All posts in category Museum

Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum

This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. Imperial War Museum advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.

This is a really important exhibition on a very important subject. Most exhibitions stimulate or entertain me but this one significantly changed my understanding and attitude towards a horrific and ongoing crisis.

‘Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict’ is the UK’s first major exhibition dedicated to describing, analysing and understanding sexual violence in conflict. It includes 162 objects which illustrate all aspects of the issue, from wartime propaganda posters to testimonies from women victims from the First and Second World wars, as well as more recent conflicts such as Yugoslavia, Darfur and Congo, Gaza and Ukraine.

Expert views

The first and last galleries house no objects, just video screens which feature interviews with experts in the field. In the first room they introduce key facts and concepts around sexual violence in conflict, including the term itself and its definition, what it means, who perpetrates it, and who the victims are. In the final room, the same experts suggest ways to bring about change. These experts are:

Charu Lata Hogg – founder and Executive Director of All Survivors Project
Dr Zeynep Kaya – Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sheffield
Dr Paul Kirby – Queen Mary University
Christina Lamb – Sunday Times journalist and author of ‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’
Sarah Sands – journalist and former Chair of the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council

Why sexual violence in conflict has gone unreported

According to the experts, sexual violence has accompanied conflict and war for as long as we have records.

Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.
(Sara Bowcutt, Women for Women International)

For most of history it has been repressed and unrecorded, for numerous reasons.

Until the advent of photography and, nowadays, smartphones and social media, it’s been difficult to document and record.
This has led to sexual violence being under-reported at the time and so all but ignored in official records and historical accounts.
Perpetrators and the bodies they serve in (armies, militias, informal groups), wanting to preserve their ‘honour’ and prestige, suppress information.
But victims, families of victims, their communities and wider societies sometimes cover it up because of the ‘shame’ and social stigma attached.

But there are other occasions when sexual violence is the opposite of hushed up, when it is used to terrorise and demoralise civilian populations, with a view to depriving fighting forces of support or bringing pressure on them to surrender and end the abuse of their civilian communities. This was practiced in Darfur and more recently by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine. In these situations incidents of sexual violence are widely advertised – but the challenge remains the same: of identifying the exact perpetrators, and trying to establish who in the chain of command gave authorisation for it. This can be frustratingly difficult to achieve.

Why it’s important to discuss sexual violence in conflict

The stance of this exhibition is that the subject must be directly addressed, discussed and aired, for a number of reasons:

Allowing victims to speak allows the crimes to be documented and so evidence gathered for legal proceedings.
But it also allows for something equally important, which is for the victims’ voices to be heard, their ordeals to be recognised, and so some kind of closure to be achieved.
Legitimating speech on the subject also helps to overcome social taboos around shame and keeping silent, which obtain in many if not most societies.
So: speaking out both helps victims recover and contributes documentary evidence to investigations and trials.

As a survivor explains:

‘To leave a little bit of what I had behind, that affected me, you don’t forget it but you learn to live with it, and by talking you take off a weight, a stigma, so I leave relaxed, free and happy.’

Four charities

With these aims in mind in mind, the penultimate room focuses on the ongoing work of four NGOs working in the field of sexual violence in conflict, namely:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

There’s a panel on each of these organisations, alongside photos of the work they do, and moving testimonials from victims who have benefited hugely from being listened to and validated. As one of them wrote:

‘We all want to mean something to someone, that we matter. That we’re important.’

These testimonies are accompanied by objects:

a traditional cloth toub titled ‘Peace by Piece’, created by Sudanese women affected by the war in collaboration with Waging Peace
a handmade animal toy created by women through Free Yezidi Foundation’s programme to empower women through training, job opportunities and income generation
policy and testimony from All Survivors Project, the only international NGO dedicated to addressing acts of sexual violence in conflict against men and boys

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing panels explaining the work of three of the four featured NGOs, including written and spoken testimony (via the headphones) © Imperial War Museum

Why an exhibition like this is part of the solution

Having explained all these processes you can see why an exhibition like this fits into the process of solution, by 1) documenting and recording abuses 2) allowing victims’ voices to be heard 3) increasing public awareness and understanding 4) making it easier to discuss abuses and, potentially, identify and target the patterns of behaviour which underpin or lead to sexual violence: the underlying attitudes which have made it ‘acceptable’ or ignorable in the past.

I would say that two major threads or themes run through the exhibition, one about gender, the other about justice.

Gender norms

Charu Lata Hogg is the most feminist or deploys the most academic feminist point of view. All I mean by this is that in her interviews she talks liberally about toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, two phrases which don’t appear in any of the other interviewees.

Hogg claims that sexual violence in conflict does not take place in a vacuum. It follows logically from the gender stereotyping widespread in peacetime society and then promoted in much wartime propaganda. She sees sexual violence in conflict as arising directly from ‘toxic gender norms’ i.e. the widespread perception in so many societies which associates masculinity with strength, power, dominance and violence, and women with passivity, domesticity, secondariness and victimhood.

This is why the first room of the exhibition, immediately after the introductory videos, is devoted to an impressively large number of images, posters and propaganda leaflets etc, from the First and Second World wars but also other conflicts, which play up to these gender stereotypes. They shows women as sexy spies, seducers, security risks, with a whole fleet of striking leaflets designed to be dropped over enemy troops depicting their beloveds back home having sex with non-combatants while they’re living in misery and fear at the front.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing posters promoting gender stereotyping in wartime © Imperial War Museum

In other words, the exhibition argues that the widespread deployment of sexual and gender stereotyping in peacetime society feeds into the propaganda accompanying a conflict, and both lay the foundation for the sexual violence which then occurs in the conflict itself.

In the final room of videos which addresses possible solutions, Hogg returns to this theme and says the only way forward is to target the patriarchy, to target ‘toxic gender norms’ and target ‘the patriarchal seeds’ that establish these gender stereotypes at such an early age, and so ubiquitously, that when conflict arises, men act accordingly, i.e. abuse the exaggerated positions of power which conflict gives them in order to rape, enslave, terrorise, mutilate and murder the vulnerable i.e. mostly (but not only) women.

You can see that this approach has a number of weaknesses. 1) It’s problematic knowing exactly what you mean by ‘patriarchy’ and ‘patriarchal seeds’; in a general way probably everyone could agree with the idea that, despite half a century of feminism, it’s still ‘a man’s world’, but can you be more specific? 2) ‘Targeting the patriarchy’ sounds fine as a slogan but, like ‘levelling up’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, the challenge is in formulating concrete proposals to make this happen.

3) But surely the biggest problem is that if you tie sexual violence in conflict to every type of gender stereotyping across all of society, and claim that you won’t be able to end the violence until you’ve ended all gender stereotyping, this means you’re going to be waiting a very long time. It is, in other words, a utopian wish rather than a practical solution.

Justice

This is why I was more attracted by Christina Lamb’s contribution in the final video room which discusses the way forward. Lamb says the solution is simple: hold the perpetrators to account. Encourage and support victims to speak out (as per the work of the NGOs listed above). Document the crimes. Empower international bodies such as the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to set up courts of enquiry into specific conflicts. Gather evidence, name names, and bring individuals to justice.

Although this has proven dismayingly difficult in practice, it is at least a practical agenda, and it harmonises with work already going on i.e. it can be based on the speaking out supported by the NGOs and also helps to validate the accounts of victims, make them feel that they’re not being ignored.

In this practical area of justice progress has been made over the last 30 years or so, which the exhibition describes.

Timeline

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania and for the first time recognises rape as an instrument of genocide to be prosecuted as a war crime.

1998 First conviction for rape as a war crime.

1998 The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 2008 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 Establishment of the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2019 First conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 Report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

Reconciliation

The comfort women

But it’s not only justice in the sense of arresting and charging individuals. Only by acknowledging the existence of sexual violence can any progress be made towards broader reconciliation.

The most striking example, and also an example of how difficult this is in practice, is probably the case of the ‘comfort women’ of south-east Asia. Before and during the Second World War the Japanese Army forced hundreds of thousands of women and girls into sexual slavery. They came from many different nationalities but the large majority were from Korea.

The exhibition describes the Wednesday demonstration, more fully the ‘Wednesday Demonstration demanding that Japan redress the Comfort Women problems’, which began to assemble outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul at noon on Wednesdays in 1992. Japan claims to have made a formal apology for the scandal and to have offered reparations but the wrangle goes on about precise details.

Meanwhile, the Koreans have erected several statues in memory of the comfort women, one outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, another in front of the Japanese consulate in the southern port city of Busan. Here’s a newspaper article about it. The exhibition includes a miniature reproduction of this statue with an explanation of its symbolism.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing a tiny replica of the Korean Sonyeosang or statue of peace, and the panel explaining its symbolism © Imperial War Museum

My overview

I asked at the museum Information desk but there is, regrettably, no catalogue for the exhibition, so I intend to provide a public service and give a fairly thorough breakdown of its content. It is in six rooms. The headings are the titles of each room, the bullet points are sub-sections within each room.

1. Prologue

Video clips of the experts addressing the following questions:

What is sexual violence in conflict?
Who is affected by sexual violence in conflict? Mostly women but some men and boys, particularly homosexuals
Who are the perpetrators? Armies, militias, military police, armed bands
Does sexual violence in conflict still happen today? Yes, widespread in current conflicts including Ukraine, Sudan
Why are we talking about this now? It is bad now but with the stresses and displacements of climate change is only likely to get worse

2. Structures and representations

Wartime presentations: sexist imagery and propaganda (see photo, above) including a couple of unintentionally hilarious films from the 1940s informing soldiers about the risks of sexually transmitted infections
Power and accountability:

3. Acts and manifestations

Mass incidents:
- Red Army: the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army as it fought its way across Germany at the end of the Second World War; Stalin notoriously commenting that he could understand why battle-scarred soldiers would want to have some ‘fun’ with enemy women; over 2 million German women were abused, leading to death and serious injury, infections and suicide
- ISIS: in 2014 Islamic State authorities organised the enslavement and mass sexual abuse of Yazidi women and girls: the exhibition includes the guidelines ISIS published for its soldiers on how to capture and treat sex slaves
Power imbalance: the little-known stories of sexual abuse of evacuees, particularly children, including in Britain during the Second World War
Sexual humiliation and torture:
- Abu Ghraib: the show includes the New Yorker magazine article by Seymour Hersh detailing the shocking abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003
- les tondues: French women who, at the liberation of villages, towns and cities, were seized, displayed and had their hair shaven off as a form of punishment and social condemnation for alleged collaboration with the German occupiers – the show includes documentary photos of tondues taken by Lee Miller

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing, on the wall on the right, the section about comfort women; on the wall in the middle evidence of the ISIS mass enslavement of Yazidi women; and in the glass cases letters and memoirs from child evacuees who were sexually abused © Imperial War Museum

4. Justice and reconciliation

Legal justice: history of attempts to set up courts and tribunals starting with the first arrest warrants for rape issued by the Yugoslavia tribunal in 1993; in 1998 the International Criminal Court recognised sexual violence in conflict as a crime against humanity
Children born of sexual violence in conflict: the work of TRIAL International and The Forgotten Children of War Association and how it took until 2022 for Bosnia and Herzegovina to acknowledge children born as a result of sexual violence during the Bosnian War 1992–1995 as civilian victims of war

5. Rebuilding

As described, a panel apiece on the four charities:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

6. Final thoughts

Video room with the five experts listed above giving their thoughts on the following topics:

How are attitudes towards sexual violence in conflict changing?
Why is it important to listen to victims and survivors?
What does justice look like for victims and survivors?
How can we create change?

