The other day, on the anniversary of my father's death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together.
The Prints and Drawing Room used to let us both in - child though I was - to leaf through paintings and drawings of clouds by John Constable.
Now there is a deadly little exhibition there – Gesture and Line. Yawnsville. ‘Four post-war German and Austrian artists.’ A legacy, I suppose, of the disastrous period when Hartwig Fischer was the director, and on whose watch large numbers of artefacts were stolen.
The British Museum is observably in a bad way. Fischer has to take a lot of the blame. But so does the vulgarian Chairman, George Osborne, and the Trustees, who have been chosen for their trendy or celeb status or because they are rich, not because they have any feeling of what a Museum actually should be.
The Trustees positively writhe with embarrassment at the idea of Sir Hans Sloane, the Enlightenment figure on whose collection the Museum was based.
The present atmosphere at the Museum, which is trying to be matey and family friendly, is probably slightly intimidated by the values of the Enlightenment and what used to be called Civilisation.
This is not because the Enlightenment coincided with the existence, and eventual abolition, of the slave trade – more because it thought our little present could be elevated by contemplating the great past, above all the past of Greece.
We all know about the Parthenon marbles. Fewer of us have the chance to see the Townley marbles – Greek antiquities accumulated by that great man Charles Townley (1737-1805), together with antiquities from India, Persia and Egypt. Nearly all the Townley Collection had languished in the basement of the Museum, unseen by the public for years, which is how the thefts, mostly from that collection, could happen undetected.
The thefts happened because those in charge had lost sight of what the museum was for. For the Chairman and the Trustees, the Museum was simply an excuse for them to sit on a board and feel grand. For the increasingly disillusioned - and undervalued - staff, it was no longer enough to care passionately about the past and its artefacts.
The museum had become a tourist commodity, which could best advertise itself not by concentrating on its chief treasures, but by trying to cheapen itself and make itself popular.
Those of us who have been going to the Museum for years have noticed a steady decline. The quality of the exhibitions is poor. Legion: Life in the Roman Army was a dud idea because there are not enough interesting artefacts to justify the title of the show.
‘Bring the family along to meet Roman soldiers,’ urges the publicity hand-out. No thanks. Imagine the embarrassment of meeting some poor member of the Museum staff dressed up like something in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
The point of a museum is to confront you with wonders you had not seen before, which lift you outside your own little world into the strange world of that other country, the past. I was repelled by a book in the souvenir shop in the Great Court: Write Your Own Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
I do not want to write my own. I want to stare in wonderment at the Rosetta Stone. All the visitors were barging past the stone, unheeding. Yet it is one of those objects that compels you to confront the paradoxical morality of museums. The Rosetta Stone was double plunder – Napoleon stole it from the Egyptians and we, in effect, stole it from him.
Yet, without a Western scholar having compared the three versions of its inscription – one of which is Greek – none of us, the Egyptians included, would be able to read hieroglyphs. Comparable thoughts come to mind when one thinks of how many of the most famous exhibits in the BM came to be there.
My favourite moment on my last visit there was when a Greek – a schoolmaster, I’d guess – asked me to take a photo of him and 15 young students. Behind them was one of the most glorious of all Hellenic monuments in the Museum – so I could understand his pride.
‘Why did you choose to be photographed in this spot?’ I asked.
‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘Soon, that’ – he pointed behind him – ‘will be in Athens.’
He was pointing at the superb Nereid Monument from south-western Turkey, built for the ruler of Lycian Xanthos in the fourth century BC. He clearly thought they were the Elgin Marbles.
If they ever do send the Marbles back to Athens, we should specify that George Osborne is sent too, and is asked never to come back.
Osborne is a classic example of how the principle of FUMU (Eff Up, Move Up) dominates public life. Osborne made a hash of being Chancellor of the Exchequer. He got himself a cluster of grotesquely well-paid directorships while he made a balls-up of being editor of the Evening Standard.
So, of course, he became Director of the BM. We all deserve better. Osborne should go.
The Oldie Spring 2024
