by German, English and other national concepts of God. Very little was left to mediate between these fronts. Luther was a German, not a cosmopolitan figure compared to the broad-minded humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example. He was also a master of polemics in a period which one could call the golden age of mud-slinging. He inspired noble democrats but also nasty nationalists.

Luther’s cult of the word benefited the growth of standard German, but it also encouraged the attacks on treasures of visual art and sacred objects during the Reformation. It should not be overlooked that ordinary, illiterate people before Luther had access to the Bible through the so-called biblia pauperum (Paupers’ Bible), which was essentially a picture book. I find it fascinating to observe that the image is once again favoured in today’s digital media, just as the era of the printing press gave power to the word. Today the text no longer rules over the image. This exhibition, Germany: memories of a nation, focusing as it does on objects and making them speak, is a good example of the re-balancing of image and word. It would make Luther shudder, though, just as the relics and images of saints of his time did. In his youth he was a very stern Augustinian friar on the radical fringes of the Roman church, and he never lost his suspicion of the senses, especially the eyes as an inroad of sin into our souls. The word was abstract, an expression of the spirit, the same stuff that God was made of. Images and objects would pull us away from this, Luther thought. As a linguist I admire the greatness of Luther, the sheer might of his words, both pious and polemical, but many things which he dismissed have regained an unexpected importance again and probably for a good reason.

Germany: memories of a nation (16 October 2014 – 25 January 2015) is sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan, with support from Salomon Oppenheimer Philanthropic Foundation.

Accompanying the exhibition is a 30-part BBC Radio 4 series written and presented by Neil MacGregor. Starts Monday 29 September.  The episode Luther and a Language for all Germans is available to listen to on the BBC website.

Chris Michaels, Head of Digital Media and Publishing, British Museum

There is no end of digital fads that might make a significant impact on the British Museum. Every time I open LinkedIn, or read a blog, there’s something new, or seeming-new, waiting to be tried. It’s fun.

But what really matters? What are the things that take our mission of being the museum of and for the world, and reveal an entirely new dimension to that great Enlightenment aim; that find a new way to make it real?

That’s a harder question, but it’s the strategically critical one that we will try and answer in the months and years ahead.

Today’s second debate in the Museum of the Future series, Changing public dialogues with museum collections in the digital age, is a crucial staging post in the process of us starting to talk about what digital means.

In advance of that, here are 5 themes – or megatrends, to give them their grander title – that might help shape our future. Big ideas all of them, but what better place than the British Museum to talk about the value of big ideas?
 

1. The next billion comes online

If we want to be the Museum of and for the World, then being able to tell the story of the history of mankind to all mankind is a conceptually critical moment in our long history. Over the period to 2020, 1 billion new people are forecast to come online for the first time, predominantly through mobile-based Internet connections. In an increasingly digital-dependent economy, that runs consequent with a similar number of people’s emergence into the global middle class, marked by an income of $5000 per year. Is this our new, next audience? As these people connect for the first time, how do we tell them stories of their histories in ways that are most meaningful?

Watch Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg talk about the next billion and what it means here:

 


2. HS2 makes the world get smaller

All around the world, from London to China to Russia and Spain, incredible investments are being made in high-speed rail networks that will make tourism – the largest driver of our visitorship – a whole lot easier. There are many complex arguments around the social, economic and environmental impacts of major new rail networks, but whatever happens, it will make getting to the British Museum quicker and cheaper for hundreds of millions of people round the world. We will need to be ready for that. Explore the HS2 proposals for UK railways here.
 

3. This place is alive! The rise of smart cities and buildings

As the Internet gets built into everything, and as the power and potential of the data that creates gets unlocked, we will have to change the way we manage the connections between people and things. The buildings we live and work in will become smart. The British Museum is a very, very big building, and making it smart might do anything from saving huge amounts on our energy bills, to managing the flow of visitors that creates overcrowding around the Mummies, the Rosetta Stone and (yes) the toilets. Read abut smart cities here.
 

4. Machines anticipate us and speak in our language

Asking Google, or talking to Siri, are already astonishing experiences – there’s a complex existential pleasure in speaking to a machine, and the machine getting it. The quality of natural language processing and machine learning will accelerate in the period to 2020, and their capabilities will start to move from reactive (‘you ask them’) to predictive (‘they know what you need’). That may alter the way we use the Internet forever – making the voice, not text, the first choice for finding what we need. For a Museum, that’s an exciting moment, helping visitors to help themselves. Is Siri the most important Visitor Services team member we haven’t hired yet?
 

5. Media markets reach the tipping point

Museums are complex media organisations, involved in book publishing, television, cinema, radio and more. Just this month the Museum has launched Germany: memories of a nation) with BBC Radio 4, while awaiting Night at the Museum 3: Secret of the Tomb from Fox in December. As we intersect with all these markets, we have to recognise one thing: digital is the driver of change in all of them. PwC’s market forecasts suggest that digital market revenues will grow at 11.9% compound annual growth rate in the years to 2017, by which time digital will account for 45% of all media revenues. Contrast that to TV and cinema, growing at 3.6%, and with streaming revenues expected to become primary in three years time. There is much to consider here, many complex implications. But whatever the answers, in this as in so much else, one truth is simple: the internet is changing who we are and what we do, and the Museum must change with it.

Changing public dialogues with museum collections in the digital age (Thursday 16 October, BP Lecture Theatre, 18.30–21.00) is the second in a series of debates as part of Museum of the future, in which we are discussing big questions about the Museum’s future. The event is fully booked, but an audio recording and video highlights will be available following the event. You can also follow @britishmuseum and #MuseumOfTheFuture for live-tweeting of the event.

Visit our Tumblr to get an introduction to the debate and the Museum’s history.

Robert Bracey, curator, British Museum

The term ‘religion’ covers a diverse range of thoughts and beliefs. Some people understand their religion to prohibit all acts of violence, even to the smallest animal, while others believe their religion compels them to go to war. For some people religion is central to their identity and infuses every aspect of their life while for others it is something that relates to a particular place on a certain day. Religion’s diversity makes it hard to define though we all feel we recognise religiosity when we see it.

Over two days in June this year, a group of staff from the British Museum and guests took on the problem of trying to define religion and think about how religion affects, or is affected, by the sort of objects that make up the British Museum’s collection. This seminar took place as part of the Empires of Faith research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is about comparing religious objects from different cultures in the first millennium AD. This is a hugely important period for the religions we know today. Christianity and Islam both began in the first millennium, and the beliefs and rituals of many other religions (Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Buddhism) took the form we recognise today at this time.

It is very easy to let preconceptions get in the way of thinking about big ideas like religion. To help the members of the research team break out of their comfort zone we invited five guests with very different expertise to speak about the topics. Averil Cameron (University of Oxford) is well-known for her work on Byzantine history. Matthew Canepa (University of Minnesota) is an art historian and expert on the Sasanian world (ancient Iran). Simon Coleman (University of Toronto) is an anthropologist and an expert on pilgrimage. Bruce Lincoln (University of Chicago) works on the history of religions. Joan Pau Rubies (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) studies the history of European missionaries. Such a diverse range of expertise helped push everybody to think in new ways.

This wasn’t a conventional seminar with formal lectures. Instead, it was a discussion, sometimes a debate, about ideas that could shape the project. So, although the project team will write lots of research over its course, there will be no book of the seminar. The participants agreed instead to let their ideas and discussion be ‘sketched'; a new concept for most of us. The artist Clarice Holt sat quietly in the corner while we talked at, argued and harangued each other. Clarice prepared eighteen sketches of the meeting, encapsulating different points that were raised during the discussion. You can see the full sketches in the slideshow at the end of this post.

Not often is one’s mind stretched so far and in so many captivating directions. I hope very much that the images I created for the Empires of Faith Project will allow a wider range of people access to what is a vibrant and relevant area of historical research, and to gain insights into this weird and wonderful area.

Clarice’s reflections on the seminar.

The first day of the seminar was spent trying to find a way of defining religion. One of the disagreements was about whether a single definition of religion was useful or if what was, or was not, religious had to be defined for each historical period. The single definition makes sense to us because we live in a world where there are sharp divides between the religious and non-religious (or secular). Some people, and some places, and often certain days are ‘for’ religion but in the past religion was part of everyday life. People saw the world as constantly shaped by magical or divine forces beyond their control. Thinking ourselves back into that perspective is very hard and that made these days very useful for the project as a whole.

The second day was about objects and what they tell us about religion. One topic that was discussed was the ambiguity of images. The Empires of Faith team is very interested in how the same image can represent different gods in different places. So, for example, an image of the Greek god Hercules found in modern Pakistan would probably represent Vajrapani, the protector of the Buddha, or in Iran it could be the divine being Verethragna. What did the people who made the images, or used them, think about the relationships between these different gods?

The two days were tiring but enlightening. Everyone came away with plenty to think about and some more questions that the project will try to answer in the future. Can objects shape what you believe? Can they be more important than doctrines and scripture? Does a sacred object possess some intrinsic quality that sets it apart, or does sacredness only exist in our perceptions?
Traditionally the study of religion in the ancient world has focused on what people wrote about regarding their beliefs or practices. The Empires of Faith project is seeking to balance that by looking at how visual culture and religious artefacts relate to religion. It feels appropriate that the thinking from our first seminar was recorded not as a series of written articles but as a set of images.

Click on one of the images below to view as a slideshow

More about the Empires of Faith project on the British Museum website.

