Not all the galleries are experiencing such demonstrative love, but the staff begin each morning before the museum opens by cleaning the cases which hold the extraordinary reliquaries, once believed to hold the bones and blood of saints and martyrs, assembled for its Treasures of Heaven exhibition. The exhibition, which opened last week, is equally attracting art lovers and the devout in unprecedented numbers. "We're knee deep in archbishops" as one staff number put it.
"When our maintenance staff are cleaning off the kiss marks, it's clear that some of the relics attract much more veneration than others," the museum's director, Neil MacGregor, said. "It's a new form of audience participation, one we've never experienced before."
One of the highlights of the coming year will be an intervention by the Turner prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, who is borrowing objects from the collection and creating his own work inspired by them. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman exhibition, which includes a cast iron coffin-ship‚ is intended "partly as a tribute to the myriad anonymous craft workers whose masterpieces have come to rest in the museum".
Perry has already completed a drawing showing himself as a pilgrim figure on a steep and rocky road towards the museum, waved on his way by his teddy bear.
More than 400,000 visitors have paid for the special exhibitions in the Reading Room and other temporary exhibition galleries, and one of the most successful, Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, which had to be extended for a month owing to demand, has uncovered a lost treasure from the looted museum in Kabul.
A London antiquities dealer contacted the museum after seeing the exhibition, to say he planned to acquire, through the British Museum's contacts, a 1,800-year-old statue of Buddha in order to return it to the Kabul Museum, where the object once stood at the bottom of the main stair case.
The Afghan museum was looted, bombed, and at one point occupied by insurgents, but is now gradually being restored and reopened to the public. The Buddha had been through several hands since it was stolen, probably in the early 1990s, before the dealer spent his own money to recover it from the shadowy market in looted antiquities.
He wishes to remain anonymous, but is the same man who recovered ancient ivories also stolen from the same museum, which are also being handed back. The Buddha is on temporary display at the British Museum, but will be returned to Kabul later this summer.
The museum is also increasing its global reach through its website, which had 21m visits in 2010/11, with 1.93m objects now covered by its online collection records, and versions available in Chinese and Arabic.
The cherry on the cake of the last year for the museum was winning the £100,000 Art Fund museum prize earlier this month, for the History of the World in 100 Objects project with BBC Radio 4. Apart from the success of the 15-minute broadcasts on each object, the hefty hardcover book has now sold more than 300,000 copies.
All the prize money will be used to send the most prized objects on a tour of regional museums. The first is one of the most dazzling pieces of Roman silver ever excavated, the Mildenhall Great Dish, voted one of the nation's top 10 treasures, which will go back to the county where it was found by a ploughman in 1942 on temporary loan to Ipswich Museum later this year.
A major acquisition was only finalised a few weeks ago, a diminutive but arresting marble sculpture, bought for £300,000 with a £100,000 grant from the Art Fund. The British Museum already displays 15 female Cycladic figures: now, as MacGregor said, "at last a man is coming to join them."
The figurine is particularly important because it reveals traces of the original painted staring eyes which would have dramatically changed the appearance of the figures which now seem highly abstract. This one, one of only three of its type known in the world, was once owned by the painter Wolfgang Paalen, who lived and worked in Paris in the 1920s and 30s and used the sculpture as inspiration in several paintings, one of which the museum hopes to borrow to show beside it.
The next major exhibition in the Reading Room, opening in January, will be devoted to the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, with scores of objects never seen in the west before. It may also be one of the last exhibitions in the spectacular but temporary display space created in the room. The museum hopes its extension, with a new major exhibition gallery, will open in early 2014.
Niall FitzGerald, chair of the trustees, said along with the £10m just announced by the Heritage Lottery Fund, they have now raised £109m for the project, with £26m left to find. So far the building consists of a hole in the ground. "But it is a very big hole in the ground," FitzGerald said proudly.
Author: Maev Kennedy | Source: The Guardian/UK [June 28, 2011]