Museums - Richard Cork discovers an enlightening array of exhibitions at the British Museum
When Neil MacGregor became director of the British Museum in August 2002, plenty of his admirers thought that he had gone mad. After all, he was a brilliant director at the National Gallery, and could easily have stayed on there until retirement beckoned. Instead, he plunged into the infinitely larger, more turbulent problems of an institution riddled with grave financial problems and unease among the staff. The BM might well have been renamed the Beast of Bloomsbury. It is colossally complex, filled with highly diverse collections and difficult to administrate. Even Sir John Pope-Hennessy, an instinctive autocrat who had presided over the Victoria and Albert Museum with imperious resolve, was defeated by the BM. He found it resistant to change of any kind and left the directorship for a teaching post in New York as soon as he could.
MacGregor is made of sterner mettle. Although he has only just settled in, the mood already seems very different. We hear far less about deficits, and far more about fresh exhibitions that seek to redefine the British Museum's identity. Taken together, these ambitious shows make a new year's visit hugely pleasurable. In Norman Foster's luminous Great Court, where serenity now prevails after the absurd initial rumpus over the use of "the wrong stone", a "Buried Treasure" exhibition makes explorers of us all. It contains work as spectacular as The Great Dish from the Mildenhall treasure, unearthed by chance during the Second World War. But this magnificent tour de force in silver, dating from the Roman era in the 4th century AD, is only the most sumptuous of many fascinating objects displayed here. The Hoxne treasure, the biggest hoard of Roman gold and silver ever uncovered in Britain, was found by a farmer searching for his mislaid hammer. As for the palaeolithic hand-axe, the earliest man-made artefact found in north-west Europe, it was stumbled across by someone walking their dog on a quiet Norfolk beach.
North of the Great Court, the new £5.5m Wellcome Trust Gallery makes us think about how people across the world use art to help them cope with the fundamental challenges of mortal existence. Called "Living and Dying", the show boasts as its masterpiece Hoa Hakananai'a, a monumental carved figure from Easter Island. Ever since Queen Victoria donated it to the BM in 1869, this grave presence has presided over the ethnographic collection with immense, unforced authority. Its name is translatable as "stolen or hidden friend", and the statue was probably first displayed around AD 1000 as an ancestral figure in an outdoor setting. Afterwards it became the focus of a birdman cult and relief images were carved on the back. But the islanders still regarded it as a symbol of leadership, and in 1914 the young avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska used it as the springboard for a heroic, not to say blatantly phallic, carving of his friend Ezra Pound.
However ancient these artefacts may be, such objects speak to us directly about the fears and hopes of the communities who produced them. In the tradition of the Mexican Day of the Dead festival, The Atomic Apocalypse is four papier mache images of outstanding figures from the Book of Revelation: Pestilence, War, Death and Famine. While Death's skeleton bestrides the globe, Famine rides a grasshopper and leers with predatory glee. Suspended from the ceiling, the entire installation is unashamedly grotesque. At the same time, its vitality testifies to a quickening resolve, as if its makers were determined never to be defeated by the dangers around them.
Very little evidence of mortal peril can be detected in the latest and grandest of the BM's current attractions. Intended as the climax of the museum's 250th anniversary celebrations, the "Enlightenment Gallery" occupies resplendent premises in a Greek Revival room where the library of George III was previously housed. Now that the monarch's books have been transferred to the British Library, plenty of space is available for a new permanent exhibition charting the 18th century's spirit of boundless curiosity about the world. The immense double-height room, designed by Sir Robert Smirke in the 1820s, has been superbly restored at a cost of £8m. And rather than devoting itself exclusively to rare books, the gallery is now enlivened by a wide-ranging array of carvings, watercolours, fossils, plants, rocks, shells, minerals and just about anything else we care to imagine.
Sir Hans Sloane, whose tireless acquisitions formed the basis of the BM in 1753, believed passionately that science and art were interconnected. He loved obtaining pieces as disparate as a painted bamboo cane designed to hold poisoned arrows, a flower "used for tea in New England", and a Scottish flint arrowhead supposedly "shot into cattle by witches or elves". Sloane's own entries in his collection's catalogue revel in the romance of it all, including his delight at receiving "the remains of a Cargo of Plants, Birds, Shells, etc., which unfortunately fell into the hands of pirats" [sic].
Some of his contemporaries mocked Sloane for taking pleasure in such diversity. The Duchess of Portland, reporting on a visit to his house in 1742, declared that, "I have beheld many odder things than himself, though none so inconsistent." And Sloane could undoubtedly be dotty at times. One of his entries solemnly describes "the singed hair of a woman kill'd by thunder, 1691". Even more bizarrely, he acquired "the hairy scalp of Mrs Robinson murdered by Ellen Lewis, 1735". But before we start speculating about the dark, Freudian undertow in Sloane's possessions, he deserves praise for embodying the love of unlimited inquiry that led to the BM's creation by Act of Parliament. He believed that his "curiosities" were "a manifestation of the glory of God", and the Enlightenment show is filled with treasures amassed by other collectors as well.
Charles Townley was the most prominent of the wealthy connoisseurs who doted on classical sculpture. His house in Park Street was cluttered with carvings, many of which he believed to be Greek originals. But the truth is that they were often Roman copies, recently dug from the ground and heavily restored in 18th-century Italian workshops. The most show-stopping exhibit in "Enlightenment" is the enormous Piranesi Vase, discovered in Emperor Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli in 1769. Basically a Roman piece dating from the 2nd century AD, the vase was in fact extensively recarved to hide the damage it had suffered. So were most of the other "classical" statues on view here, and yet there is nothing faked about the head of Ptolemy I, a fragment of a basalt statue of Alexander the Great's general. Although carved in the late 3rd century BC, it remains smooth, solid and utterly imposing.
The BM's founding ambition, to provide a virtual "encyclopaedia of the world", means that "Enlightenment" roams far beyond classical boundaries. The irrepressible Sloane bought Indian miniatures, Islamic amulets and a flamboyant watercolour of a Suriname crocodile struggling with the deadly coils of a pipe snake. Pioneering British travellers brought back prizes from the most distant corners of the earth, including a Maori hand-club from Captain Cook's Pacific voyages. This omnivorous and liberating appetite gives the show its fascination, and goes a long way towards explaining why the BM is such a limitless treasure-house today.
"Buried Treasure" continues at the British Museum, London WC1 (020 7323 8000) until 14 March. "Living and Dying", sponsored by Anglo American and Tarmac, and "Enlightenment" are permanent exhibitions
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