Frances Carey, art historian

Statue of Käthe Kollwitz, Kollwitzplatz, Berlin. Photo by Rae Allen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

The seated figure of an elderly woman cast in bronze presides over a square in a part of north east Berlin known as Kollwitzkiez, the ‘Kollwitz district’, where Käthe Schmidt (1867-1945) came to live in 1891 on her marriage to Dr Karl Kollwitz. The sculpture by Gustav Seitz, installed in 1960, was commissioned under the DDR (German Democratic Republic) just as the renaming of Wörtherplatz and Weissenburger Strasse had been done in her honour in 1947. The nearest U-Bahn station is Senefelderplatz opened in 1923 and named after another notable figure in the history of printmaking, Alois Senefelder, who is credited with the discovery of lithography in 1796. When I stayed on Kollwitzstraße in the summer of 2009, the formerly bohemian neighbourhood of the 1990s after Die Wende (‘The Change’, i.e. including the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification) was fast shedding its down-at-heel appearance. All the familiar signs of rising property values and gentrification were plain to see, much more so now: handsome, well-buffed apartment buildings, smart shops, cafés such as Anne Blume (called after Kurt Schwitters’s subversive poem of 1919), and nearby parks and playgrounds with brightly coloured equipment for children. TripAdvisor waxes lyrical about the area as a tourist destination.

Käthe Kollwitz, Selbstbildnis nach links (Self-portrait facing left), 1901, lithograph, 269 x 204 mm © DACS, 2014 (1951,0501.81)

It is a far cry from the surroundings where Käthe and Karl (d.1940) were to spend almost the whole of their adult lives. Prenzlauer Berg, the larger district in which Kollwitzkiez is situated, was developed as a working-class neighbourhood to cope with the great surge in population after 1871 when Berlin became the capital of a united Germany; by 1900 the population had grown from around 800,000 to 1.9 million. Street after street of Mietskasernen or tenements (literally ‘rental barracks’) were built where conditions were dire. The Frauenkunstverband (Organisation of Women Artists), co-founded by Käthe Kollwitz in 1913, protested that 600,000 Berliners lived in dwellings with five or more people to a room while 100,000 children had nowhere to play. The title of the polemic by Werner Hegemann published in 1930, Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der grössten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt (Stony Berlin: History of the Largest Tenement City in the World) captures the impact of this remorseless urbanization. Prenzlauer Berg was dominated by these tenements and the breweries that were the major employers.

Käthe Kollwitz, Arbeitslosigkeit (Unemployment) 1909, 6th state, etching and engraving 382 x 530 mm. © DACS 2014 (1949,0411.3945)

Kollwitz was rooted in the nineteenth century, drawing much of her inspiration from the narrative realism and emotive power of writers such as Dickens, Ibsen and Zola. She grafted her reading of fiction, whether it dealt with near contemporary circumstances or ostensibly historical ones, onto the direct experience of ‘the lives of others’ who were beset by the uncertainties of casual employment, deprivation, high maternal and child mortality, and often domestic violence. In this challenging environment she found a beauty and a grandeur that became her mainspring as an artist. It was a largely black-and-white world, but with many gradations of tone and texture. For the realization of its expressive potential she turned to drawing and printmaking, above all to the example of Max Klinger (1857-1920) and his championing of graphic art as having an important status of its own. His series of ten etchings and aquatints called Dramen, Opus IX (1883) comprised six tragedies set in Berlin among the different echelons of society. Two dramas – Eine Mutter (A Mother) and Märztage (March Days) – unfold over three plates each, while the other four have just a single sheet apiece. Märztage seemed to refer to the failed liberal revolution of March 1848, but Klinger made it clear that he had in mind the contemporary context of Germany’s Social Democratic movement in 1883.

Max Klinger, Eine Mutter I (A Mother I), Dramen, Opus IX 1883, etching and aquatint, 453 x 318 mm (1981,1107.23)

Max Klinger, Mârztage I (March Days I), Dramen, Opus IX 1883, etching and aquatint, 453 x 358 mm (1981,1107.28)

Käthe Kollwitz was similarly inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die Weber (The Weavers, 1892), which she saw at its first performance in 1893, to create a print series that was more about the conditions of the poor around her, than Silesia in 1844. Her second graphic cycle Der Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ War) executed from 1902-7 and published the year after, used the religious and economic conflict of 1524-5 as yet another vehicle through which to express the heroism of the working class. This series along with her later work after the First World War in woodcut and lithography, earned her significant influence on the development of printmaking in Russia and China in the 1920s-40s and beyond.

Within a few years of commencing printmaking in 1890-91 Käthe Kollwitz had demonstrated considerable artistry and technical competence. Ein Weberaufstand (A Weavers’ Revolt) – three etchings and three lithographs completed in 1897 – propelled her to the front rank of artists in Germany. When she went to Paris in 1904 she was given a glowing testimonial for Rodin from Hugo von Tschudi, Director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie. Her greatest champion was Max Lehrs, Director of the Dresden Print Room who both acquired her work for the collection and published the first catalogue of her prints in 1902. He likewise encouraged a curator, later Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, Campbell Dodgson (1867-1948). Dodgson bequeathed to the British Museum (which was not then permitted to buy the work of living artists) a remarkably fine body of impressions from the most innovative phase of Kollwitz’s career: none more so than a sequence of three states of the harrowing subject of Frau mit totem Kind (Woman with dead Child) of 1903, which shows Kollwitz’s mastery in every aspect of its accomplishment. The artist and her younger son Peter (b.1896) were the models at a time when her elder son Hans (b.1892) had narrowly escaped dying of diphtheria. The sculptural quality of her treatment of the motif anticipates her later interest in working with a three-dimensional medium which was one of her objects of study in Paris.

Käthe Kollwitz, Frau mit totem Kind (Woman with dead child) 1903, 7th state, soft-ground etching and engraving with green and gold wash, 415 x 480 mm. © DACS 2014 (1949,0411.3928)

Frau mit totem Kind has none of the resignation of her later sculpture (1937) of a mother and her dead son, ‘something like a Piéta’, of which the artist said ‘There is no longer pain, only reflection.’ In the 1903 print there is only pain, but however much she drew upon personal experience and observation, it is nonetheless a carefully contrived artistic composition.

Käthe Kollwitz, Selbstbildnis (Self-portrait) 1924, 6th state, woodcut, 209 x 301 mm © DACS, 2014 (1980,0126.85)

Kollwitz’s most unwavering commitment was to being an artist: ‘It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.’ (New Year’s Day, 1912). Her intensely examined life as expressed in all her work, not just the many self-portraits, her journals and correspondence, is humbling to recall amidst the middle-class comforts of modern Kollwitzkiez. I admire her because she succeeded in doing what a great contemporary artist has advocated: ‘I thought women as artists should focus on how to start, lead, and sustain a creative life. It’s not a question of style or a break with tradition.’ (Bridget Riley, 2004).

The exhibition Germany: memories of a nation is at the British Museum from 16 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. Sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan, with support from Salomon Oppenheimer Philanthropic Foundation.

Accompanying the exhibition is a 30-part BBC Radio 4 series written and presented by Neil MacGregor. In the episode Kathe Kollwitz: Suffering Witness, Neil MacGregor focuses on the art of Käthe Kollwitz, who expresses the loss and suffering of war, especially after the death of her younger son Peter at the front in 1914.

Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London

I’m very excited about the screening of The Kingdom and the Beauty this Sunday afternoon at the British Museum. When I was asked to help the Museum put together a small series of screenings as part of the programme supporting the BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China, this was the film I was most determined that we should get. This Sunday provides a rare opportunity, so I’d like to tell you what makes this screening so special.

The Kingdom and the Beauty © Licensed by Celestial Pictures Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Kingdom and the Beauty (‘Jiang shan mei ren’)is a big, lush, gloriously colourful, and unabashedly romantic musical set when the Ming dynasty was at the height of its power. A kind of Cinderella story with a tragic twist, it was made by the legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers in 1959, when they too were at the height of their power. The Kingdom and the Beauty was a huge hit across Southeast Asia, winning awards at film festivals and sparking off a series of similar Mandarin-language musicals.

The story is about the Zhengde emperor, who ruled from 1505 to 1521. He was known as a bit of a playboy, and the film shows him sneaking out of the court in Beijing and traveling south to the rich heartlands around the Yangzi Delta. There he falls in love with a village girl, played by Shaw’s leading star of the time, Linda Lin Dai. Recalled by his duties at court, he forgets about her, but she discovers she is pregnant and hopes to be reunited with him. Her character in the film is a girl with a sunny nature who suffers a tragic fate, as Lin did herself a few years later. The film is remembered for her upbeat renditions of charming and catchy tunes. But Lin killed herself in 1964, and became an icon who has endured through the ages.

Nearly all other films set in the Ming dynasty take place in the 17th century, when the dynasty begins to fade. They feature stories about patriotic outsiders trying to defend the country in the face of dynastic failure (the Ming were replaced by the Manchu Qing in 1644). The Kingdom and the Beauty is unusual in this respect as it is set in the early 16th century, and is more indicative of the splendour of the early Ming courts, as seen in the Museum’s exhibition. No film better communicates the image of the Ming as the largest, richest, and most successful civilisation of its time.

Sir Run Run Shaw, the great Shaw Brothers founder, who was also the producer of The Kingdom and the Beauty, died earlier this year. Our screening of the film, made possible by Celestial Pictures, which owns the 760-film Shaw Brothers library, is our way of honouring Sir Run Run and Shaw Brothers.

It’s a classic musical, a big, old-fashioned and indulgent pleasure for a Sunday afternoon that I think everyone would enjoy. Do join us to sit back and float off into a fantasy world of Ming luxury and romance.

Tickets for The Kingdom and the Beauty are available from the British Museum website.

The BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China is at the British Museum from 18 September 2014 to 5 January 2015.
Supported by BP

Liam O’Connor, artist

I am creating an archive of audio interviews with the staff of the British Museum, the subject of which is a museum object or space they have developed a significant personal connection with as part of their work.

‘WCEC Excavation’ 2012 © Liam O’Connor

Between 2010 and 2014 I was artist in residence on the construction of the World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, a new building at the British Museum. Although my efforts were focused on the building site, I also received a privileged insight into the workings of the place through conversations with a wide variety of people who work at the Museum.

My understanding of particular objects and spaces around the Museum has been greatly enriched by talking to the people who have invested time and emotion in them. I am intrigued by how these objects and spaces that belong to everyone seem to bear a great significance to certain individuals, and believe the stories of how and why are important to capture.

