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December 2015

Vol. 157 / No. 1353

Neil MacGregor and the British Museum

This month Neil MacGregor stands down as director of the British Museum, after almost thirteen years at its helm. News of this forthcoming event immediately drew widespread praise for his achievement. This Magazine initially intended to pursue the customary procedure of showing a selection of significant acquisitions which have entered the museum during the director’s term of office; but in MacGregor’s case it seemed more appropriate to do the opposite: to look not at what was brought in to the museum but at what has been sent out and shared with the wider world.

It is widely recognised that MacGregor has articulated a vision which flows directly from the Museum’s foundational Enlightenment programme. Neither a royal possession nor controlled by the state, the British Museum, operating on the arm’s length principle and with the trustee system, has, since its inception in 1753, set out to interpret world cultures. Free access for all peoples remains one of its first principles. The strapline MacGregor inherited – ‘Illuminating world cultures ’ – has been reformulated into something more challenging and more demotic: ‘museum of the world and for the world’. Entrance fees have been firmly resisted and the international strategy has been strengthened. The Museum has, of course, a long history of sharing expertise with colleagues in other countries and of collaborating with museums across Britain. But exhibitions sent abroad before MacGregor’s arrival mostly went to North America or Japan. They raised the Museum’s international profile, while also bringing in welcome financial gain. Since then, the international programme has been vastly increased, largely due to the development of partnerships with museums in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Nowadays a loans hub, part of the British Museum’s newly built World Conservation & Exhibitions Centre (WCEC), makes it still more feasible for the Museum’s 3.5 million objects to be regarded as a global resource. In June 2013 the Art Newspaper reported the fact that the British Museum had become the world’s largest lender. In the previous year it had loaned 4,502 objects: 2,174 of these went to 169 UK venues; and 2,328 items went abroad. Since 2010 the British Museum’s international touring exhibitions have been seen, at a conservative estimate, by over six million people overseas, at fifty-one venues in ­sixteen countries and thirty-five cities. Its breadth of reach, in terms of time, geography and material culture, is demonstrated by the fact that this December four different exhibitions, ­drawing upon diverse aspects of the Museum’s great collection, will open in Kobe, Brisbane, Seoul and Singapore.

With hindsight, it must seem to MacGregor that his first six or seven months at the British Museum were the equivalent to a calm before the storm. He arrived in August 2002. Behind him lay active experience as a lawyer; the study of art history at the Courtauld Institute and in Paris; the experience of teaching at Reading University; and of further scholarly endeavour through his role as editor at this Magazine (1981–87). At the Burlington he and the Managing Director, Kate Trevelyan, achieved a near miracle – skilfully moving the Magazine out of the control of the International Thompson Organization and into a not-for-profit, charitable organisation, resting on two foundations. Five days before this transfer took effect, MacGregor accepted the directorship of the National Gallery. In this role he oversaw the creation of the Sainsbury Wing, and, among other things, pipped the Louvre in being the first to obtain a major gift from Yves Saint Laurent in connection with the ­renovation of Room 18. Another testimony to his work at the National Gallery is the fact that, on his final day, the warders queued round the block to shake his hand. But despite all the experience he brought with him to the British Museum, he arrived, as he has admitted, with only a limited knowledge of its collections. For many months he refused to make any press announcements and his staff gained relatively little idea of his aims and intentions. Of critical importance, no doubt, were his early morning walks around the museum’s galleries, whenever possible in the company of an expert, and, at one point, as is widely known, he was spotted working behind the information desk. All this suggests a slow gathering of information, knowledge and ideas. Then in March 2003 the Second Iraq War began, and on the 12th April news came of the ransacking of Iraq’s National Museum. Further looting, destruction and chaos followed, not only in Baghdad and Basra but also in other regions.

It was inevitable that the British Museum, with its long-standing exchange with scholars and museum curators in Iraq and its depth of scholarship, would play an important role in the aftermath of this tragedy. Three weeks before the war broke out John Curtis, then Keeper, Department of the Middle East, and Robert Springborg, of the Middle East Institute at the School of African and Oriental Studies, had warned the Minister of Defence (Geoff Hoon) of the potential danger to the cultural heritage of military action in Iraq. Why had the Coalition not sought to protect Baghdad’s National Museum? These and other questions about Iraq dominated a British Museum press conference, on 15th April 2003, at which it had intended to announce plans for its 250th anniversary. At this press conference, Channel 4 News set up a satellite telephone conversation between John Curtis and Donny George, Director of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities. In the course of this ­conversation it was learnt that the Museum was still unguarded, and protected only by local people and vigilantes. When Curtis informed his Director of this, MacGregor contacted the Prime Minister’s office with a request for immediate ­protection of key historical sites. Shortly afterwards the British Museum heard that tanks had been deployed to guard Baghdad’s National Museum.