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing the videos of expert opinion (photo by the author)

Niggles

On 2 November the exhibition ends and will be dismantled. Why? Surely an exhibition on such an important and universal subject as this should become a permanent display. Not least if it’s true, as the curators claim, that sexual conflict has always been a part of war and continues to be, right up to the present day. Well then, shouldn’t a key element of conflict be addressed in a permanent display in Britain’s leading museum of war and conflict?

In the same spirit, why is there no catalogue of the exhibition? I’ve been to hundreds of exhibitions, and even the most trashy or superficial have usually been accompanied by catalogues or brochures. Surely an important exhibition on such an important subject warrants a permanent documentary record.

Poster created by the Mansudae Art Studio, Pyongyang. The text, in Korean, can be translated as: ‘No! Rid the twenty-first century of sexual violence!’

Support

At the end of the exhibition, there’s a list of support groups. For public information, I include it here:

Related reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Feminism, Museum, War

Tagged Abu Ghraib, All Survivors Project, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian war, Busan, Charu Lata Hogg, child abuse, Christina Lamb, comfort women, Congo, Darfur, Dr Paul Kirby, Dr Zeynep Kaya, End Violence Against Women Coalition, exhibition, First World War, Forgotten Children of War Association, Free Yezidi Foundation, Gaza, Global Survivors Fund, Imperial War Museum, Imperial War Museum London, International Court of Justice, Japan, justice, Korea, Lee Miller, les tondues, LGBTQ+ Rape and Sexual Abuse Helpline, Mansudae Art Studio, National Association for People Abused as Children, New Yorker, No Means No Worldwide, Our Bodies, Peace by Piece, propaganda, Pyongyang, rape, Rape Crisis, reconciliation, Red Army, Refuge, Safeline National Male Survivor Helpline, Sara Bowcutt, Sarah Sands, Second World War, Seoul, sexual humiliation, sexual slavery, Sexual Violence in Conflict, Seymour Hersh, Sonyeosang, speaking out, Stalin, statue of peace, Survivors UK, the patriarchal seeds, the patriarchy, The Survivors Trust, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Three Guineas, torture, toub, toxic gender norms, toxic masculinity, UK War Crimes Team, Ukraine, United Nations, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, Virginia Woolf, Waging Peace, Wednesday Demonstration, Women and Girls Network Ascent Helpline, Women for Women International, Women's Aid UK, Women's Refugee Commission, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on October 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/unsilenced-sexual-violence-in-conflict-the-imperial-war-museum/

Ancient India: living traditions @ the British Museum

‘God – or his avatars, manifestations – is believed to dwell in the sacred images. The clothing and adornments are devotional offerings, expressions of a loving relationship with God.’

Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – some 2 billion people follow these three major world religions. This fabulous, beautifully staged and atmospheric exhibition at the British Museum brings together 180 objects – imposing statues and friezes, vibrant paintings, glittering coins and bracelets, drawings and manuscripts, as well as half a dozen videos – to explain the origins of the imagery and iconography of these three religions and (in the videos) how they live on into contemporary religious practice.

The exhibition focuses on the period between 200 BC and AD 600. It was during this period that artistic depictions of the gods and enlightened teachers of these three religions dramatically changed from purely symbolic or abstract images to showing them as human figures. It was during this period that much of the iconic imagery and attributes that today’s followers are familiar with, first emerged.

A highlight of the show is the evolution of depictions of the Buddha, tracing the transformation from symbolic representations to the human form we recognise today. In contrast, images of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, associated with wealth and good fortune, have remained largely unchanged for over two millennia.

Installation view of Ancient India: living traditions at the British Museum showing the opening three statues (photo by the author)

Right at the start the visitor is confronted by these three statues, one each from the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain traditions, and invites us to ‘meet’ (from left to right) the Buddha, Ganesha and a tirthankara.

And straightaway we are also faced with the exhibition’s strengths and challenges. Its strengths are that:

it is stylishly designed, with hanging curtains dividing different sections, with soft lighting and ambient sounds (featuring the sound of rivers, monsoon rains, thunder and wind blowing through grass, animals, people worshipping in temples, monasteries and shrines, bells, gongs, cymbals, horns and drums)
you are subtly aware of the gentle scent of sandalwood in the background
it is extremely informative
it contains many really beautiful objects, particularly the many striking statues

Installation view of Ancient India: living traditions at the British Museum (photo by the author)

Its challenge is that describing the iconography of not one but three religions entails a dazzling amount of information. To be more precise, I was a little overwhelmed by the number of numbers involved in each of these religious traditions.

As I went from one wall panel to the next I reflected on how relatively simple the Christian tradition I was raised in is: the Catholic tradition has a vast number of saints, but in essence Christianity boils down to: there is one God, he created earth, heaven and hell; humans disobeyed him and their disobedience is recreated in each generation and augmented by all our individual sins; so he sent his son Jesus to die as an act of atonement, as expiation for our sins; and everyone who truly believes in him will be saved from hell and go to spend eternity in heaven.

Similarly, the pantheon of the ancient Greeks contains numerous demigods and spirits of woods and rivers and so on, but the core is relatively straightforward: gods of heaven, sea and underworld, each with a wife; gods of war, beauty and wisdom; a messenger, a blacksmith – ten or so gods you need to remember – and these were copied or mapped onto the traditional Roman gods and then disseminated across Europe and round the Mediterranean.

It’s even simpler for Judaism which, beneath its plethora of rules and customs, depends on one creator god, Yahweh; let alone Islam, again festooned with customs, saints and so on, but which can be boiled down to the Shahada, ‘There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet’.

But here, right at the start of the exhibition, you learn that these three Indian religions – Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism – contained a sometimes bewildering multiplicity of entities. If you’re brought up in the tradition no doubt you know them from the cradle, or at least know which ones are important to your community. But as an outsider, trying to process the sheer number of beings, across so many interlinked but separate traditions, and stretching far beyond the borders of India (the exhibition includes a section about the spread of these religions to South East Asia and beyond), is quite a challenge.

Numbers

Jainism

Jains follow the teachings of twenty-four tirthankaras – enlightened beings – who are human rather than divine, and are attended by male and female nature spirits. They also worship some gods.

To help them, they have sixteen goddesses of knowledge called Vidyadevis – vidya means knowledge in Sanskrit and devi means goddess. They are usually depicted holding a manuscript and sometimes a pen.

All 24 Jain enlightened teachers have identical bodies because they are depicted as they are about to enter the heavens – the realm of liberated souls at the top of the universe. So that devotees can tell them apart, symbols from stories connected with their lives are used.

Jains follow the Three Jewels – right faith, right knowledge, right conduct – to enable their immortal souls to live in a state of bliss. Ahimsa (non-violence) is central to their faith, as is the belief that humans, animals and plants have living souls.

Parshvanatha is the 23rd tirthankara, depicted in the exhibition in a sandstone sculpture.

The Jain universe is divided into three worlds – the hells, the middle world and the heavens. As beings advance spiritually, their souls are eventually liberated from the cycle of rebirth and reach the heavens. The three worlds are depicted in a vivid painted cotton map showing the two-and-a-half continents of the middle world, where humans reside.

Map of the Jain universe. Gujarat or Rajasthan, India (1700 to 1900) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Buddhism

Buddhism is based on the teachings and philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama, a prince who became known as the Buddha after gaining enlightenment. He taught the Four Noble Truths, helping others to also achieve enlightenment.

Hinduism

Many Hindu teachings emphasise the four aims of life – dharma (righteous duty), artha (prosperity), kama (desires) and moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth).

Vishnu is said to have ten principal avatars, known as the Dashavatara, who appear to restore cosmic order and protect righteousness. While these ten are the most celebrated, texts like the Bhagavata Purana suggest his incarnations are innumerable.

Hindus believe Vishnu uses the different incarnations to preserve order on earth and to save the world and humankind from disaster. His first form is Matsya the fish, who rescued the first man from a great flood. Here, Vishnu emerges from Matsya’s mouth. Rama, Vishnu’s seventh avatar, is a central character in India’s epic poem the Ramayana.

Images of Hindu goddesses have many features in common with those of female nature spirits, including floral headdresses, plentiful jewellery and full figures. During the first century AD, an important moment of artistic innovation occurred when deities began to be shown with multiple arms. Each hand was held in a particular gesture or carried something which enabled the devotee to identify the god.

Overlap

Maybe the biggest single learning from the whole exhibition is the surprising extent to which these three major religious traditions had common origins, often in local nature gods and spirits and how, even when they’d become distinct belief systems, they still strongly influenced and interpenetrated each other.

There is a surprising amount of overlap among the gods and spirits and guardians and scared figures of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism and the exhibition includes objects demonstrating how nature spirits or gods or guardians from one tradition morphed into another, or highlighting the common origins of many traditions, figures and stories.

Some learnings

It is an information-rich exhibition which, as I said, I struggled to fully absorb and process. Here are some choice learnings:

Nagas and naginis are male and female serpent spirits who control life-giving waters. These nature spirits grant wealth, fertility and protection but they can also kill with a single bite. Among the most ancient deities to be venerated in India, they are usually depicted as many-headed cobras. Such was their enduring power and popularity that they were incorporated into Jain, Buddhist and Hindu art.

A nagini is a female sacred serpent. She has a woman’s torso, but still has her snake tail and her canopy rising above her head. Such figures are erected at temples or by trees and bodies of water, where they are venerated for their life-giving powers.