The British Museum, as an idea, is a place where a diverse range of people are brought together for a common purpose, a place and a collection that has endured through many generations of staff and visitors, it is a collection and a building that weaves all those generations together.

The objects and spaces of the Museum are vessels for meaning and memory; they are constantly being adopted into new narratives by staff and visitors. The aim of these interviews is to reveal the small memories, invested in the museum and its collection, that overlap and sustain this fantastic institution through generations reaching back into the past and forward into the future.

Internally, among staff I have discovered a tradition of stories being passed from previous generations to the present – characters and events long since gone are still present within the Museum. It would be amazing if in fifty or a hundred years from now a conservator, curator, security guard could listen to the person give an account of working on that same object or within that same space from today.

Painting on silk showing Buddha (probably Śākyamuni) preaching in a Paradise composition. From the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Dunhuang, Gansu province, China. Tang Dynasty, 8th century (1919,0101,0.6)

The voice is important in this project; the voice of an individual is much more captivating and engaging than a written text, and somehow more immediate than a video combining sight and sound.

The background sounds also provide another layer; the secret door in the Enlightenment Gallery creaking open in Bryony Shepherd’s interview, and the rolling rack revealing the painting in Clarissa von Spee’s interview. These all start to contribute to a soundscape that is another layer in describing the British Museum. This is something I didn’t think about until I started listening back to the interviews; for me this is an exciting discovery.

As part of the interview, I also want to capture the journey that lead each person to working at the Museum. I want to understand the diversity of paths that all lead to the same place. I arrived here purely by chance, approaching the Museum to ask if I could study their building site, I didn’t have any ideas to investigate the Museum itself, but I have received an invaluable education from the place purely through talking to people who work here, it is their enthusiasm for their subjects and objects that has encouraged and strengthened my own enthusiasm for the place.

Door panels and lintel from the palace of the Ogoga (king) of Ikere in Nigeria. They depict the arrival of a British administrator in the Ogoga’s palace around 1899-1901. Af1924,-.135.a-b

I like exploring the rituals, patterns and the accumulation of time that bind us to objects and places in physical and imagined ways. This takes the form of revealing meaning or narratives that individuals project onto spaces and objects that otherwise remain hidden to everyone else.

I invest huge amounts of time in single objects or drawings or spaces as part of my work, this repeated attention shown to something creates a deep bond that is hugely important in placing memory and meaning in something physical. I also make drawings and objects that are only the trace or evidence of the actual work, where the work exists in the story of how the object was made or the performance/investment of time in making it.

The Museum’s objects, as beautiful and magnificent as they are, will always rely heavily on the devotion of the people who work with them day to day, the energy they invest in them is infectious, bringing them to life for the rest of us.

I have only recently begun this project, so far I have 10 interviews, but I want to collect many more. I hope this project will provide a rich archive of material for the Museum, which will become more interesting over time, as the Museum changes, but also the interviews are individual pieces of storytelling that could provide an alternative audio guide for museum visitors, that further enrich the mythology of the British Museum.

Room 1: Enlightenment Gallery

Voices of the British Museum is being hosted on the British Museum’s Soundcloud channel, where you can find recordings of events, Audio Descriptions, and other audio.

Liam O’Connor (@liamoconnor919) is currently artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, making work in response to their Exhibition Road Building Project.

Jennifer Wexler, Bronze Age Index Manager, MicroPasts

Part of the Blackmoor Hoard in the British Museum collection

As part of our research into British Museum’s Bronze Age collections, the MicroPasts team is asking for the public’s help with researching the wonderful Blackmoor Hoard. Known also as the ‘Blackmoor-Wolmer Forest’ or ‘Selborne’ Hoard, the hoard was found near Blackmore, Hampshire. There are several Bronze Age barrows within the area of Woolmer Forest, and multiple hoards (Woolmer Forest, Woolmer Pond, Hogmoor, Longmoor Camp) from different periods have been found there. The connection between the ritual deposition of bronze weapons and the barrow cemeteries together constitute a particularly well-preserved ritual landscape of the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age periods.

Like many Bronze Age hoards recorded in the Bronze Age Index (such as the Arreton Down hoard), the Selborne Hoard has connections with several famous collectors of archaeological antiquities, including Rev. Greenwell, George Roots, General Pitt Rivers and Lord McAlpine.

Middle Bronze Age hoard from Blackmoor (left to right: 1893,0618,7, 1893,0618.11, 1893,0618.10, 1893,0618.13)

Bronze Age Index card illustrating objects from the Blackmoor Hoard

Both Middle Bronze Age (MBA) and Late Bronze Age (LBA) hoards from the area are featured in the Bronze Age Index. The MBA hoard was found in 1840 and contains bronze torcs, rings and a palstave.

The LBA weapon hoard, discovered in the garden of a cottage near Blackmoor in 1870, is better known, and has a complicated history of collection. A large part of the hoard was handed over to Lord Selborne, as it was found on his land. It currently makes up part of the Selborne collection now in Gilbert White’s House and includes sword fragments, over twenty spearheads, three rings, ferrule fragments and one mysterious ‘grooved socket’.

Late Bronze Age socketed spearhead. From the Roots Collection (1891,0514.6)

Somehow two large groups of objects from the hoard were separated from the Selborne Collection. Part of the hoard appears to have been disposed of soon after discovery and sold to two prominent antiquarian collectors, George Roots and Rev. William Greenwell. The Greenwell collection now in the British Museum is composed largely of spearheads donated by John Pierpont Morgan in 1908. The Roots collection is more diverse, containing spearheads, sword fragments and cast rings. Evidence suggests that the Selborne, Greenwell, and Roots assemblages were all part of the same deposit, with spearhead fragments from the various collections fitting together.

Lunette spearhead from the Blackmoor Hoard. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1998.540.1)

The British Museum purchased the Roots collection at auction in 1891. At this sale, one extraordinary example of a lunette spearhead (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was bought by General Pitt Rivers and displayed in his museum in Farnham, Dorset. The spearhead’s origins in the Roots collection and similarity to other spearheads from Selborne/Blackmoor suggests that it came from the same hoard.

This spearhead remained in the Pitt Rivers collections until the Farnham Museum closed in 1966, when much of the collection was dispersed to the Salisbury Museum and private collectors. Sometime after, the spearhead became part of Lord McAlpine’s extensive collection. After getting involved in the restoration of the Victorian town of Broome in Western Australia, Lord McAlpine sold off much of his private estate and collections, including the spearhead, to the New York art dealer Peter Sharrer. Sharrer donated the spearhead to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998, along some other Bronze Age objects originally from the Roots Collection, where it is on display in Room 301, one of the few representations of the British Bronze Age in the Met.

While originally interpreted as representing a ‘founder’s hoard’ (i.e. containing a mix of broken metal objects for melting and re-using at a later time), recent research suggests that these objects were being purposely deposited in the ground in a particular, possibly ritualistic, manner. Also, rather than being used in everyday struggles or battles, the weapons found in such hoards may more likely be representative of social status and a ‘warrior aesthetic’ that developed later in the Bronze Age. A recent analysis of MBA-EIA (Early Iron Age) skulls found in the Thames shows that almost all exhibit blunt force injuries, at a time when the archaeological record is dominated by edged weapons, such as swords and spears. Not only does this have implications for the massive record of elaborate bronze weapons found in the Thames and other watery locations, but for all weapon hoards. Perhaps this explains why we get such elaborate and beautiful examples of weapons both from the Thames and from LBA hoards; the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the Selborne spearhead as representing the

…highest tradition of the British Bronze Age. The piece is undeniably beautiful: its shape is elegant and spare to the point of evoking modern art. The raised rib in the middle, which also outlines the half-moon or lunette openings, may have been designed as a blood channel.

Help us find out more about the Selborne-Blackmoor hoard! If you are interested in helping us research and enrich our knowledge of the Bronze Age, please join us at MicroPasts.

The MicroPasts project team is led by Professor Andy Bevan (Institute of Archaeology (IOA), UCL) and co-investigated by Daniel Pett and Rachael Sparks (IOA, UCL). The British Museum Bronze Age Index is managed by Jennifer Wexler in collaboration with Neil Wilkin and Chiara Bonacchi (IOA, UCL) and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert (IOA, UCL) are the principal researchers.

The Project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Matthew Cock, Head of Web, British Museum

In August this year, a team from CyArk scanned the British Museum’s collection of Assyrian reliefs displayed on the Ground floor, using three different techniques: LiDAR, structured-light and photogrammetry.

Detail of relief from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, Iraq. The king is in his chariot shooting arrows at succession of lions (ME 124867).

The reliefs were originally commissioned by powerful Assyrian kings between the 9th and 7th centuries BC for their palaces, at a time when the small kingdom of Assyria, in what is now northern Iraq, expanded through conquest to dominate the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf to the Nile. The carved images range from symbolic scenes of royal achievements to scenes of conquest and hunting that all serve to glorify the Assyrian monarch.

Reception of Nineveh sculptures at the British Museum, The Illustrated London News 1852, p. 184. Etching and engraving.

The reliefs were acquired by the Museum in the late 1840s and 1850s as a result of the Treasury-sponsored archaeological expeditions of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who began his excavations at the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud in 1845. The first reliefs arrived in London in June 1847, followed soon by the monumental human-headed winged bulls. To accommodate them, the Assyrian galleries were created – between the Egyptian sculpture and Greek sculpture galleries – where they remain today.

As well as contributing to CyArk’s archive of cultural heritage, the scans provide a fantastic resource that we can use to help people better understand and engage with these objects. The carved panels work like modern comic books, starting the story at one end and following it along the walls to the conclusion. They were designed as a narrative, to be ‘read’ by the king, court and visitors to the royal palaces. It is incredibly difficult to get a good sense of that narrative, or their scale or presence through still images or even video.