With remarkable alacrity, MacGregor announced that the British Museum would play a lead role within an alliance of five world-class museums (the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Louvre, Paris; the State Museums in Berlin; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in providing Iraq’s National Museum with assistance. He also secured an anonymous donor to fund a rescue mission. Further meetings followed, including an emergency meeting of experts at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, at which MacGregor was one of three facilitators. Another meeting, held at the British Museum on 29th April, was attended by Donny George who affirmed in front of all present that the British Museum was the right museum to spearhead an international response of this kind.

MacGregor’s sense of urgency, as The Observer rightly pointed out (8th June 2003), had moved antiquities up the political agenda. He also drew the attention in the press to the universal sense that what was being lost or desecrated in Iraq were not distant artefacts but a heritage and history that belonged to the whole world. From this time on, MacGregor would repeatedly state his belief that we are all becoming ‘world citizens’. His own position was changing: rapid and unpredictable events called for subtle and innovative diplomacy and MacGregor was fast becoming this country’s leading cultural ambassador.

Nowhere must this diplomacy have been more acute than in MacGregor’s behind-the-scenes discussions in connection with the British Museum’s Forgotten Empire: Treasure from Ancient Persia (2005). While this exhibition was in progress tensions between the West and Iran over its nuclear programme were at their height. Incredible skills of persuasion must have been needed to obtain agreement on precious loans of national importance while diplomatic relations foundered, especially after economic concessions offered by Britain, in return for an end of nuclear activities, were rejected by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet on the opening night of the exhibition, the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Mr Mashaei, then Head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organisation, met in Neil MacGregor’s office, both having been asked to speak, art and culture providing the ­platform that enabled them to override political differences.

Perhaps the most significant loan sent out from the British Museum during MacGregor’s directorship has been the Cyrus cylinder (Fig.I). This small object – a barrel-shaped baked clay cylinder measuring 22.5 cm. long by 10 cm. at its widest diameter – carries huge significance. Discovered in 1879, during an excavation in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia sponsored by the British Museum, it was dispatched to England with the permission of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It is thought to have been made around 539–38 BC, soon after the Persian conquest of Babylon, when Cyrus defeated the Babylonian king Nabonidus. The cuneiform script which ­covers its surface extols Cyrus, commending the policy he ­pursued while reviving Babylon. Among other things, he repaired ruined temples, restored cults and returned sacred objects to their rightful owners. Although false translations have troubled the interpretation of the Cyrus cylinder, and claims about its relevance to the history of human rights have been contested, it is nevertheless widely perceived to uphold, in its promotion of religious tolerance and – by implication – freedom of speech, values and beliefs which found definitive expression in the 1968 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Certainly it speaks to the idea of cultural tolerance and an understanding of our shared humanity.

The Cyrus cylinder was initially sent to Tehran in 2010 for three months. It stayed seven months, owing to its popularity, and was seen at the National Museum of Iran by over half a million visitors. Questions had been asked before it left this country as to whether this loan might be interpreted by Britain’s allies as an unfriendly act. Any such arguments were overridden by the Museum’s mission – to engage and to enhance understanding, both of which were very much to the fore in relation to this project. More recently, in 2013, the Cyrus cylinder toured five cities in America. It has also been shown in Mumbai.

Loans sent abroad during MacGregor’s directorship have served many purposes. They have strengthened awareness of national identity, or reminded of the long history within an ancient culture that lies behind a very different modern regime. When the Mus­eum teamed up with the Nairobi Museum in Kenya in 2006, the aim was to work in partnership with colleagues in Africa so as to enhance understanding of the rich diversity of cultural heritage within the African countries and peoples. But MacGregor has also been keen to deepen people’s understanding and knowledge of cultural heritages different to their own, and one of the ­Museum’s most successful touring exhibitions has been Treasures of the World’s Cultures, which has been seen in China, Japan and South Korea. More controversial has been the decision to send, in 2016, on long-term loan, some 500 culturally significant artefacts, including ‘highlights’ from the Museum’s collection, to the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.

‘Objects are uniquely able to speak across time and space’, MacGregor has argued. So speaks the author of The History of the World in 100 Objects, which changed radio history and reached into the national psyche. It was an ingenious decision not to show the object, as would have been possible on television, but to allow it to grow in the imagination of the listener or to send the listener in search of it afterwards. As a boy from Glasgow, MacGregor once ran his finger over the Rosetta Stone (then uncovered), when taken by his father on a trip to London. The electric thrill he then experienced was a foretaste of his capacity to light up with passionate interest over small details. At the British Museum he has discovered further the power of objects: he has witnessed the way in which museums can provide forums for discussion for those who are in opposition to each other, in part because of the humility that ancient objects inspire. This love of things he has communicated widely, through print, radio, online and in exhibitions. He has greatly enhanced public awareness of cultures different to our own, and made us more conscious of human affinities across these cultural differences. Under his directorship, the British Museum’s has aimed at the widest possible audience and brought an intellectual rigour to its high standards of display. For during the last decade, the real challenges identified by the Museum have concerned not acquisitions but how to engage with the world in new and more far-reaching ways.