A nagaraja or snake king. Divine snakes are usually represented as many-headed cobras and snake kings tend to have five or seven hoods. Images of sacred snakes are often placed at entrances to sacred buildings – whether Hindu, Jain or Buddhist – to protect them.

Ancient sculptures show Hindu gods taming the powerful and ancient snake kings Kaliya, Vasuki and Ananta Sesha.

Manasa is a snake goddess venerated by Buddhists and Hindus alike for her ability to provide prosperity, children and protection from snakes. She can also cause harm with a deadly snakebite. Depicted as a beautiful woman surrounded by snakes, she usually holds a serpent or a child.

Yakshas are male nature spirits associated with trees, mountains, bodies of water and wealth. Widespread across India, yakshas were gradually adopted by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus, who used their imagery and attributes when they began to depict their gods and enlightened teachers in human form.

The famous elephant god Ganesha has yaksha origins as indicated by his elephant head and potbelly. Ganesha symbolises wisdom and new beginnings.

Installation view of Ancient India: living traditions at the British Museum showing a 2nd century AD statue of Ganesha (photo by the author)

Kubera is the king of yakshas and also the god of wealth, emphasised by his potbelly and plentiful jewellery.

Yakshis are powerful female nature spirits able to bestow abundance and fertility, as well as death and disease. Originally independent goddesses, many yakshis were given male consorts when adopted into Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism.

Yakshis are always depicted as full-figured, extravagantly bejewelled women standing and looking directly at the viewer.

A stupa is a dome-shaped memorial shrine built over sacred relics, built by both Buddhists and Jainists.

Mathura was a major ancient centre of production for Jain, Buddhist and Hindu devotional sculpture in northern India. The earliest known and definite images of Jain tirthankaras (enlightened teachers) depicted in human form are from here, perhaps dating to about 100 BC. The earliest dated figurative sculptures of the Buddha that survive today were produced in Mathura.

Incidentally, the earliest images of the Buddha in human form were created independently in Mathura (India), the Swat Valley (Pakistan) and Gandhara (Pakistan and Afghanistan).

Ayagapatas, square or rectangular tablets of homage depicting tirthankaras, shrines and deities, are a uniquely Jain innovation. They often have inscriptions from donors, many of whom were women, who gained spiritual merit through their donations.

Bodhisattvas are beings who seek enlightenment, whereas great bodhisattvas have gained additional powers over many lifetimes, enabling them to perform miracles and help others on the path to enlightenment. There are generally accepted to be eight great bodhisattvas, although other traditions speak of four (Chinese Buddhism) or as many as 16.

A distinctive feature of Buddha images from both Sri Lanka and southern India is the flame-shaped ushnisha on top of his head, representing his enlightenment.

Individual gods

According to Buddhist tradition, Hariti was associated with smallpox, and the stealing and killing of children to feed her large family. To show Hariti how much these parents were suffering, the Buddha briefly hid one of Hariti’s children beneath his rice bowl. She was so distraught that from that moment on she vowed to protect all children and women in childbirth.

Isakki and Pecci are worshipped in Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, and among Tamil communities living elsewhere. Devotees believe that such goddesses were women who perhaps died during pregnancy or childbirth and were later deified.

Mount Mandara rests on the back of Kurma, a tortoise and one of the god Vishnu’s bodily forms on earth.

The great bodhisattvas include figures such as Tara and Avalokiteshvara.

Statistics

I like numbers. The show prompted me to do some research. Here’s the number of followers of each religion worldwide:

Hindus – 1.2 billion, 15% of global population
Buddhists – 535 million, 7% of global population
Jainists – 12 million (but tricky to pin down because many Jainists identify as Hindu), about 0.15% of global population

And in the UK:

Hindus – 1 million, 1.7% of UK population (cf Muslims 4 million, 6%)
Buddhists – 275,000, 0.4% of population (around the same as Jews, 313,000, 0.6%)
Jainists – 25,000

South East Asia

Buddhist and Hindu devotional art spread along sea and land-based trading networks to Southeast, Central and East Asia. Sacred imagery and religious ideas from India were adopted and adapted to merge with local beliefs and styles, producing unique depictions of Buddhist and Hindu deities and enlightened teachers. Enough core features were retained, such as the ushnisha on the Buddha’s head symbolising his wisdom, to enable devotees from different regions and cultures to still recognise the gods and teachers depicted.

New and distinct architecture also emerged to house these sacred images. Fascinatingly, the largest surviving ancient temple complexes for both Buddhism and Hinduism are found, not in India, but in Southeast Asia, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Gallery

Shiva

In some of the earliest representations of the Hindu god Shiva, he is depicted as Ardhanarishvara which represents the divine couple Shiva and Parvati. In this painting, Shiva is shown on the left with the river Ganges flowing from his matted hair while he carries a trident and drum. His consort Parvati wears a crown and holds prayer beads.

Ardhanarishvara, ‘lord who is half woman’, Shiva and Parvati combined in one deity, about 1790 to 1810 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Buddha

The Buddha was first represented symbolically, through footprints or a tree, for example, and was only later depicted in human form. This gold reliquary might represent the earliest dateable image of the Buddha shown as a man, as coins found with it could date to the late 1st century AD. The Buddha stands with his right hand raised in the gesture of reassurance and is flanked by the gods Indra (right) and Brahma (left).

Bimaran casket, about 1st century © The Trustees of the British Museum

Gaja-Lakshmi

Gaja-Lakshmi (‘Elephant Lakshmi’) has yakshi (female nature spirit) origins. She bestows good fortune and is one of the most popular Hindu, Buddhist and Jain goddesses. The dark bodies of the elephants symbolise monsoon clouds filled with much-anticipated rain ready to bring the earth to life. This image so successfully conveys the message of abundance and fertility that it has remained largely unchanged for the last 2,000 years.

Gaja-Lakshmi (‘Elephant Lakshmi’) goddess of good fortune, about 1780 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ganesha

Hindu ideas and imagery flowed in both directions between India and Southeast Asia. The elephant-headed god Ganesha is part of Southeast Asia’s diverse religious landscapes. This sculpture shows Ganesha’s traditional attributes, such as his broken tusk, axe and prayer beads, along with some differences. Javanese artists often portrayed him with skulls, his feet together and carrying an empty bowl rather than one filled with sweets, indicating that varying communities understood and worshipped him differently.

Ganesha made in Java from volcanic stone, about AD 1000 to 1200 © The Trustees of the British Museum

A yaksha

This mottled pink sandstone figure represents a yaksha (male nature spirit). Yakshas can grant prosperity but also make life difficult if not properly placated. This is represented by the fierce or scowling expressions on these yakshas. Leaves sprout above this yaksha’s ears which possibly connects him with trees.

Head of a grimacing yaksha, about 2nd or 3rd century © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Naga

Stone plaque with the rearing figure of a five-headed cobra. Plaques like these can be difficult to date as some have been placed by sacred tree shrines for over a thousand years. Snake veneration belongs to the most ancient and potent substrate of Indian religion. Today, across India, popular veneration of divine snakes by followers of different religions still centres on devotional images such as this one.

Naga, about 17th century © The Trustees of the British Museum

Silk Buddha

From about the third century BC, following trading networks, Buddhist missionaries took their faith and its devotional art beyond India. In different regions, Buddhist art merged with local ideas and art to form new artistic styles. This is one of the oldest and best-preserved paintings from Cave 17 – the famous ‘Library Cave’ at Dunhuang. It shows the Buddha, seated between bodhisattvas, with his hands in the gesture of preaching This composition originates from earlier devotional images from India which became popular across East Asia.

Silk watercolour painting of the Buddha, China, about AD 701 to 750 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Seated Jain

This marble figure depicts a Jain tirthankara (enlightened teacher). Tirthankaras are human, not divine, and the earliest certain representations of them in human form were shaped in Mathura, possibly in about the first century BC. Seated in meditation, the tirthankara has the sacred symbol of an endless knot in the middle of his chest.

Seated Jain enlightened teacher meditating, about 1150 to 1200 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Related reviews

British Museum reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 4, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, India, Museum

Tagged Afghanistan, Ahimsa, Ananta Sesha, Ancient India: living traditions, Angkor Wat, Ardhanarishvara, art, artha, Avalokiteshvara, avatars, ayagapatas, Bhagavata Purana, bodhisattva, bodhisattvas, Brahma, British Museum, Buddhism, Cambodia, Dashavatara, devi, Dharma, Dunhuang, exhibition, Four Noble Truths, Gaja-Lakshmi, Gandhara, Ganesha, God, great bodhisattva, Gujarat, Hariti, Hinduism, history, India, Indian history, Indra, Isakki, Jainism, Java, Kaliya, kama, Kubera, Kurma, Lakshmi, Manasa, Mathura, moksha, Mount Mandara, Muhammad, nagaraja, Nagas, nagin, naginis, Pakistan, Parshvanatha, Parvati, Pecci, Rajasthan, Rama, religion, river Ganges, Sanskrit, Shiva, Siddhārtha Gautama, snake goddess, snakes, Southeast Asia, Swat Valley, Tamil Nadu, Tara, the Buddha, the Ramayana, the Shahada, Three Jewels, tirthankara, ushnisha, Vasuki, vidya, Vidyadevis, Vishnu, Yahweh, yaksha, Yakshas, yakshi, Yakshis

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/ancient-india-living-traditions-the-british-museum/

Shattered glass of Beirut @ the British Museum

The Beirut explosion

As if Lebanon hadn’t had enough suffering and tribulation, what with its own long civil war (1975 to 1990) and then the ongoing civil war in its neighbour, Syria (2011 to the present), on the evening of 4 August 2020, a massive stockpile of ammonium nitrate being stored in warehouses in Beirut exploded.

The blast was on a scale difficult for us to imagine. It killed at least 218 people, injured 7,000 and displaced 300,000! It’s estimated to have caused a staggering $15 billion of damage.

The Asahi Shimbun room at the British Museum

When you enter the main entrance of the British Museum, it’s easy to be dazzled by the scale of the space you’re entering, confused by the layout and propelled forward by the press of people behind you (the British Museum is the most popular visitor attraction in London and is always packed). So it’s easy to miss the fact that right by the entrance, over on the left, is one small room which has become home to a series of small, niche but fascinating displays. In the past I’ve seen small but beautifully laid out little displays about, for example, the embalmed crocodiles from an ancient Egyptian temple. These small but beautifully formed displays are sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun Company, a Japanese newspaper and internet company.