With the help of the 3D models created from the scans, we have the potential to develop interpretative media in the galleries, online and through mobile and wearable technology. There are many potential approaches, from delineating the carved scenes where the stone has deteriorated to reconstructing the original architectural scheme, complete with colour paint, and torch-lit ambience as they might have appeared to the Assyrians in their original setting. The video above shows an early trial developed by CyArk using scans from the Siege of Lachish reliefs in Room 10b.

Imaginative reconstruction of the interior of an Assyrian palace. A H Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh, London, 1849, plate 2.

Computer 3D technology is being increasingly adopted in museums to aid with conservation, curatorial research and interpretation. When the Assyrian reliefs first arrived in the Museum almost exactly 160 years ago, the latest imaging technology of the time – photography – was in its infancy. Interestingly, it grew up closely connected with the developing discipline of archaeology. Indeed, the main players in the early histories of archaeology, photography and philology (the study of language, but particularly the decipherment of ancient languages) moved in the same social and scholarly circles in London, meeting, corresponding and collaborating.

The early pioneer of photography William Henry Fox-Talbot was also fascinated with archaeology and convinced of the usefulness of his invention to museum and archaeological practices. He had visited the British Museum Trustees in 1843 to demonstrate his invention, but failed to persuade Charles Fellows, then excavating in Lycia, in what is now southern Turkey, to take the bulky and fragile equipment on his next expedition.

But by the 1850s, the equipment and processes were simpler, and interest at the Museum had grown. Edward Hawkins, Keeper of the Department of Antiquities, responsible for the Assyrian objects, was keen for photographs to be made of the growing collection of cuneiform tablets (arriving from Assyria at the same time as the reliefs) to help allow Edward Hincks, an Irish scholar and expert in cuneiform, and others (including Fox-Talbot himself) to translate them.

Collotype print photograph of Roger Fenton, taken by an unknown photographer, c. 1860. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library (2003-5001/2/22878).

Hawkins talked to Lord Rosse, scientist and President of the Royal Society, and British Museum Trustee, and soon after the Trustees instructed the Museum to employ a photographer. The advice of another scientist, Charles Wheatstone, was sought. Wheatstone had invented stereoscopy, creating the first stereoscopic viewer in 1838 which created the illusion of 3D. This early model used illustrations, but photography provided a far more suitable medium. Wheatstone had been collaborating with the photographer Roger Fenton, and recommended him for the job.

Roger Fenton, The Assyrian Gallery, British Museum. stereoscopic pair of photographs, c. 1850s.

Part of Fenton’s early work at the Museum was a series of stereoscopic photographs of galleries, which survive as part of Wheatstone’s collection now in the archives of King’s College, London. One of those shows a tantalising view of the newly opened Assyrian Gallery.

Stereo viewer, with view of Edinburgh Castle and the Grassmarket. This viewer is an example of the more portable development of the technology that followed Wheatstone’s earlier ‘desktop’ models. Photo © Peter Stubbs.

Stereoscopy became a huge craze in the late 1850s and 1860s, and persisted well into the 20th century. Today’s virtual reality wearable technology, such as Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard echo their forerunners in intention (an immersive experience) and appearance.

First in the series of Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Kuyunjik Collection of cuneiform tablets. Albumen prints on card. Archives of the Middle East Department at the British Museum

Cuneiform clay tablet, a salt paper print photograph by Roger Fenton, c. 1854. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library (1937-4093).

As well as experimenting with this new 3D technology in the galleries, Fenton also made photographs of the objects, as was his brief. Between 1853 and 1854 he systematically photographed the series of cuneiform tablets known as the Kuyunkjik Collection. One of Fenton’s greatest challenges was lighting. He had a glass studio built on the roof of the Museum, based on his own studio in his home in North London. Portable objects such as the cuneiform tablets were brought there to be photographed. By May 1856, Fenton and his assistants had made more than 8,000 prints in the galleries and his rooftop studio.

Standing in the gallery watching CyArk’s scanners spinning and collecting millions of points of data, I reflected on how the British Museum and the Assyrian objects that so fascinated scholars and public alike in the late 19th century were once again the site of a new technology in its early years. Museum technologists have to make difficult decisions on what to adopt and when. Soon after the period discussed above, the British Museum’s early interest in photography waned, likely mainly due to the high cost of the equipment and materials. Fenton’s employment was ended in 1859, and many of his negatives were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they form part of the UK’s national collection of the art of photography. But still, of course, that doesn’t mean it never happened: 160 years on, and the British Museum now has over 1.2 million images of objects in the collection online.

CyArk have enabled us to investigate the possibilities of 3D with a significant group of objects from the collection, and I am optimistic that this is just the beginning. It doesn’t take much to imagine a time when 3D scans become the de facto method of recording objects in the collection. I believe that this project – and once again the Assyrian reliefs – are remembered as a key moment in that change.

The Assyrian reliefs are on display in Rooms 6-10 on the Ground floor of the British Museum.

If you are interested in stereoscopy, visit the BP Spotlight: ‘Poor man’s picture gallery': Victorian Art and Stereoscopic Photography at Tate Britain from 13 October 2014 – April 2015

A selection of 3D models of British Museum objects can be viewed, embedded and downloaded from our Sketchfab channel.

Craig Clunas, Professor of the History of Art, University of Oxford and co-curator of the BP Exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China

Of the many paintings included in the BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China, one of the most famous is the ‘Elegant gathering in the Apricot Garden’, showing a swanky party held in 1437 in the garden of Yang Rong (1371–1440), Grand Secretary and all-round important person of early fifteenth-century China. It’s in all the books on Ming painting, appears on loads of websites, and is generally one of the most reproduced images dating from the period covered by the exhibition. This is partly because of where the painted silk handscroll now is, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and so it has been relatively easy to view and study, as well as to publish in books about Chinese art. I’ve used it myself in the classroom and lectures in all sorts of ways, as it’s a very rich image for talking about patronage of the arts, the relationship between politics and art in the Ming, the role of the artist and lots of other topics. I find it is one of those images that you can always learn more about, and indeed there remain a number of mysteries.

Who is it by? It bears the signature of an artist called Xie Huan; his dates used to be a bit vague, but recent research by Yin Ji’nan, Professor of Art History at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, has established definitively that he was born in 1377 and died in 1452. He was an important person in the early Ming art world, apparently working as an advisor and painter to the Yongle and Xuande emperors, as well as maintaining a presumably lucrative private practice, producing images like this for important people like Yang Rong and his friends.

Anonymous, after Zie Huan (1377–1452), ‘Elegant gathering in the Apricot Garden’ (detail); handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 1437. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift 1989.

The nature of the event – senior officials of the empire demonstrating the calm and peaceful state of affairs by gathering for a day of relaxed gentlemanly pastimes – means that more than one person present might have wanted to have an image of the party. Indeed another version of the same subject exists, in the Zhenjiang Museum in China. Are both paintings by Xie Huan? Did he, like Italian artists at the time, run a workshop where multiple versions of the same subject were turned out with the help of assistants? Is one painting the original, and the other just a copy?

Anonymous, after Zie Huan (1377–1452), ‘Elegant gathering in the Apricot Garden’ (detail); handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 1437. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift 1989.

All of these views have been put forward by art historians at some point, and indeed I’ve contributed in my time to the scholarship on this painting; I’m particularly intrigued by the painting within the painting (of which we can only see a tiny corner). So it’s a bit humbling to confess that there is a detail of this painting that I’ve never really noticed before, though I’ve looked at it many times, both in reproductions and at the Met in New York. The figures depicted as attending the party are all men, since mixed-sex gatherings would have been vaguely indecent affairs in the Ming, where men and women were strictly segregated in most aspects of elite life. The servants who attend them are all male too, young boys who hold up the painting for viewing, or roll up scrolls no longer wanted, or attend to incense or bringing in the drinks.

Anonymous, after Zie Huan (1377–1452), ‘Elegant gathering in the Apricot Garden’ (detail); handscroll, ink and colours on silk, 1437. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift 1989.

Except (and this is what never registered properly with me until I had the chance for extended viewing of the picture in the exhibition), that there is one woman visible. She is right at the very left edge of the scroll, the last section to be unrolled when the painting was viewed in sections. She is peeping out from behind a tree, coming out from (presumably) the kitchens carrying a large handled basin. We can’t see the contents, perhaps it is hot water to warm the wine, or maybe it is meant to represent a serving of snacks to go with the drinks. She is doing something important, but unregarded. As it happens, historical Ming gossip tells us that Yang Rong had a famously dowdy wife, a woman from his home province of Jiangxi in the south; she was once given a makeover by the empress, to the extent that she was unrecognisable beneath the added palace glamour. I don’t think the woman in the painting is meant to be her. Yang Rong’s wife was after all a lady, she did not serve the drinks at parties. But I’ve become aware that my own failure to notice her until recently has compounded the invisibility of women, which skews our understanding of Ming art and Ming culture more generally.

In 1437 the emperor was a young boy, and the gentlemen we see here were in fact governing the empire in coalition with the powerful women of the imperial family, the child ruler’s mother and grandmother. I like to think – in fact it’s entirely reasonable to think – that in the depths of the palace they and their ladies-in-waiting were partying in their own way. But they’re not in the picture.

The BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China is at the British Museum from 18 September 2014 to 5 January 2015.
Supported by BP

Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall are editors of the exhibition catalogue, The BP exhibition: Ming: 50 years that changed China, which is available in paperback and hardback from the British Museum shop online

Emma Taylor, Supplementary Schools Programme Coordinator, British Museum

There are approximately 5,000 supplementary schools in the UK. They usually cater for minority ethnic communities and aim to raise the attainment of children and young people by providing learning opportunities in core curriculum subjects such as Maths, English and Science, and often also provide mother-tongue and cultural teaching. On 8–9 November the Museum’s Community Partnerships Team ran a supplementary schools and families activity weekend which saw 500 supplementary school students, teachers and their families attend, taking part in a range of fun, interactive activities and visiting the Museum’s galleries.

Our supplementary schools programme began in 2012 and since then we have organised six activity weekends which support community schools and their wider communities to access the Museum’s collection, but this was the first time that the entire programme of activities has been created by young people. The journey began in May when we invited supplementary schools to enter a competition to create an artistic project based on their favourite objects in the Museum. Three supplementary schools were chosen to take part, each partnered with an artist who worked with them over a series of three workshops to create a performance or installation to be showcased at the Museum during the activity weekend.

Students from EC Lighthouse researching the objects in the Roman Empire gallery. Photo © Benedict Johnson

Students from EC Lighhouse performing ‘Reawakening Rome’ at the Museum. Photo © Benedict Johnson

Students from EC Lighthouse, a Lithuanian supplementary school in Tower Hamlets, took part in a dance project supported b Katie Green. Responding to objects in the Wolfson Gallery: Roman Empire (Room 70), they created a performance piece examining the interconnected stories of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Mark Antony. With an emphasis on bringing museum objects to life through movement, the dancers began by exploring how people represented themselves in the Roman era, reawakening the statues and busts in the gallery. They then went on to work with a broad range of themes including loyalty, power, competition and conflict to create their final piece which was performed at the Museum.

Students from IYDA learning different artistic techniques. Photo © Benedict Johnson

Young people from IYDA next to their art installation ’Reimagining the Palace of Persepolis’ in the Great Court. Photo © Benedict Johnson

Students from IYDA, a youth group for children and young people in the Farsi speaking communities (predominantly Iranian and Afghan), took part in a creative arts project inspired by the stone reliefs from the palace of Persepolis, displayed in the Rahim Irvani Gallery: Ancient Iran (Room 52). Based on their visit to the gallery, the young people were asked to imagine that they were a ruler, like King Darius I, who had commissioned a new palace. They were asked to think about what murals and scenes they would include, showing the type of ruler they would be. Supported by artist Stephanie Hartman, they experimented with different art techniques and created palace tiles and a garden mural for an installation that was displayed in the Great Court.

Children from the Czech School without Borders visiting the nef; gaining inspiration for their storytelling soundscape

Children from the Czech School without Borders taking visitors up to the Clocks and Watches gallery with their nef. Photo © Benedict Johnson

Finally 12 children aged 4-6 from the Czech School without Borders, London took part in a storytelling project with author and playwright Sam Gayton, based on the mechanical nef, an automated clock in the form of a ship, displayed in the Clocks and Watches gallery. When the children visited the nef, they were mesmerised by how it was used to signal the beginning of a banquet by playing music, gliding along the table and firing its cannons, although some weren’t so sure they would like it on their table at home!

As the nef is currently part of the exhibition Germany: memories of a nation they used the case where it normally lives in the Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Gallery: Clocks (Room 39) to inspire songs, poems and stories about the object’s imaginary journey across the Museum and beyond. Here are the lyrics to the song they wrote:

I’m a mechanical golden ship
In the British Museum I sit
But nobody’s wound me up for a bit
I’m feeling sad and lonely!

I just sit behind this glass
Watching all the people pass
I better get me outta here fast!
I want someone to play with me…
I’m feeling sad and CRYING!

All of these responses were made into a storytelling soundscape which was played during the activity weekend in the Ford Centre. At the end of each soundscape performance the children invited guests to join them and visit Room 39 with the help of their own nef.

‘Enjoyable, educational, arty, interesting and just fun’ was how one student described the Museum having taken part in the project, but I would also use these words to describe the atmosphere during the weekend. The young people all took such pride in the work that they’d produced, which really added to the communal, feel-good atmosphere of the weekend.

There is a natural affinity between supplementary schools, which cater for diverse communities, and the British Museum’s collection, which spans the history of the world’s cultures. It has always been the aim of our programme to encourage cross-cultural and thematic connections in the Museum. This project and activity weekend allowed us to continue this practice but also to branch out and facilitate a deeper form of collaborative working between supplementary schools, artists and the Museum. All three projects also received support and guidance from curatorial teams and Anisha Birk, Sackler Scholar for Ancient Iran, met with students from IYDA and provided a tour of the Ancient Iran gallery which really added to the groups understanding of the historical period. Through the feedback we received and their reactions during the activity weekend it is clear that the young people developed a real appreciation and sense of ownership of the objects and galleries they chose to focus on and I am confident that taking part in these creative learning projects has allowed us to build more meaningful and sustainable relationships with our community partners.

Neil MacGregor, Director, British Museum

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The British Museum is a museum of the world, for the world and nothing demonstrates this more than the loan of a Parthenon sculpture to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg to celebrate its 250th anniversary.

The river-god Ilissos. Marble statue from the West pediment of the Parthenon, Athens, Greece, 438–432 BC (British Museum 1816,0610.99)

The British Museum opened its doors in 1759, just five years before the Hermitage. Sisters, almost twins, they are the first great museums of the European Enlightenment. But they were never just about Europe. The Trustees of the British Museum were set up by Parliament to hold their collection to benefit not only the citizens of Great Britain, but ‘all studious and curious persons’ everywhere. The Museum today is the most generous lender in the world, sending great Assyrian objects to China, Egyptian objects to India and Iranian objects to the United States – making a reality of the Enlightenment ideal that the greatest things in the world should be seen and studied, shared and enjoyed by as many people in as many countries as possible.

The Trustees have always believed that such loans must continue between museums in spite of political disagreements between governments. That is why in 2011 they lent the Cyrus Cylinder, the document setting out the humane ideals of the ancient Persian Empire, to Tehran. It is a position energetically shared by our counterparts in Russia. Last year, the Hermitage lent the spectacular collection of paintings, formed by Sir Robert Walpole and sold to Catherine the Great, back to his country house, Houghton Hall, for the summer. Loans from Russian museums enriched the recent exhibition Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind and the BP exhibition Vikings: life and legend both at the British Museum, and Malevich at Tate Modern earlier this year was an outstanding act of Russian generosity, enjoyed by thousands of visitors. Both Tate and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts are in return lending works to the exhibition Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past which opens at the Hermitage this weekend.

So, when our colleagues at the Hermitage asked if we might also make an important loan to celebrate their 250th anniversary, the Trustees immediately answered yes. And no loan could more fittingly mark the long friendship of our two houses, or the period of their founding, than a sculpture from the Parthenon.

Sculptures from the West pediment on display in Room 18

The great leader of Athens, and the visionary spokesman for its exemplary status for all humanity, was Pericles. In 431 BC, in his famous funeral oration for the heroic Athenian dead, he proclaimed the world-wide renown to which destiny had summoned both them, and their city:

For glorious men like them, the whole earth is their sepulchre. And their memorial is carved not only on a headstone by their home, but far away in foreign lands, unwritten, in the minds of every man…

Marble portrait bust of Pericles. Roman copy of a Greek original (British Museum GR 1805.0703.91)

Two and a half thousand years later, I hope that Pericles would applaud the journey of Ilissos to Russia, where ‘far away in foreign lands’, this stone ambassador of the Greek golden age and European ideals will write ancient Athens’s achievements – aesthetic, moral and political – in ‘the minds of every man’. It is a message that Russia, and the whole world, need to hear and I am delighted that the British Museum has been able to lend such a remarkable object.

This post is based on the text of an article by Neil MacGregor for The Times, 5 December 2014.

Press release – British Museum loan of Parthenon Sculpture to State Hermitage Museum

The river-god Ilissos from the West pediment of the Parthenon is on display at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, from Saturday 6 December 2014 until 18 January 2015.

More about the Parthenon sculptures on the British Museum website

Comments for this post are closed until Friday 5th December 09:00 am GMT

Jin Xian Qiu, Senior Conservator of Chinese Paintings and Carol Weiss, Conservator of Chinese Paintings, British Museum

On entering the BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China, one of the first objects visitors see is a large silk painting depicting an official in front of Beijing’s Forbidden City. This Ming dynasty painting by artist Zhu Bang was conserved especially for the exhibition, using traditional Chinese scroll mounting techniques that have been passed down from master to student since before this 500-year-old painting was even painted.

The British Museum is extraordinarily fortunate to have as its Senior Conservator of Chinese Paintings Mrs Jin Xian Qiu, who originally trained and worked in Shanghai Museum before coming to the British Museum 27 years ago. It is thanks to her expertise that many of the Museum’s Chinese paintings can be displayed today. For this particular project, along with the help of her assistants and colleagues in the Hirayama Studio (part of the British Museum’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research, working on East Asian paintings) Mrs Qiu was joined by Mr Chu Hao, a Senior Paintings Conservator from Shanghai Museum, who assisted with some of the processes that make up this painstaking treatment.

Anonymous, Portrait of an offical in front of the Beijing imperial palace, hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, c. 1480-1580 (British Museum 1881,1210,0.87.CH). Before treatment.

Traditionally, East Asian scroll paintings are habitually conserved and cared for over the course of their lifetimes by a process of remounting. The paintings themselves are cleaned and repaired, whilst the surrounding silk borders and accompanying lining papers are replaced with new materials. It is because of this remounting that many silk paintings survive today as hanging scrolls. Because our painting was in poor condition, it was decided to completely remount it.

Before any work could start on the painting, its condition was documented using detailed photography and microscopy. At the same time, appropriate materials had to be prepared and sourced; from dyeing the new first lining paper to exactly the right shade and tone, to finding matching old silks to repair all the missing areas. Mrs Qiu donated a Ming dynasty silk, which matched very closely the colour and weave of the painting, from her own collection (which was passed down to her by her scroll mounting teacher in Shanghai).

Strengthening pigments with nikawa (a traditional East Asian consolidant)

After consolidating any vulnerable pigments, the treatment could begin. The old unsuitable mount was removed from the painting, and in the process of doing so, wider hidden painted edges and more of a seal were revealed. The painting was then ‘washed’ four times in a wet treatment that removes acidity and discolouration from the silk. This process involves carefully sprinkling water onto the surface of the painting before gently removing the excess.