The shattered glass of Beirut

At the moment the Museum is running a relatively small display telling the story of the Beirut explosion’s impact on a particular set of artefacts which were on display at the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut. This museum is just 3 kilometres from the epicentre of the blast and housed, among other things, a case displaying 74 glass vessels from different periods of Lebanon’s complex history.

The blast shattered the display case, mixing the shards of ancient glass with those from the case and surrounding windows into a mess of glass fragments.

Undeterred, the museum’s curators set out to disentangle all the fragments and try to restore as many of the glass vessels as they could. They invited British Museum conservators to help them and this room displays the results of their joint labours. After three months of collaboration, the two teams have pieced together eight vessels and these are what are on display here, eight rebuilt glass containers in a row in one display case, accompanied by a couple of short videos and a few wall labels.

Installation view of ‘Shattered glass of Beirut’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

The vessels are all of different shapes and sizes, some plain, some yellow or yellowy-green in colour. They range from the first to the ninth century, mainly ancient Roman with a few Byzantine and Islamic examples: bowls, a flask, a beaker, a jug and a cup. The room is dark. From the ceiling hang white sheets onto which are projected an aerial view of the explosion site, at the docks down by Beirut’s seafront.

Usually the British Museum displays stuff of mostly historic interest. This is a little more polemical. It is intended as a symbol of hope in several ways. First, at the most basic physical level, it is a practical display of the work of museum conservators which usually goes on behind the scenes but here is given pride and place. It showcases the delicacy and precision and fastidiousness of their unsung skills.

Installation view of ‘Shattered glass of Beirut’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

Second, it is a demonstration off co-operation between two institutions, one in Britain, one in the Middle East, a symbol of internationalism as opposed to the narrow nationalisms of our times.

Third, the stitching back together of these battered artefacts comes to stand as a symbol for the resilience and bravery of the Lebanese people who have been through such gruelling times. These eight fragile vessels stand as an ‘expression of the grief, solidarity and recovery of the people of Lebanon’. To quote the museum:

The team purposefully made the joins between the shards visible and, though some of the missing areas were filled to support the surrounding fragments, others were left unfilled. These visible scars and missing fragments bear witness to the explosion and the determination of the people of Lebanon to recover.

So now, as well as being artefacts from thousands of years ago, these fragile eight objects now carry a heavy weight of meaning, testament to the commitment of Beirut’s curators to preserve the past from obliteration, testament to the internationalist spirit of collaboration, testament to the skills of the British Museum’s conservators.

Small room, big heart.

Two videos

1. Responding to crisis

2. One broken piece at a time

Other British Museum reviews

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

Leave a comment

by Simon on October 21, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Museum

Tagged American University of Beirut, Asahi Shimbun room, Beirut, Beirut explosion, British Museum, conservation, conservatorship, Lebanese civil war Syria civil war, Lebanon, Middle East

Posted by Simon on October 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/21/shattered-glass-of-beirut-british-museum/

Peru: a journey in time @ the British Museum

This is a magnificent exhibition. I think the British Museum is my favourite museum/gallery in London, not only because of the beauty of the building, its sense of size and spaciousness, the awesome breadth and range of its holdings – but because it also combines two of my favourite subjects, art and deep history: art in the widest sense, from the high art of imperial courts to the folk art of Inuit or African tribes; and ‘history’ meaning 50 or 100 years ago, but 5,000 or even 50,000 years ago, the full depth and breadth of all human history.

Copper and shell funerary mask, Peru, Moche, AD 100 to 800. Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru. Donated by James Reid

What

In fact the quality of the objects on display in this exhibition is one of its most striking points. I’ve been to scores of exhibitions about ancient cultures and often the curators are forced, through lack of archaeological evidence, to display shards of pottery or fragments of swords and so on and reconstruct their appearance.

By striking contrast, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an exhibition where the quality of every single piece on display was so high. Peru: a journey in time is an exhibition of physically complete, highly finished and dazzling masterpieces!

I was fascinated to learn that this is in large part because of the dry desert conditions of coastal Peru where a lot of its ancient cities were sited meant that all objects, even rugs and tapestries, remained beautifully preserved in the sand for centuries. Apparently these deserts are among the driest in the world, and the exhibition opens with a huge 4-minute video projected onto the wall showing aerial shots of (presumably a helicopter) flying over Amazon jungle, then the breath-taking Andes mountains, through winding river valleys and then, finally across the beautiful bone dry deserts and so to the sandy shoreline. I sat and watched the whole thing several times. It’s awesome.

The exhibition brings together over 40 objects transported from nine museums across Peru to join 80 other pieces from the British Museum’s own collection, many of them rarely if ever exhibited before, including beautiful pots and ceramics, gold headpieces and gauntlets, highly decorated fabrics used to wrap royal corpses and much more.

So it really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see such an extensive exhibition of such wonderful, beautiful objects from remote and ancient cultures most of us have never heard of.

Where

So where are talking? Right at the start the show features a big map showing the borders of modern Peru. I can’t find it anywhere online and this is the least worst available alternative. In the centre is the modern state of Peru with key archaeological sites highlighted. To the north is Ecuador, the north-east Colombia, to the east Brazil, to the south-east Bolivia.

Map of ancient sites in Peru

But the point is that, until a few hundred years ago, until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 1530s, all the South American states didn’t exist, in fact the modern state of Peru didn’t come into existence until 200 years ago (and the Museum does point out that the exhibition is by way of celebrating Peru’s bicentennary).

Before the 1530s the central part of the west coast of South America was ruled by a succession of native states and empires, the mountains of the Andes were more sparsely populated, though containing some towns and holy sites, and the Amazon rainforest was inhabited by countless indigenous tribes who have left little or no trace.

When

As to when, the big, big revelation of this show is that the Incas, who most of us have heard about, were only the last and relatively short-lived of a whole series of empires which rose to eminence and ruled various parts of the mountain and coastal regions of what we now call Peru for centuries, the first empires dating from thousands of years BC.

As the co-curator of the exhibition, Cecilia Pardo, puts it:

‘While the Incas are one of the most well-known civilisations from Peru, they were actually relatively recent in terms of the long history of this region. We’ll be taking visitors back many thousands of years earlier.’

The Museum provides an illustrated timeline:

A Central Andes timeline

And the exhibition is arranged in simple chronological order, with a room (or, since the spaces are actually marked off by fine bead curtaining) a ‘space’ assigned to the six most important empires or cultures. Each one is introduced by a wall label giving a brief overview of the culture’s dates, rise and extent, cultural practices, a map showing that particular culture’s centres, ritual sites, and one or more big big photos of a key site.

The wall labels are just the right length, but it still requires an effort to get the timeline clear in your head, to try and remember the names of the successive cultures and then to remember the cultural practices associated with each.

Pottery vessel in the shape of a contorted body, Peru, Cupisnique,1200 to 500 BC. Museo de Arte de Lima. Donated by Petrus and Verónica Fernandini. Photo by Daniel Giannoni

The timeline can be summarised as:

15,000 BC first humans arrive in South America
2,500 to 1,800 BC first pottery remains
1,200 to 200 BC Chavin culture
900 to 200 BC Paracas culture
200 BC to 650 AD Nasca culture
100 to 800 AD Mosca
600 to 900 AD Wari
900 to 1400 AD coastal kingdom of Chimú
1400 to 1533 Inca Empire

So the Inca ‘room’ is the last one in the show (well, there’s a kind of epilogue showing how some of the practices, patterns and designs of the earlier cultures linger on among peasants or high-end artists in modern Peru), and it goes heavy on the famous ruined city of Machu Picchu, with the usual breath-taking photos, architectural diagrams showing its structure and layout and so on. But we know about Macchu Picchu sitting atop its mountain, 8,000 feet above the tropical forest and the spectacular views which we routinely see in screensavers or travel brochures. (I’m always disappointed to be reminded that Machu Picchu, from the Quechua Indian language, simply means ‘old mountain’. As so often, the foreign words are so much more evocative than the bald English translation.)

But it’s the other spaces, devoted to the other cultures, which are the real revelation. Here they are in order with a few of the outstanding highlights.

1. Living landscapes

Introduction to the breath-taking but challenging environments of Peru, rainforest in the east, high Andes mountains, and desert down to the coast. Introduces ideas from the various cultures, suggesting how the peoples lived in tune with nature, developed agriculture, commerce and art, and their own theories of time and history, and of death and the afterlife.

2. Early cultures and the Chavin (1200 to 500 BC)

3. Life and death in the desert

How the Paracas and Nasca peoples lived along the south coast of Peru, one of the most arid places on the planet. the most outstanding achievement of the Nasca people couldn’t be included in the exhibition because it is the huge ‘geoglyphs’, outline shapes of animals which they carved in the desert. They did this by removing the top layer of earth and exposing the lighter sediment beneath to create stylised depictions of animals and other natural objects. And there aren’t just a handful: to date between nearly 100 new figures had been found with the use of drones and archaeologists believe there are more yet to be discovered.

The Monkey geoglyph, Nasca, Peru. ©Walter Wust / PROMPERÚ.

As to the Paracas, the standout thing here was their cult of severed heads. One of the biggest exhibits is a big tapestry aid flat in a case which you can stroll round. At first I took that busy pattern to be of stylised figures, a bit reminiscent of the early video game, Space Invaders.

Mantle depicting mythical beings holding severed heads. Museo de Arte de Lima. Prado Family Bequest. Restored with a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.

It was only when I looked closer that I realised every single one these figures was carrying in their hand a severed head. At first I thought this was a gruesome proof of human sacrifice comparable to the Aztec cult of cutting human hearts out of the defeated in battle. This seemed to be confirmed when in realised several of the pots in this section also depicted figures holding a rope tied to the top of a severed human head.

And then saw a set of wood carvings (rare survivals from the period which have been in the British Museum vaults for over a century, apparently, and never before been put on public display). These were of naked figures (we know they are naked because they had prominent wooden penises) again with thick rope around their necks.

The curator explained it all. In most societies war means unbridled violence between large armies, all too often rampaging across territory and considering it a valid war aim to kill all civilians, destroy all buildings and agriculture. Not so the Paracas. According to the curator, if conflict arose between groups, representatives were chosen to take part in something more like the games in the Roman amphitheatre. The losers were not killed there and then but submitted to this ritual of abasement and execution. The penises are important not as symbols of fertility but because they emphasise the captors’ naked status.

The losers were taken by boat to a holy island just off the coast, where were priests or religious officials who performed the beheading according to rituals. This explains why this section of the exhibition included a beautifully complete and detailed ceramic of a boat being sailed, with a fully dressed sailor at the tiller and several naked captives on deck, all with the stylised short thick rope round their necks.