After cleaning, in order to stabilise the silk weave during the upcoming treatments, a temporary facing was applied to the painting’s surface, now nicely flattened by the wet treatment. This facing is made of tong oil paper (a specially treated water-resistant paper) with further layers of xuan paper (a short-fibred paper used in all Chinese scroll mounting and much East Asian calligraphy and painting) applied on top for extra stability.

Mrs Qiu with her two assistants, Valentina Marabini and Carol Weiss, removing the painting’s old backing papers

With the surface protected, the painting could be turned over and stuck to the table face-down to reveal many layers of backing papers. These were removed with tweezers, sometimes in long strips, sometimes fibre by fibre, along with old unsuitable silk repairs. Only now was the real extent of damage to the painting revealed, and while still damp, misaligned silk pieces were carefully realigned to their correct positions.

Mrs Qiu repairing the missing silk areas

Once dry, the process of silk repair could begin, being careful not to waste any of the precious ancient silk resources. Shaped patches of repair silk were adhered to the back of the missing areas and once dry any overlapping edges were carefully pared away. Because the painting was in such bad condition, this process alone took three conservators working for around six weeks.

Mrs Qiu with her assistants and Mr Chu Hao from Shanghai Museum, after the painting has been lined and its facings removed.

It was at this stage that Mr Chu Hao from Shanghai Museum joined the team to help apply the new lining papers. The first lining was dyed Chinese xuan paper, and the second, long-fibred Japanese usumino paper. Mrs Qiu developed this technique, which she thinks provides extra strength, after coming to the British Museum’s Hirayama Studio, where our Chinese and Japanese expert scroll mounters work together – a wonderfully unique situation, and one of its kind here in Europe. After this double-layer of lining was applied to the painting using wheat starch paste, it could be turned over and the temporary facings removed. Then it was applied to a drying board to allow the process of toning the repairs to begin.

Mrs Qiu and Mr Chu Hao retouching the painting on the drying board.

With the conservation aspect of the treatment finished, the mounting work could begin. Mount silks were lined and dyed to best enhance the painting, before being cut into carefully proportioned rectangles that were adhered to the painting’s edges to make an aesthetic border. Slender paper reinforcement strips were applied to the back of the lined painting wherever there was previously a crack or crease, and then the whole mounted painting was given a final backing of two layers of xuan paper with cover silk at the top (to protect the scroll once rolled). This was attached to the drying board for many months, before it was removed and the back burnished, producing a smooth finish ideal for a scroll that will be rolled up. Finally, wooden fittings including the top stave, bottom roller and roller knobs were attached, and the hanging braid and tying ribbon tied on to produce a finished hanging scroll.

Anonymous, Portrait of an offical in front of the Beijing imperial palace, hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk, c. 1480-1580 (British Museum 1881,1210,0.87.CH). After conservation.

From undertaking the first analysis to tying the final ribbon, the entire process took over a year, with other paintings worked on during the long periods of drying. The painting is now stable and can be rolled and unrolled for display without risk of damage; the silk has been cleaned and strengthened by the washing and repair processes and the entire painting has been flattened by its new lining. Details in the painting, previously hidden by stains or creases, are visible once more. A hundred or more years should pass before this painting will need to be remounted again, its journey of conservation and potential to be preserved never-ending while there are still expert scroll mounters to care for these works in the traditional Chinese style.

The BP exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China is at the British Museum until 5 January 2015.
Supported by BP

The exhibition catalogue, The BP exhibition: Ming: 50 years that changed China, edited by Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall, is available in paperback and hardback from the British Museum shop online

David Francis, Interpretation Officer, British Museum

In his Twelve Caesars, the Roman historian Suetonius describes how the emperor Augustus’ eyes ‘shone with a sort of divine radiance’ and that it gave him profound pleasure ‘if anyone at whom he glanced keenly dropped his head as though dazzled by looking into the sun.’

The Meroë Head. Roman, 27–25 BC (British Museum 1911,0901.1)

The Merӧe Head, the only bronze portrait of Augustus to have survived with its original inlaid eyes, perfectly captures the enigmatic gaze of the Roman emperor. Depending on how the light falls, the expression of the head can vary from haughty disdain to melancholic introspection. The whites of the eyes are further emphasised by the dark green sheen of the emperor’s skin and hair. This is a result of the oxidation process that has covered the original bronze surface with a deep marine green patina. This otherworldly quality is fitting for a man who was deified as a god upon his death.

The Meroë Head. Roman, 27–25 BC (British Museum 1911,0901.1)

The Merӧe Head is one of the great treasures of the British Museum, selected as one of the objects featured in the the British Museum and BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 objects in 2010. However, it was but one ofmany portraits of Augustus, which were mechanically copied and sent to the far-flung corners of the Roman Empire as a form of imperial propaganda. Today, very few bronze statues from the Roman world survive; most were melted down due to the value of their metal. The story behind how the Merӧe Head avoided such a fate is a fascinating one and told in the new display in Room 3, The Meroë Head: Africa defies Rome.

One of the first photographs of the Meroë Head taken in the field, December 1910. © The Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool

The head was first unearthed in December 1910, during an excavation led by Professor John Garstang (1876–1956) of Liverpool University, on the site of the ancient city of Merӧe in what is now modern-day Sudan. Merӧe was the capital of Kush, a powerful African kingdom that from 1070 BC onwards rivalled Egypt for control of the region. Like their neighbours they built vast pyramid complexes, which can still be visited today. What made this find so unexpected was that Merӧe was located close to the sixth cataract of the Nile, hundreds of miles from the Roman border in Egypt. What could the head of a Roman emperor be doing here?

Clues lie in the writings of the Greek historian Strabo who reported that in AD 25, a Merӧite army led by King Teriteqas and the one-eyed queen Amanirenas attacked the Roman garrisons at Syene, Elephantina and Philae, ‘enslaved the inhabitants’ and ‘threw down the statues of Caesar’. Caesar here refers to the Roman title for emperor and it was thought that the Merӧe Head may have once belonged to one of the statues plundered during these raids, before it was decapitated.

Remains of the building where the Meroë Head was discovered at the beginning of the 1910 season. © The Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool

Lord Kitchener (1850–1916) and other British officials visit the site during the excavation (Kitchener is second from left, Professor John Garstang on the far right). © The Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool.

Garstang and his fellow archaeologists found the head buried in the doorway to a building, which was located outside of the main city. The building was decorated with frescoes showing the king and queen enthroned, while a line of bound, kneeling slaves are presented to them. Some of these slaves have the distinctive helmets and tunics of Roman soldiers. It was therefore thought that the building may have been a victory monument, or a temple. In burying the head, the Merӧites ensured that everyone who entered the building would trample this image of the emperor Augustus beneath their feet, thereby ritually perpetuating the Merӧite victory over the Romans. Ironically, it was this act of desecration that ultimately preserved Augustus’ portrait for future generations to appreciate.

Although we might regard such acts of iconoclasm as the preserve of the ancient world, in fact the decapitation of statues has occurred with surprising regularity over the past 30 years. Targets range from the London Guildhall’s marble Margaret Thatcher, decapitated using a metal rope by protestor Paul Kelleher in 2002, to a statue of Lillestrøm SK football club’s star striker Tom Lund, whose bronze head was stolen by rival fans in 2013. The beheading of statues even features as a plot line in The Simpsons The Telltale Head ((season 1 episode 8, first aired in February 1990), in which Bart chops off the head of the statue of Jebediah Springfield, the eponymous founder of the Simpsons’ home town.

Contemporary acts of statue decapitation have the advantage over the Merӧites in having mass media to spread their message. In April 2003, the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad became one of the defining symbols of the Iraq War. Initially, a former Iraqi champion power-lifter attacked the huge statue with a sledgehammer, but was only able to break off a few chunks of concrete. American troops then intervened, toppling the statue with the aid of rope and a tank. Once on the ground the head of Saddam was beaten with shoes and eventually wrenched from the statue’s body. The toppling was presented as a spontaneous event symbolising the fall of Saddam’s regime by the newly liberated Iraqis. However, it was in fact carefully planned by the US military and broadcast on news bulletins worldwide.

The demolition of the Firdos statue by American troops may itself be a symbolic act of revenge, for the regime’s placement of a portrait of US President George W. Bush on the floor of the Al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad. All visitors to the hotel, particularly Western politicians and businessmen who used to stay there, were forced ritually to trample the face of the leader of the biggest power in the West – just as the Merӧites did with the face of Augustus outside their victory shrine 2,000 years earlier. Unlike the Merӧe Head or the head of Jebediah Springfield, however, the Firdos Head of Saddam has not yet resurfaced. But who knows, perhaps it lies hidden somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered and become a museum piece in the future.

The Asahi Shimbun Displays The Meroë Head of Augustus: Africa defies Rome is in Room 3 from 11 December 2014 to 15 February 2015, admission free.
 

Sascha Priewe, curator, and Ellie Miles, Interpretation Officer, British Museum

The Museum is re-opening its refreshed Korea Foundation Gallery (Room 67) thanks to a generous grant from the National Museum of Korea. The project gave us the chance to re-think how we talk about and display things from the Korean peninsula. We took into account the collection’s profile, and how our visitors actually use our permanent gallery spaces. Most visitors make their own paths around the gallery, so we took down walls and moved cases to open up the space for them to browse and make different connections between objects. Bringing in colourful case designs and a new lighting design, we hope that the new gallery will give the objects a stronger visual impact, and encourage closer looking than before.

Samramansang Moon Jar #1 by Kang Ik-joong (b. 1960), USA, 2010–13, mixed media on wood (British Museum 2014,3046.1)

The collection tells an on-going story of Korean visual and material culture that continues to today. To start this new look at the Korean peninsula’s enduring history, we chose contemporary art with a historical focus. Kang Ik-joong (b. 1960) is an artist whose paintings of moon jars from the Joseon period (1392–1910) are particularly well known. His spectacular Samramansang Moon Jar #1 will welcome visitors into the gallery.

One of the parts of the new gallery that we are most excited about is the cases that we have reserved for changing displays. These will allow the gallery to be responsive to the events programme, new acquisitions and visitor interest. When the gallery opens on 16 December the first of these cases will show the work of Nam June Paik (1932–2006),the Korean pioneer of video art. The display of his works is in step with other interest in him, such as Tate Modern’s current exhibition. The other changing cases will allow us to make links with other collections within the Museum, too, and with the Museum’s exhibition programme.

Korean and Chinese objects displayed in Eumorfopoulos’ home, originally published in George Eumorfopoulos, G.E. 7, Chelsea Embankment, December 1934 (1934).

As we’ve been thinking about the re-display, the first ‘mini-exhibition’ will look at the history of the Korean collection at the British Museum, and how the earliest Western collectors of Korean art might have seen Korea. The beginnings of the Korean collections and the collecting of Korean objects began in the 19th century through the likes of the diplomat Thomas Watters (1840-1901), William Gowland (18427–1922), who worked for the Japanese mint, and George Eumorfopoulos (1863–1939), an ‘Oriental’ art collector in London, each representing different types of collectors. Between the three of them they amassed important collections but each with a very different texture.

East Gate – Seoul, colour woodcut by Elizabeth Keith (1887–1956), Britain, c. 1924, (British Museum PD 1928,0310.40)

Another lens through which Korea was seen was through photography and paintings. The display will show books featuring images of Korea published by the collectors’ contemporaries. Depictions of trades, pastimes, boats, architecture, costumes and natural history and so forth provided a lens through which Asia was perceived. And we will also show prints by Europeans and Americans that they made based on their impressions of Korea.

The gallery refreshment has given us the chance to look into the collection from different angles, to explore its strengths and its weaknesses. We have made some new discoveries and reconnected with objects that have been ‘old friends’. But our main task has been to improve the gallery to serve the visitors much more consciously by telling exciting stories and making connections with a part of the world, its past and present, that is still largely unknown.

The Korea Foundation Gallery</a re-opens on 17 December 2014, admission free.
View on the floorplan

Sascha Priewe, curator, The British Museum

When the embassy of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) opened its doors for an art exhibition in November, here at the British Museum we were busy preparing the Korea Foundation Gallery for its re-display, which opens today. Given the curiosity about the mysterious state and the artists working there, it seemed timely to write about the British Museum’s collection of art from North Korea.

Silver coin commemorating the meeting of the leaders of South and North Korea in 2000, Pyongyang, DPRK, 2000 (British Museum OR.9666)

In June 2000 South Korean president Kim Dae-jung (1924-2009) met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (1941-2011) in the first Inter-Korean Summit in Pyongyang, the DPRK capital. It was the time of ‘sunshine’ relations between the north and the south. Although north-south relations have iced over in recent years, this brief period allowed the world a glimpse into one of the planet’s most inaccessible societies.

In 2001 and 2002 colleagues from the British Museum and the British Library visited the DPRK. Jane Portal, then the curator of the Korean collections (and now the BM’s Keeper of Asia) built of one of the largest collections of DPRK works of art in a Western museum. On her first trip Portal collected woodblock prints, ink paintings, oil paintings, posters, calligraphy, ceramics, lacquer and commemorative coins. On her second visit she collected mostly prints and posters. Thanks to this initiative the British Museum now has about 80 objects from the DPRK.

The Steelworker, Song Chan-yong (b. 1930), Oil on canvas. Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, about 1990-99 (British Museum 2001,0607,0.6)

The DPRK’s regime leaves artists few of the freedoms that artists in other parts of the world take for granted. Art from the DPRK is usually seen as a state-controlled propaganda tool. Often there has been little room to appreciate the works as works of art. But once we understand the context and constraints in which art is produced, we have the opportunity to think about their qualities as works of art. One example is The Steelworker, an oil painting by Song Chan-yong (b. 1930). The portrayal of a worker is naturally in tune with the tenets of a socialist country, however, with Song’s own words we can add a layer of appreciation to the work:

I have dedicated all my artistic life to drawing the subject of the working classes. The base of our society is the working class so I should draw them. I always like to place my easel in a glaring blast furnace not in a splendid studio. Then it seems to be more realistic. I intended to be an artist of the workers in the world of workers.

This and other works in the collection permit glimpses into an isolated world, which for most of us seems like a different universe.

Celadon-glazed porcelain with inlaid decoration. From Pyongyang, DPRK, c. 2002. (British Museum 2002,0930.1)

When I visited the Pyongyang and other parts of the DPRK as a tourist in 2005, I felt as if I was stepping into the photographs, footage and stories of 1970s China. The place felt otherworldly, but realising that this physical manifestation is a reality for millions of people held me firmly on the ground. But it is within this context that great works of art are being created. There is politics behind some art, but there is also art behind some politics.

Sian Toogood, Broadcast Manager, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, British Museum

In the century or so since the birth of film, the British Museum has had many cameras within its galleries, labs and libraries. For the most part they have been filming documentaries, unravelling mysteries of the Museum’s collection, but every once in a while the Museum gets to participate in the organised chaos that is feature film production. In the past we have had Hitchcock in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, Merchant Ivory in the Assyrian Galleries and Phaedra in the Parthenon Galleries; we can now add Fox to this pantheon, with their third installment of the hugely popular Night at the Museum series: Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb.

I was extremely pleased when I was approached by Fox, not because it was a fantastic opportunity to get more people interested in the Museum, nor because it would be an interesting project filled with lots of exciting and complicated challenges (though it was undoubtedly both of these things). I was pleased because ever since I’ve worked at the British Museum I have consistently been asked why they didn’t film Night at the Museum here! Now I can finally say that we have.

The limitations of what is possible within the Museum meant that Fox only filmed at the Museum for three nights, from the moment the gates closed to the public to 07.00 the next day. The remainder of the British Museum scenes were shot over three months on a specially built set in Vancouver, Canada. Filming a full-scale feature in a 19th-century Grade I listed building is no joke – given some of the dramatic and explosive chase and fight scenes, it could never have been done on the actual premises.

Those of you who have seen the film and know the Museum, even reasonably well, might wonder why parts of the fictional Museum look so different to the real thing. There are significant differences between the real Museum and the museum of the film. For one thing, our natural history collection became the basis of the Natural History Museum in 1889, so to see a triceratops you will have to go to South Kensington. Equally, if you want to see a knight in full armour, then the Wallace Collection is a much better bet. I’m afraid I can’t tell you where to find a nine-headed serpent cast in bronze though!

Apart from the objects in the collection, the layout and style of the Museum has been almost entirely altered for the film, with only the Parthenon Gallery (Room 18) and the Great Court remaining as they are in real life. So why was there a need to change the Museum to such an extent? Well, this film is the third in a series and so it had to fit in with the aesthetics of its predecessors in the trilogy, and we must allow for the artistic licence of the film’s director, Shawn Levy. This is an adventure film with a wish to get young people hooked on history. While there are some wild inventions, the Fox team also paid meticulous attention to detail for the general ‘look’ of the British Museum. For example, the Museum’s distinctive brass doorknobs were designed especially for the Museum and can be found nowhere else in the world. We sent a single pair of them to Vancouver so that they could be recreated for the film.

The Artistic Director spent a week looking at the original plans and elevations of the Parthenon and Egyptian Sculpture Galleries, and recording the details of many of the galleries, floor tiles, heating grills and columns to faithfully recreate them. Paint chips and marble samples went to Vancouver to join the doorknobs and these details, along with the great care that Fox took to recreate signage in the building, make a lot of the imagined Museum look as though these scenes could have been shot in brand new galleries of the British Museum.

We were lucky that Night at the Museum came in only few months after we had had our own first foray into cinema production with a live broadcast from our exhibition on Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Museum facilitates about 50 commercial film crews a year, shooting documentaries, music videos, fashion photo shoots and commercials, so we are well used to dealing with the requirements of film crews. But it was the experience of broadcasting live to hundreds of cinemas nationwide that gave us the confidence and base knowledge about the fabric of the building to be able to facilitate the scale of Night at the Museum. All those tedious facts about the weight loading capacity of the forecourt and the exact power provision in the Great Court suddenly became very useful!

Fox were certainly not the average Museum film crew. They had 200 crew on site, a 40-tonne crane, helium balloon lights so large they couldn’t fit through the front door when inflated, and a myriad of other lights, cameras and stands. There was also a visual effects crew that 3d-scanned key spaces and dozens of objects from the collection to populate the film with living objects. Then there were the horses (outside) and the monkeys (inside). All of this kit, people and animals needed significant managing and overnight supervision.

We saw this film as an opportunity to interest new audiences across the world in museums in general, and to show the British Museum in particular in a new light. At the heart of the series is the idea that when you enter a museum you see the objects gathered there as if they were alive. These objects are used as gateways to other places and times and we invest them with personalities – we do not need to know everything about them to have an emotional connection with them. Visitors to the British Museum in the past might not have had the capabilities of Fox’s digital team, but in our mind’s eye I think we have all seen a lion roar or Greek sculptures walk, and we now have the opportunity to see them on the silver screen.

I doubt that we will ever have another film that is so closely linked to the Museum and its collection. I personally have been delighted and proud to have been part of this new chapter in the Museum’s film history.

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is in cinemas across the UK from 19 December.

Download the free app based on the film to help you explore the Museum, and enter a competition to win a real Night at the Museum!

Caroline Ingham, Senior Designer: Exhibitions, British Museum

Detail of a Bronze reconstruction of around 1920 by George Römer of the Doryphoros or ‘spear-bearer’ by Polykleitos, made around 440–430 BC. H 212 cm. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich

Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art is the first major temporary exhibition of sculpture at the British Museum since Hadrian: Empire & Conflict in 2008. It is also the first sculpture show in the new Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery (Room 30). For the Museum’s Exhibitions team this is the culmination of over a year of intensive work with the exhibition’s designers, Caruso St John architects and Matt Bigg, Surface 3 graphics.