To return to the funerary wrapping, the curator now explained that the 70 or so figures depicted are gods or protective spirits of the afterlife, and the head each one is holding by a rope represents an ancestor of the person being wrapped in this covering. So, by the end of his presentation, I realised what a precious object this was and how highly charged with religious and ritual symbolism.

(The exhibition features half a dozen or so videos, each devoted to particular exhibits, and this funeral cloth was accompanied by a video showing exactly how it would have been used to wrap the body of its high status owner.)

4. The Moche (AD 100 to 800) and the Chimu (AD 1000 to 1400)

These two cultures dominated along the coast and inland valleys of northern Peru. The outstanding artefacts from the Moche period were the stunningly finished and lifelike pottery heads and figurines.

This is what I meant when I said that the exhibits are in astonishing condition. If these pots were from ancient Greece or Rome, you’d put up with half the decoration being scratched off, chips and fragments. But all the pottery heads and figurine included in the exhibition were in immaculate condition. They looked like they’d been made and glazed last month instead of two thousand years ago.

You might have expected that the portrait heads and figurines were stylised and stereotyped or standardised. But the curator pointed out that archaeologists have discovered a set of pottery heads depicting a man with a distinctive facial disfiguration, and the three pots clearly show him as a youth, a mature man and an old man. In other words, these ceramic heads are portraits of real people. I found that breath-taking.

5. The Wari (AD 600 to 900) and Inca (AD 1400 to 1532)

The two great empires of the highlands of the Central Andes, this part of the exhibition overshadowed, as mentioned above, by stunning images of Machu Picchu.

6. The Andean legacy

The final part of the Inca space shows Western influences impinging on native traditions, Christianity apparently wiping out native religions and rituals, books written entirely by Spanish clerics (all the cultures listed above were illiterate so we can never know the detail of their beliefs or practices) giving a very one-sided account of the native peoples, often misunderstanding or distorting their beliefs and traditions.

But then the final (small) space is devoted to a more optimistic vision, showing how many of the native traditions, despite Spanish attempts at obliteration, survived and went underground, emerging centuries later in enduring traditions of arts and crafts, in native words and traditions kept alive in rural areas..

Why

Why go? Because it is a magnificent exhibition. All the exhibits are in stunningly good condition. The photos of the Peruvian landscape are breath-taking, made me want to jump on a plane and go see for myself. The sense of history it gives, of how deep history works, of the growth and overlap and intermingling of distinct cultures over long periods of time on similar or adjacent territories, fire the historical imagination.

If you like images of severed heads, this is the exhibition for you! And I haven’t even mentioned the frequency of other images and motifs taken from the natural world, such as the recurring motifs of pumas or panthers, and the sly presence of snakes in many images. For example, the stunning 2,500-year-old gold headdress and pair of ear plates decorated with embossed motifs of human faces with feline fangs and snakes’ appendages, part of an elite burial found at Kuntur Wasi.

It’s a feast for the eyes and the mind. Go.

A video review

Here’s a rather home-made but accurate depiction of what the exhibition looks like, made by Visiting London Guide.

More British Museum exhibition reviews

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

Leave a comment

by Simon on December 13, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History, Latin America, Museum

Posted by Simon on December 13, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/13/peru-a-journey-in-time-the-british-museum/

Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint @ the British Museum

‘Thomas is the best doctor for the worthy sick.’
(Inscription on a lead ampulla created before 1200 to hold some of the Saint Thomas Becket’s miracle-working blood)

Two years after his murder on 29 December 1170, Thomas Becket was canonised by Pope Alexander III and his tomb at Canterbury cathedral quickly became a site of miraculous healing and wonder cures, and one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in all of Europe, second only to Rome and Santiago de Compostela.

How appropriate of the British Museum to re-open after the long COVID lockdown with a grand exhibition devoted to one of the greatest healers this country has ever known.

The healing of Ralph de Longeville. Miracle window, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Thomas’s story

The exhibition is in the central rotunda at the museum, smaller and more intimate than the large Sainsburys gallery at the back. It is laid out in simple chronological order, with key events told in the dozen or so big wall posters and embellished in the labels of over 100 objects brought together for the first time, including rare loans from across the UK and Europe.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll quote liberally from the exhibition wall labels:

Becket was born in 1120 in Cheapside, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral. He had a comfortable childhood. His parents Gilbert and Matilda were immigrants from Northern France, and part of a wealthy merchant community living in the commercial heart of London.

Around the age of 18 Becket went to study in Paris. After three years in Paris, Becket returned to England. He was offered the chance to work as a clerk for Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, joining a group of ambitious young men. The legal and diplomatic training that Becket received in his nine years with Theobald was life-changing.

In 1154 the archbishop recommended him as royal chancellor to the new king, Henry II, and the two men became great friends. It was the best paid position in the royal household, earning him five shillings a day. As chancellor Becket was responsible for issuing documents in the king’s name.

In 1162 Henry II nominated Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, following Theobald’s death. It was a controversial appointment. Becket was not a priest and until then had lived a worldly, secular life. The king wanted him to remain chancellor, hoping that having his friend in both positions would increase royal control over Church and State. This plan failed when Becket renounced the chancellorship and began to oppose Henry. In 1164, with tensions escalating, the archbishop escaped across the Channel.

Henry II saw Becket’s rejection of the chancellorship in 1162 as a betrayal. Over the next two years their relationship disintegrated. One issue in particular divided them. The king demanded that churchmen accused of serious crimes be tried in secular rather than religious courts. Becket refused to endorse this infringement of the rights of the Church, provoking the king’s outrage.

With the situation spiralling out of control, Becket was brought before the king and accused of trumped-up crimes. Fearing for his life, on 2 November 1164 the archbishop fled abroad. He spent six years in exile under the protection of Henry’s rival, Louis VII of France, returning on 2 December 1170. Henry II punished Becket for leaving England without his permission, confiscating his land and wealth.

Becket found himself in France at the same time as Pope Alexander III, who was locked in disagreement with Frederick Barbarossa, an emperor with vast territories in central Europe. Like Becket, Alexander was in exile and sought protection from King Louis VII of France. After making peace the pope returned to Rome. This image shows him embracing Becket before their farewell. Alexander was later responsible for Becket’s canonisation as a saint.

Pope Alexander, who had forbidden the Archbishop of York to perform the sacred act, receives a complaint from Becket. He asks for permission to excommunicate the bishops involved in the ceremony, which the pope duly grants.

The coronation of the Young King spurred Becket into action and, after agreeing a fragile peace with Henry II, he decided to return to England. Fatefully, before leaving France he carried out the sentences of excommunication endorsed by the pope.

On 2 December, Becket returned to Canterbury and the cathedral he had not seen for six years. At his Christmas court in Normandy, Henry learned that Becket had excommunicated the English bishops involved in his son’s coronation. He flew into a rage, calling Becket a traitor and ‘low-born clerk’. Four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, Richard Brito and William de Tracy, heard the king’s outburst. They hatched a plan to bring the archbishop to Henry and headed for England to arrest him.

The knights arrived at Canterbury and entered the precincts. They tried to arrest Thomas but he fled into the cathedral itself. Here the knights again tried to seize him but Thomas refused to go with them. The knights had worked themselves up into a rage and also risked major humiliation if they ended up having to leave empty-handed. Although the precise exchanges will never be known the confrontation escalated out of control and finally the knights attacked, one of them raising his sword and bringing it down to shatter Thomas’s skull. There were quite a few eye witnesses including Thomas’s clerk, Edward Grim, who tried to intervene and was injured in the struggle. All the eye witnesses agree that Thomas’s skull was shattered and a fragment of it flew to the ground.

The exhibition contains numerous depictions of the deed, as illustrations in illuminated manuscripts such as the MS containing John of Salisbury’s Life of St Thomas Becket from the British Library, one of the earliest known representations of the murder, or as carved reliefs, as shown below.

Alabaster panel showing the murder of Thomas Becket. England, around 1425 to 1450. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Appalled at what they had done the knights returned to Henry’s court in France where the king immediately grasped the significance of the catastrophe. In the years to come he made not one but two major penances to atone for his guilt and eventually took the extraordinary step of going on pilgrimage himself to Canterbury, where he stripped to a loincloth and shuffled through the cathedral on his bare knees, arriving at the altar where he was flagellated by monks.

To understand the utterly Christian worldview of the Middle Ages, you have to grasp that this was a reasonable and practical thing for a king to do. It cleansed him of his personal guilt and thus enabled his soul to enter heaven. It went a long way to winning back those of his subjects and the hierarchy of the church in Rome which had been scandalised by the murder. And so it, at the same time, fulfilled Henry’s purpose of asserting his authority over the farflung territories of his Plantagenet empire which stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

The personal drama

Complicated story, isn’t it, and I’ve followed the museum’s account so closely because your opinion of the murder has to depend on a good grasp of its context and of the precise chain of events leading up to it.

At the level of personal drama, Henry and Becket had at one time been very good friends. Becket was 13 years older than Henry, better educated and in many ways a mentor to the younger man. The pair worked well together when they were king and chancellor. When Henry raised him to the archbishopric he therefore had every expectation that Thomas would be grateful.

But Thomas was also a flamboyant man, given to grandiloquent gestures as chancellor and, when he became archbishop, there is evidence from contemporary accounts that many other clerics disapproved. He had to be promoted through the hierarchy of clerical positions at top speed which many felt made a mockery of religion.

Therefore Thomas was nervously aware of his lack of deep theological training or of proper clerical experience. Combine that with a tendency to grandstand and you have an accident waiting to happen.

To this day historians debate his motives.

1. When he refused Henry’s demands to reform ecclesiastical law in order to make priests who had committed egregious crimes (for example rape or murder) subject to the secular laws of the land, did Thomas do it because he sincerely felt everyone anointed into the church was only accountable to the church – or because of his awareness that he wasn’t a ‘proper’ churchman so he was trying to curry favour with the English church hierarchy and the distant pope?

2. When he made the dramatic move of excommunicating the bishops who anointed Henry’s young son co-king, did he do it out of purely religious fervour and in order to protect the rights and privileges of the post of archbishop of Canterbury, whose ancient right it was to perform coronations and this undermined his authority. Or was he, once again, grandstanding to curry favour, this time with the pope who he met in exile in France and who explicitly approved his actions?

3. Lastly, why did he insist on staying put when the knights came to arrest him? Chances are he knew they were behaving without Henry’s explicit permission, that arresting an archbishop was illegal, and he knew any confrontation between him and the king would inevitably draw in the pope who was a staunch ally. Why not go with the knights, have it out with the king and be exonerated?

Alabaster panel from an altarpiece showing Becket’s consecration as archbishop on 3 June 1162. England, first half of the 15th century. Private Collection. © Nicholas and Jane Ferguson.

Or, as T.S. Eliot’s play on the subject considers, did Thomas want to be martyred? Facing intractable problems, not least his own sense of inadequacy and illegitimacy (as a man who lacked the deep experience required by an archbishop) did his liking for grand gestures kick in, and he taunted the knights so much they were left with no way out?

This is the view of Paul Johnson in his 1976 History of Christianity who quotes Edward Grim, who was an eye witness:

He who had long yearned for martyrdom now saw that the occasion to embrace it had arrived. (Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, 1990 Penguin edition, page 210)

And one of Thomas’s many hagiographers, William Fitzstephen:

Had he so wished, the Archbishop might easily have turned aside and saved himself by flight, for both time and place offered an opportunity to escape without being discovered.’ (ibid)

Could he have simply walked out peacefully with the knights and accompanied them to France with no fuss? We’ll never know.

The saint and healer

The exhibition really blossoms after Becket was murdered because that’s when he was transformed from one among many squabbling European monarchs and their statesman, into a premier league saint.

News of his murder spread far and wide across Europe and almost immediately people rich and poor, high and low, young and old, male and female, began making the pilgrimage to the cathedral and to the precise steps into the choir where he was hacked down. Relics were many: his clothes, his blood, his bones, his coffin, special prayers, these all helped rain down on pilgrims inestimable blessings, healings and cures.

Not only did Canterbury become by far Britain’s premier pilgrimage site but until the Reformation Thomas was the most frequently portrayed of all saints, had more parish churches named after him than any other saint, and more English boys were called after him than any other namesake.

The exhibition includes many of the precious caskets which were lovingly created to contain this or that relic brought back by pilgrims which are all beautiful examples of medieval craftsmanship, but maybe the most striking is this reliquary casket from Norway. Norway! Because apparently in Norway Thomas’s fame was such that he was second in popularity to St Olaf, the national saint.

(If you look carefully at the bottom panel you can not only see the knight hacking Thomas’s head but also the famous fragment of skull falling to the floor.)

Reliquary casket, c.1220–50 from Hedalen Stave Church, Norway. By kind permission of Hedalen Stave Church

The stained glass

In the decades following his death, the authorities at Canterbury cathedral created a new chapel devoted to Thomas. This included what became a set of 12 tall, narrow stained glass windows over six meters in height and each containing a set of four circular roundels themselves divided into segments depicting scenes not from Thomas’s life, but from the countless miraculous healings which people attributed to his powers. Hence they are collectively known as the Miracle Windows.

Five of the original windows were destroyed over the centuries, so seven survive, and one of these seven has been lovingly dismantled, removed from the cathedral and carefully transported here to the British Museum, where the four sections have been separated and are displayed at head height in a special curving gallery.

So this is a golden opportunity to see some masterpieces of medieval stained glass, really close up, beautifully presented and with the sometimes gruesome stories portrayed in each of the panels carefully described and explained.

Take the roundel which describes the sensational story of Eilward of Westoning.

Miracle window, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Eilward was a peasant who was accused of stealing in a drunken quarrel. In the panel on the mid-left he stands with the stolen items tied behind his back. A judge in a cap sentences him to trial by ordeal. Eilward fails and is condemned to blinding and castration. At the bottom left, Eilward is reclining in bed, his head bandaged from a blow. Becket appears to him in a vision, emerging from a shrine to bless him. In the middle-right panel Eilward lies bound to a plank as a man holds him by the neck and stabs his eyes while another wields a blade, kneels on his legs and reaches for his testicles.

Becket appears in a vision to Eilward. The saint makes the sign of the cross in front of his face. On waking, Eilward’s eyes and testicles grow back. The top panel shows Eilward riding a horse to Canterbury Cathedral. In the bottom centre panel a crowd gathers round Eilward as he points to his eyes while another man points at his groin to highlight his miraculous healing. The green tree at the centre symbolises his restored fertility. The panel at bottom right shows Eilward giving thanks at Becket’s tomb.

The other roundels describe in similar detail the miracle of Etheldreda who recovers from a fever, Saxeva who recovers from a painful arm and stomach ache, two sisters from Boxley who were lame and are healed, a monk called Hugh from Jervaulx Abbey who is cured, and so on. I particularly liked the story of Hugh who, at one point, suffers a catastrophic nosebleed which is depicted as a vivid flow of red streaming down from his face, on the lower left.

Detail from Miracle window showing the story of Hugh of Jervaulx, Canterbury Cathedral, early 1200s. Note the vivid red nosebleed from the prostrate man’s face © The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral

Move over, graphic novels!

Thomas and Realpolitik

I was already familiar with the story of Thomas Becket, possibly a little over-familiar with it and not much in the main body of the exhibition told me much I didn’t already know or changed my own personal opinion.

Influenced by secular historians like Paul Johnson, I am inclined to think of Thomas as a deliberately obstructive, showboating and irresponsible man who needlessly set out to make Henry II’s life as difficult as possible. In most accounts I’ve read, the Becket murder was a blip or side issue in the bigger picture of Henry’s lifelong struggle to maintain his Plantagenet empire. It had a seismic impact on popular culture but little or no impact on the diplomatic Realpolitik of the day. After his half-naked atonement Henry restored good relations with the pope who approved his selection for next Archbishop of Canterbury as well as other ecclesiastical posts, as well as his plans to invade and conquer Ireland. In practical, worldly terms, Thomas’s death changed nothing.

(It’s worth pointing out that the curators disagree, and include a treasured manuscript of Magna Carta, signed 45 years after Thomas’s death by Henry’s useless son, King John, in 1215, to make their case. The Charter’s very first clause, probably added at the insistence of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, states that the English Church must be free from royal interference. In the curators’ opinion this demonstrates how Becket’s dispute with Henry II continued to shape English politics long after his death. In Paul Johnson’s view this struggle between king and church was the central issue of the high Middle Ages, would remain a bugbear for centuries until Henry VIII decisively ended it with victory for the secular authority, and Thomas’s death didn’t really affect the issue one way or the other. Discuss.)

The Canterbury Tales

The exhibition has a section devoted to The Canterbury Tales, one of the key texts of English literature and, with its varied and colourful tales told by a motley cross section of late 14th century personalities all engaged on a horseback pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, as explained in the lovely words of the Prologue.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

‘That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke’, I love that line. Who doesn’t need holp when that they are seeke?

The exhibition includes one of the earliest manuscripts which contains all 24 of the surviving stories, as well as blow-ups of the original medieval portraits of some of the storytellers (the Wife of Bath, the Yeoman, the Merchant and the Shipman). But none of the stories are actually about Thomas and, if anything, they demonstrate a woefully relaxed attitude to Christian faith and morality which would have appalled the saint and his most zealous devotees.

The suppression of a saint

The one part of the exhibition I found genuinely new and informative came right at the end and deals with Henry VIII’s aggressive erasure of the cult of Thomas.

I knew that, as part of the first steps in the Reformation and linked with the Dissolution of the monasteries, Henry had all pilgrimage sites and saints shrines shut down. I knew from Johnson’s account that Thomas’s shrine was the biggest one in the land and that Henry’s commissioners carried off a vast amount of loot, namely 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and 26 cartloads of treasure. A generation earlier, around 1511, the Dutch reformer Erasmus and the English humanist John Colet had visited the shrine and been disgusted at its tackiness. They were offered the opportunity to kiss a prize relic, the genuine arm of St George, or to touch a manky old rag supposedly stained with the saint’s blood, and Thomas’s genuine original shoe to be kissed.

As the curators observe:

After visiting Becket’s shrine real pilgrims bought similar souvenirs, badges to pin to clothing or little flasks worn around the neck. They were made quickly and cheaply by pouring molten lead or tin into a mould. The range of Canterbury souvenirs is remarkable, from miniature bells inscribed with ‘St Thomas’ to tiny swords with detachable scabbards.

And the exhibition includes no fewer than 24 examples of these multivarious knick-knacks and gewgaws. The medieval cult of saints had degenerated to the level of Blackpool souvenirs.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn the specifics of the demolition of Thomas’s massive and treasure-laden shrine, that:

On 5 September 1538, Henry VIII arrived in Canterbury. During his three-day stay royal agents began demolishing St Thomas’s shrine, prising off the jewels and smashing the marble base. They packed up its precious metal in crates, which were taken to London. Becket’s bones were removed, and a rumour spread that they had been burnt and the ashes scattered to the wind.

What I didn’t know and found fascinating was the way King Henry VIII singled out the cult of Thomas for special suppression. It was because, at a political level, above the level of popular culture and religion, Thomas was a symbol of the independence of the Church and Henry’s reformation was about decisively ending centuries of squabbling, and asserting the paramount authority of the secular monarch.

This explains why, after 1534 when Henry broke with Rome and Parliament appointed him Supreme Head of the Church of England, he could not tolerate Becket’s status as a defender of Church liberty and denounced him as a traitor to the country, or the new notion of ‘nation’ which Henry was creating.

Hence the passage of laws which singled out the cult of Saint Thomas and banned it. The laws banned visual references to the saint and insisted that the very word ‘saint’ was to be expunged from the record. Henceforth he was to be referred to as ‘Bishop Thomas’. A wall label quotes from a Royal proclamation, of 16 November 1538:

…from henceforth the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint, but Bishop Becket, and…his images and pictures through the whole realm shall be put down…

The exhibition closes with some quite fascinating examples of how this erasure from history, this rewriting of history, was carried out, including:

a book of hours where the devotional prayer to Becket has been carefully cut out, although the illustration of the martyrdom has been left (intriguingly) undamaged
a copy of the Golden Legend, a very popular compendium of the lives of saints, in which the text and image for Becket’s story have been crossed out with black ink
a manuscript containing texts for the celebration of mass, once owned by the parish church of St John the Baptist in Bromsgrove, near Worcester, in which thick red ink has been selectively smeared across prayers to St Thomas in order to obliterate them

Manuscript containing mass texts from the parish church of St John the Baptist in Bromsgrove in which prayers to ‘Bishop’ Thomas have been obliterated by red ink. Around 1450. © The Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Curators

Lloyd de Beer, curator, Medieval Britain and Europe
Naomi Speakman, curator, Late Medieval Europe
Sophie Kelly, project curator

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of medieval reviews

Other British Museum reviews

Complete list of all my British Museum reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on May 22, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Christianity, Exhibition, History, Middle Ages, Museum

Posted by Simon on May 22, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/22/thomas-becket-british-museum/

Collecting histories: Solomon Islands @ the British Museum

The Asahi Shimbun displays

As you walk up the stairs and into the main entrance of the British Museum it’s easy to miss the room immediately on your right, hidden behind the tide of visitors pouring in and out.