Sculptures on display in the exhibition, from left to right: Bronze reconstruction of around 1920 by George Römer of the Doryphoros or ‘spear-bearer’ by Polykleitos, made around 440–430 BC. H 212 cm. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Marble statue of the Diskobolos or ‘discus-thrower’. Roman copy from 2nd century AD of a bronze original of the 5th century BC, from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, Italy. H 169 cm, W 105 cm. British Museum, London 1805,0703.43 Ilissos, marble statue of the river god, from the west pediment of the Parthenon in Athens. Greek, about 438–432 BC. H 81.28 cm, D 56 cm. British Museum, London 1816,0610.99

The exhibition presents some of the most beautiful and best-loved classical sculpture in the Museum’s collection. It includes some key pieces that have been temporarily removed from the permanent galleries to be juxtaposed for the very first and perhaps the only time, with loans of similar international significance. The movement of such important sculptures from the permanent day-lit galleries, into the controlled lighting environment of the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery presented the Exhibitions team with a unique opportunity to experiment with their display.

Through the design brief we challenged the designers to explore how they could present the objects differently, using dramatic lighting and by experimenting with display heights. We encouraged them to exploit the scale of the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery, in particular the 6-metre height and the very flexible lighting system, to encourage visitors to engage with these very familiar objects in a new way and at a deeper level.

Testing fabric colours
Marble statue of a Nereid, from the Nereid monument, Lycian, about 390–380 BC, from Xanthos (modern Günük), south-western Turkey. H 137 cm. British Museum, London 1848,1020.81

It took many months to develop the design scheme. This included trying colours and fabrics against the objects, working up scale drawings of each object group, building a scale model and mocking up full-size elements of the design. We used our new purpose-built mock-up room, adjacent to the new gallery, which has the exact ceiling and floor specification of the gallery itself, to test the plinth heights and lighting.

The result is a scheme that transforms the way we see familiar objects in the collection. The designers have achieved this through the use of colour, lighting and displaying the sculpture at height. Many of the sculptures are lifted to 1.5 metres (approximately shoulder height) and our relationship to them is immediately transformed. The objects are lit from the ceiling track and not the space around them. This privileges them and makes them visible on key vistas – for instance, the Amazon can be seen at the west end of the gallery at a distance of 20 metres or more.

Sculptures on display in the exhibition Foreground: Marble statue of Dionysos from the east pediment of the Parthenon. Greek, about 438–432 BC, from the Acropolis, Athens. L 174 cm, H 127 cm. British Museum, London 1816,0610.93 Background: Belvedere Torso, 1st century BC. Marble copy after a Greek bronze, probably of the early 2nd century BC. H (including base) 156.5 cm, W 87.5 cm. Vatican Museums, Vatican City

The exhibition may not offer the definitive answer to the successful display of sculpture in all circumstances, but what it has done is given us a wonderful opportunity to display these sculptures for a short period, in a new and thought-provoking way.

Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art is on display from 26 March to 5 July 2015.

Sponsored by Julius Baer
Additional support
In memory of Melvin R Seiden
Mrs Jayne Wrightsman, OBE

Verena Kotonski, Specialist Conservator (Organics), British Museum

In November 2014, my workbench temporarily turned into something close to a shipyard when a model boat made of cloves arrived in the Organic Artefacts Conservation Studio. Every object that goes on temporary or permanent display at the Museum receives a thorough condition check and, if necessary, conservation treatment before its installation in an exhibition. The clove boat was to be included in the exhibition Connecting continents: Indian Ocean trade and exchange, in which it was to be displayed for the very first time.

I have come across many weird and wonderful objects over the years, but never a boat made of cloves! I was particularly looking forward to unpacking this object from its storage box to see what it looked like. When I opened the box, an almost overpowering smell of cloves was released, which was somewhat of a surprise as this boat was probably made during the 18th–20th centuries in Indonesia and was accessioned into the collection in 1972.

Model boat after unpacking from its storage box. Model Boat, AD 1700s–1900s, probably from Indonesia, L 58 cm, H 30 cm, D 23 cm As1972,Q.1944

Condition
A thorough examination of the object revealed that the structure of the boat was reasonably stable, but a significant number of elements (14 altogether) had become detached over time. It was difficult to establish the extent of missing elements at this stage. Furthermore, a considerable amount of dust had accumulated on the surface. In order to make this object fit for display, the surface would have to be cleaned, the detached elements reinstated on the object and missing elements reconstructed if and where appropriate.

Cleaning of the surface
Centimetre by centimetre I slowly worked over the object, removing the dust from the surface. This allowed me to appreciate the boat in detail; its decorative scheme and the intricate details of the cloves themselves. The boat is constructed of cloves that are either strung on one or two threads, or threaded on thin wooden pins. The hull is built from strings of cloves layered on top of each other and tied together. I also discovered, for example, that the arms of the figures on the boat and the paddles they are holding were made as one element, which was then adhered to the torso.

It was lovely to see the creative way in which the four unopened petals of the cloves that form a small central ball were used to either depict the head of a rower, the knob at the end of a paddle, or were used as decorative architectural elements.

Tools and materials I used to remove the dust were: a soft, fine tipped brush, vacuum suction and a special conservation-grade natural rubber to catch and trap the more ingrained particles.

Model boat during cleaning treatment (right-hand side – after cleaning)

Stabilisation of broken elements
Work to stabilise the boat and its occupants included mending a break in one of the corner posts of the cabin and securing several sets of arms and paddles to the torsos of the figures. For this, I used a conservation-grade adhesive, hydroxypropylcellulose, that has good ageing properties, which means that it will remain reversible should the need arise to undo the repair in future. In order to hold the elements in place until the adhesive had set, a range of different devices were employed to apply gentle pressure, such as light weight carbon clamps, hairclips, pins padded with silicone tubing and a bamboo stick mounted on what is actually a brush washer.

Different clamping devices in action

Reinstating the detached figures
Finding the original location of the figures that had become detached from the boat proved less straightforward than I initially thought. I found 14 detached elements on the boat: 5 torsos, 1 standing figure, 2 sets of arms and paddles, one long paddle rudder (?), 1 pennant (long tapering flag) without pole and 3 round-shaped objects.

Detached elements including a long paddle (rudder?), a flag and a drum shaped element with a stick attached (left)

Due to the vacant places among the rowers and a set of holes in the bottom at the stern it was fairly obvious where two of the torsos (including the respective arms and paddles) were meant to go, as well as the figure standing upright. It was possible to attribute a set of arms and paddle to the respective torso by matching the shape of the cut-out on the cloves forming the shoulders with the shape of the stick that forms the neck.

Having reinstated the standing figure and two rowers, I was still left with three torsos and two drum shaped elements as well as the pennant. Although the Museum’s records, which include a rather vague historic drawing, hinted at the possibility that some figures could have been on top of the cabin including a second pennant, the exact location of figures and pennant remained difficult to establish.

Drawing of the boat found in the Museum’s records

Fortunately, research into similar models carried out by Charlotte Dixon, Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD Student at the University of Southampton and the British Museum, provided me with a chance to compare our boat with photos of a boat held in the Kew Gardens Economic Botany Collection, which Charlotte kindly shared with me. This strikingly similar boat shows three figures with round elements in front of them on top of the roof of a cabin. Further research by Charlotte also established that the round elements might represent drums. Close examination of the break edges on both drums under the microscope established from which torso one of the drums had broken off, and allowed me to reattach it accordingly.

Despite the very revealing and informative images of the boat at Kew, the numerous holes in the roof canopy offered little guidance on how the torsos might have been arranged on the roof. The ethics of reinstating the detached figures without knowing their original location was discussed with Charlotte and Sarah Longair, curator of this exhibition. We decided in favour of installing the figures on the roof. We felt that the figures (drummers) are a key part of the object and therefore vital for the interpretation of this artefact. Furthermore, it is possible to install the figures securely without using any adhesive which means they can easily be removed and repositioned if further evidence on their original position should emerge. Knowing that the figures on the roof were meant to depict drummers certainly helped to find a sensible arrangement of the figures on the roof.

Torsos of drummers after installation on the roof top. The original location of the drum shaped element (front) with stick attached is still unclear

Reconstruction of missing parts
There were still a long paddle (rudder?), pennant and a drum with a pole attached, for which I hadn’t found a location. Unlike the other detached parts these three would have required substantial reconstruction of missing elements in order to be able to reinstall them. As there were no hints where those elements would have been situated originally and what the now missing elements had looked like, we decided not to include them on the boat. Instead, they were packed safely to go into the object’s storage box.

One exception to this was the reconstruction of a missing retaining collar, which was vital for the object’s stability. These collars on top of each corner post of the enclosure prevent the roof canopy from lifting off the upright poles. One was reconstructed using tinted Japanese tissue paper rather than a clove in order to distinguish the later addition from the original object. This detail, which could have been easily overlooked, highlights how important it is for the conservator to understand how an object was constructed in order to inform the decisions about treatment that ensure the long-term stability and integrity of an object.

Retaining collar made of Japanese tissue paper to replace the missing collar of this corner post

Call for action
After 34 hours of conservation work, which included the time for investigation and discussion with curatorial colleagues, the model boat was ready to sail and take its place on its tailor-made mount, created by Amanda Gregory, Senior Museum Assistant in the Department of Coins and Medals. My sincere thanks go to Charlotte and Sarah for their enthusiasm and constructive support in the course of this project as well as other colleagues who contributed to the success of this conservation project. Thank you also to Imogen Laing, Museum Assistant in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, for providing me with an image of the historic drawing of the boat.

Despite all our efforts, not all questions regarding the correct original position of some detached elements have been solved. Therefore, I would like to extend an invitation to the readers of this blog to get in touch should they have further information about the position of the rooftop figures, the drum (?) with pole attached, the second pennant and/or about the arms and paddle (rudder?) of the standing figure. Please contact us via conservation@britishmuseum.org with any information that might help.

Connecting continents: Indian Ocean trade and exchange is on display at the British Museum until 31 May 2015.