Officially room number three, since 2005 this smallish room has been devoted to displays sponsored by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun.

The idea is to showcase single or small groups of objects from the Museum’s vast collections, focusing right in on a particular object or set of objects or region or era. It’s a kind of lucky dip into the Museum’s bottomless store of treasures and wonders. Since 2005 the room has hosted more than 40 displays. My favourite was the mummified crocodile from ancient Egypt, which was displayed along with a fascinating explanation of the place of crocodiles in Egyptian mythology.

The Solomon Islands

The current Asahi Shimbun Display focuses on the Solomon Islands. There’s a map showing you their location in the Pacific, and wall labels describing their history before Europeans arrived, the story of their conquest and colonial administration, and then events since independence from Britain in 1978.

We learn that the Solomon Islands is an independent country of six large and many small islands, home to about 80 ethnic groups whose distinctive cultures are represented in many colonial collections around the world.

I was surprised to learn that, although the islands became steadily more enmeshed in patterns of global trade during the 19th century, it was only in 1890 that they became a British Protectorate. After 90-odd years of British governance, Christian missions and colonial plantations, the Solomon Islands became independent in 1978.

Many people these days have moved from the remote islands to the capital Honiara on Guadalcanal Island to take advantage of its jobs and facilities. Most Solomon Islanders are now Christians, children and grand-children of pagans successfully converted by European missionaries – but still very close to their tribal histories and traditions.

It’s because of this British imperial connection that the British Museum has such an important collection of native objects and historic photos from the Solomon Islands.

Objects from the Solomon Islands

The maps of the islands are good, the old photos are sort of interesting, but it is the half dozen or so native objects which fire the imagination. These include:

A bird net float

The Lau people, living on islands in the coastal lagoons, used consecrate bird floats on special nets to catch fish for festivals celebrating the ancestors. After use these powerful and dangerous objects were hung up in the priest’s house. Priest Kailafa of Ferasubua Island gave this bird float to Anglican missionary Arthur Hopkins in 1903, who later sold it to a collector, who then bequeathed it the museum.

Bird net float from the Solomon Islands, late 19th century

A large carved ‘figure of an ancestor’

This image of an ancestor belonged to a shrine at Munda in the New Georgia group of western Solomon Islands. People prayed to these ancestors for spiritual support and protection, so their memorials were sacred and precious. This figure was among artefacts taken from homes and shrines by the crew of HMS Royalist in 1891. The captain later sold it to the British Museum.

Figure of an ancestor, 1890s

Carved wooden canoe figurehead

During the colonial period the islands continued to export its a fairly narrow range of raw materials including plantation crops, timber and fish. But it was interesting to learn that before, during and after the British Protectorate, the islanders also made a healthy living selling visitors their hand-carved and decorated artefacts.

Trade boomed after the Second World War which saw the rise and rise of speciality tourism and then mass tourism. The islanders responded by producing increasing numbers of masks and sculptures carved in the traditional way and inlaid with pearl shell, to create striking designs such as this canoe figure-head. This example, made by the craftsman named Bala of Butana, was bought by a British Museum curator in an art shop in 2004.

Canoe figure-head (nguzunguzu) of wood with pearl shell inlay, 2004

This, in a way, was the most interesting learning. We all know that a lot of the artefacts in the British Museum were looted, stolen or swindled off the original owners. It’s a surprise, and goes against that whole narrative of colonial guilt and imperial injustice which is now received opinion, to learn that some of them were just…bought at gift shops 🙂

Summary

The display is not really worth a trip in and of itself. But if you’re passing nearby, or certainly if you’re visiting one of the museum’s big exhibitions, it’s always worth taking a moment to pop into Room 3 to find out what random objects and subjects the Asahi Shimbun display has pulled out of the British Museum’s bottomless trove of treasures.

Other British Museum reviews

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

Leave a comment

by Simon on July 29, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History, Museum

Tagged Asahi Shimbun, British Empire, British Protectorate, Christianity, Ferasubua Island, Guadalcanal Island, New Georgia, nguzunguzu, Pacific ocean, Priest Kailafa, The Asahi Shimbun displays, The British Museum, the Solomon Islands

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/29/collecting-histories-solomon-islands-the-british-museum/

Edvard Munch: love and angst @ the British Museum

The fin-de-siecle

The last decade of the 19th century is famous for the decadent, dark imagery of its art and literature, and even life. In Imperial Britain this was epitomised by the decadent sexuality associated with the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book magazine and the pornographic prints of Aubrey Beardsley. In France there was a reaction against Impressionism which took many forms including the urban posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and the swarthy nudes of Paul Gauguin down in the South Seas. All were well-known and public artists, working in cosmopolitan cities which were the capitals of far-flung empires – London, Paris. They were famous and playing on large stages.

In the other countries of northern Europe, however, one of the most powerful artistic currents was Symbolism.

As the exhibition notes:

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that rejected representations of the external world for those of imagination and myth. Symbolists looked inwards in order to represent emotions and ideas.

In Belgium, north Germany and the Scandinavian countries, artists developed a wide range of techniques and styles, but tended to fixate on a handful of themes, namely sex and death. Death awaits with his scythe. Empty boats arrive at forbidding islands. Youths waste away from frustrated love. Beautiful young women turn out to be vampires.

Sex and death and anguish and despair, these are all much more personal, introverted, emotions. Wilde was a flamboyant public personality, Beardsley’s art was defiantly lucid and elegant, both were immensely sophisticated and urbane and cosmopolitan, confident doyens of the largest, richest city in the world.

Whereas much of the fin-de-siecle art from Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia was darker, more personal. Of course they produced urban and sophisticated art as well – the 1890s is characterised by an explosion of diverse art movements – but there was also a big strand of empty lakes and dark pine forests and brooding skies and agonised artist-heroes.

Edvard Munch

Munch is slap bang in the middle of this social and cultural movement. His most famous work is The Scream, which was first made as a painting in 1893 and then turned into a lithograph in 1895 which was reproduced in French and British and American magazines and made his reputation.

The Scream is probably among the top ten most famous images produced by any artist anywhere, and has been parodied and lampooned and reproduced in every medium imaginable (pillow slips and duvet covers, posters, bags, t-shirts). It featured in an episode of The Simpsons, clinching its status as one of the world’s best known art icons. It’s up there with the Mona Lisa.

The Scream (1895) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection, Norway. Photo by Thomas Widerberg

Why is it so powerful? Well:

It is highly stylised and simplified – it barely looks like a human being at all, more like some kind of ghost or spirit of the woods.
The rest of the landscape is drawn with harsh single lines, whose waviness seems to echo the long O of the protagonist’s mouth.
The ‘primitiveness’ of the technique of wood carving – with its thick, heavy ‘crude’ lines – somehow echoes the primalness of the emotional state being described.

The exhibition

This exhibition brings together nearly 50 prints from Norway’s Munch Museum, making this the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints seen in the UK for 45 years.

It also includes sketches, photos and a few oil paintings, not least a big haunting portrait – The Sick Child – of his favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when she was just 13. These are set alongside works by French and German contemporaries, to present a powerful overview of Munch’s troubled personality, the artistic milieu he moved in, and his extraordinary ability to turn it into powerful images conveying intense, primal human emotions.

Vampire II (1896) by Edvard Munch. The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, on loan to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

Claustrophobic

The exhibition is up in the top gallery in the Rotunda, a relatively small space, which was divided into smallish sections or rooms, the prints hung quite close together on the walls, and the place was packed, rammed, with silver-haired old ladies and gentleman. It was hard to move around. More than once I went to move on from studying a print and found I couldn’t move, with people studying the next-door prints blocking me to left and right and a shuffle of pedestrians blocking any backward movement. Imagine the Tube at rush hour. It was like that.

Possibly, in fact, a good atmosphere to savour Munch’s work. Trapped, claustrophobic, slightly hysterical. it forced me to look up at the quotes from his letters or diaries which have been liberally printed up on the exhibition walls. Just reading these immediately gives you a sense of where Munch was coming from, his personality and the motivation for his art.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe it.

We do not want pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want… an art that arrests and engages. An art of one’s innermost heart.

Sexual anxiety

There’s plenty more where this came from. The exhibition gives a lot of biographical detail about Munch’s early life, describing the Norwegian capital of Kristiana, how it was connected to the rest of Europe by sea routes, how it was a small provincial town whose every aspect was dominated by the stiflingly respectable Lutheran church, but how young Edvard was attracted to its small bohemian, artistic set of poets and writers and artists, how he conceived a massive sequence of works about love and sex and death which he titled The Frieze of Life:

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death. (1918)

How he travelled to Paris and to Berlin and scandalised respectable opinion with the exhibitions he held there, but created a stir and won admirers for the stark, elemental quality of his woodcuts and prints. (The exhibition includes a map of Europe showing Munch’s extensive travels during the 1890s and 1900s, along with a selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps.)

We are told Munch was born and brought up in a fiercely religious and conservative bourgeois family which was horrified when he fell in with Kristiania’s bohemian layabouts. These bohos practiced sexual promiscuity, had numerous affairs, and so were plagued by jealousy and infidelity and fights – all exacerbated by the way they drank too much, far too much.

It seemed obvious to me that Munch’s anxiety was caused by the crashing conflict between his extremely repressed bourgeois upbringing and the chaotic and promiscuous circles he moved in as a young man. On the one hand was a young man’s desire and lust, on the other were all the authority figures in his culture (and inside his head) saying even looking at a woman with lust in his heart would lead to instant damnation.

The scores of images he made of women as vampires and weird Gothic presences and looming succubi emerging from the shadows, represent a repeated attempt to confront the epicentre of that clash – sex, embodied – for a heterosexual young man – by sexualised young women. They attracted him like a drug, like heroin but all these compulsive thoughts about them triggered the terror of physical disease – the appalling ravages of syphilis for which there was no cure – along with the certainty of eternal damnation – and all these led to anxious, almost hysterical thoughts, about the only way out, the only way to resolve the endless nightmare of anxiety – and that was release and escape into death, the death which he had seen at such close quarters in the deaths of his beloved mother and sister from tuberculosis.

The obsessiveness of his sexual thoughts, and their violent clash with orthodox Christianity, is most evident in the hugely controversial Madonna, an obviously erotic image to which he blasphemously misapplies the title the Mother of God. When you look closely, you realise that those are sperm swimming round the outside of the frame, and a miserable-looking foetus squatting at the bottom left. Sex versus Religion! It’s amazing he wasn’t arrested for blasphemy and public indecency. In fact his 1892 exhibition in Berlin so scandalised respectable opinion that it was shut down after just a week.

Madonna (1895/1902) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

So Munch’s vampire women aren’t real women, of course they’re not. They are depictions of male anxiety about women, namely the irreconcilable conflict between the demanding, drug-addiction-level lust many young, testosterone-fueled men experience, whether they want to or not – and the feelings of shame about having such strong pornographic feelings and experiences, regret at handling relationships with women badly, and anxiety that you are a failure, as a man and as a decent human being. And terror that – if there is a God – you are going straight to hell for all eternity.

Plus, as the wall labels indicate, there really was a lot of heavy drinking in his circle and by Munch personally, which led to chaotic lifestyles among the bohemian set. Munch became a clinical alcoholic. And this addiction – to alcohol – will, of course, have exacerbated all the psychological problems described above.

Exposure to so many of Munch’s prints – alongside detailed explanations of how he made them, the Norwegian and north European tradition they stem from, and so on – really rubs in the fact that he was a great master of the form. It’s not just The Scream. Lots of the other prints have the same archetypal, primitive power, and the exhibition brings it out by setting Munch’s work beside prime examples by other leading print-makers of the time, in France and Germany (many of which are themselves worth paying the price of admission to see).

The subtle prints

It tends to be the extreme images we are attracted to – The Scream, The Madonna, the numerous vampire women, the worrying image of a pubescent girl sitting on a bed. But some decades ago we crossed a threshold into being able to accept all kinds of erotic and extreme images, so these no longer scandalise and thrill us in the same way they did their initial viewers, although they still provide powerful visual experiences.

But having had a first go around the exhibition taking in these greatest hits, I slowly came to realise there was another layer or area of his work, which is – in a word – more subtle. If the most obvious and impactful of his images are about stress and anxiety mounting to open hysteria – there were also plenty of images which were far more restrained. In which – to point out an obvious difference – the women are wearing clothes.

Instead of vampire women whose kisses are turning into bites, these tend to be of fully dressed, utterly ‘respectable’ late-nineteenth century types, set outdoors, in open air situations where… somehow, through the placing and composition of the figures, a more subtle sense of aloneness and isolation is conveyed. They capture the mood of a couple who are, for some reason, not communicating, each isolated in their brooding thoughts.

The Lonely Ones (1899) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Like the complex ways relationships between the sexes fail, become blocked and painful in the plays of Munch’s fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. (Munch, as a leading artist of the day, was acquainted with both Ibsen and the younger playwright, Strindberg. It crossed my mind that if Munch’s more hysterical images can be compared to the highly strung characters in a Strindberg play, the more subdued and unhappy images in some way parallel Ibsen’s couples.)

Having processed the extreme images of vampire women, sex and death in my first go round, on this second pass I warmed to these less blatant images.

I noticed that the naked women images are almost always indoors (as, I suppose, naked women mostly had to be, in his day). But that the more ‘respectable’ and subtle images were all set outside, and often by primal landscapes – namely The Lake and The Forest – the kind of primeval landscape we all associate with Scandinavia and which really was available right on Kristiana’s doorstep.

The exhibition ends with a set of prints which perform variations on his characteristically hunched, half-abstract human figures – characteristically, showing one man and one woman – but in this series hauntingly isolated, leaning on each other or against each other, in postures which don’t look at all sensual but more like the survival techniques of characters from a play by Samuel Beckett.

Towards the Forest II (1897/1915) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Less striking than the vampires and naked women and girls, I thought these strange, half-abstract, ‘lost souls in the landscape’ images had a kind of purity and haunting quality all their own.

Breakdown and rebirth

It comes as no surprise to learn that in 1908 Munch had a nervous breakdown. His anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and sometimes fighting, had become acute, and he was experiencing hallucinations and persecution mania. He entered a clinic and underwent a comprehensive detoxification which lasted nearly eight months.

When he left, he was a new man. Well, new-ish. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic and the wider public of Kristiania for the first time began to appreciate his work. Critics were supportive. His paintings sold. Museums started to buy his back catalogue. His life improved in all measurable ways. But in a textbook case of the artist who needs his anxieties and neuroses to produce great works, everything he carved and painted from then on – portraits of rich friends, of the farm he bought, murals for factories – lacked the intensity and archetypal power of his early years.

Years later all that storm and stress and hysteria seemed so distant as almost to be inexplicable.It is typical that, decades later, he told the story of how his famous painting, Vampire II, got its title. He himself had simply titled it Love and Pain. Pretty boring, eh? But Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, and clearly a man with a flair for publicity, described it as ‘a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.’ And, looking back, Munch comments:

It was the time of Ibsen, and if people were really bent on revelling in symbolist eeriness and calling the idyll ‘Vampire’ – why not?

A man in remission from alcoholism and mental illness, the older Munch can be forgiven for not wanting to revive unhappy memories, and for wanting to palm off the idea for lurid titles onto his friends. But the prints themselves, and all his early writings, don’t lie. The later work is interesting and decorative – but it is the unhappy period covered by this exhibition which produced the intense and troubled works which seem to take you right into the heart of the tortured human condition.

Older, wiser and sober. Munch among his paintings at the end of his life

The promotional video

Related reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on July 22, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Museum, Prints

Posted by Simon on July 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/edvard-munch-love-and-angst-british-museum/

Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008 to 2018 @ the Design Museum

The Design Museum

Haven’t been to the Design Museum since it moved from its old location at Shad Thames and opened in its fancy new building at Holland Park at the end of 2016.

Google map location of the Design Museum

To quote their website:

The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.

On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.

Both the exterior and interior of the new building are spectacular.

The Design Museum exterior. Photo © Hufton + Crow

The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.

Hope to Nope

The rise of graphic design

The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.

This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.

Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?

Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.

Big and varied

This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.

Politically neutral

The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:

a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement
a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere
a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement
opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies
opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain
opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa
opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un
opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.

Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.

Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport

In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.

Structure of the show

The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.

1. Personality

This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions v Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.

In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)

Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.

There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.

What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?

Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.

Wall of magazine covers lampooning Donald Trump. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

2. Protest

The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.

Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:

Catalonia – street protests for independence
South Africa – street protests, speeches etc against President Jacob Zuma
Grenfell Tower in London – an angry crowd shouting ‘justice justice’
Turkey – street protests against Erdogan
The Women’s March in Washington

Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.

One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.

But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.

I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.

But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.

And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.

#stopoppression #wewantahome #justice #democracy #solidarity #thestreetwillbeours #zumamustfall #SAwillrise #defendourdemocracy #womensmarch #freemelania #dumptrump #mybodymyvoice #womensmarchparis #thisisglobal #thisisnew #justice #truth #neveragain #blacklivesmatter #bluelivesmatter #greenlivesmatter #justice4grenfell #resistance #occupy #resist #vaginadentata #stopspain #democracy #solidarity #justice

And so on, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.

Anti-capitalism

Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.

And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.

The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?

Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs v videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.

It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…

Protest web statistics

I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.

As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.

This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.

Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.

Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

Thus we are told that:

in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet
in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day
in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter
in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.
in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election
in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration

For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?

Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.

32.

Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?

At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.

Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.

Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.

Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.

But what that means v how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.

The Hope icon for Barack Obama’s election campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

Results

Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted v ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.

Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?

10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.

Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest

I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.

My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.

It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.

All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…

Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.

But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure v because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.

After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side v Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…

Fancy t-shirts, stylish badges, clever hashtags aren’t enough, nowhere nearly enough, to begin to effect real social and political change.

Forlorn poster, t-shirt and other items promoting the Remain campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.

All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.

All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.

It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:

SLOGANS IN NICE TYPEFACES WON’T SAVE THE HUMAN RACES

Slogans in nice typefaces won’t save the human races. Photo by Benjamin Westoby

To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.

Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).

The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.

The role of graphics in political protest

Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.

The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.

Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.

Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.

This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.

On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.

I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.

Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC

On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.

So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.

But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?

This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.

We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.

Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester

The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?

A morality tale

Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.

On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.

Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.

Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author

Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.

Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author

Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.

And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.

Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog-standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.

The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.

Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.

The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.

Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.

Curators

Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.

It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.

A video

Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.

Wandsworth Prison Museum

Wandsworth Prison was opened in 1851. It is an all-male prison and can currently hold 1,628 prisoners, making it one of the largest prisons in Western Europe.

You can only visit the prison itself if you have professional credentials or official business, but out in the forecourt of the prison is what is basically a large garden shed which turns out to be the Prison Museum. This you can visit by appointment or on the occasional open day. Over the weekend of 2 to 3 June it was open to the public, so I went along.

Wandsworth Prison Museum

Although small, the museum contains over 400 separate items, packed, hung, arranged and displayed densely together to make a kind of Aladdin’s cave of memorabilia, ephemera, all sorts of documents, old photographs, prison equipment, warders’ uniforms and much much more, all with informative and interesting labels which shed light on the history of Wandsworth Prison in particular and, by extension, on the broader development and evolution of British prisons as a whole.

Bird’s eye view of the Surrey House of Correction, as it was known when it opened in 1851

The free handout gives a useful overview so I’ll quote it verbatim:

Wandsworth Prison was opened in 1851 as the Surrey House of Correction at Wandsworth. it was owned and run by the County of Surrey until 1978 when the prison was nationalised and became Her Majesty’s Prison, Wandsworth. The prison opened with both male and female prisoners. An original signature piece by the architect, D.R. Hill, a cast iron pillar with the maker’s name plate from the pump house and a letter to Parliament from the first Governor, Richard Onslow, covers the early period of the prison.

The First World War is covered with stories of military prisoners, conscientious objectors, spies, Irishmen of the Easter rebellion, their offences and treatment by the authorities.

The Second World War includes the bombing of the prison, rocket attack, the formation of the Prison Officers Association, spies, traitors and their executions. The conditions for the staff and their duties, including those called up for military service, especially the Deputy-Governor (later Governor) E.J. Paton-Walsh, who attended the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Notable prisoners have included the playwright Oscar Wilde (held at Wandsworth for five months before being transferred to Reading Gaol), James Earl Ray, the assassin of the U.S. civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The prison was also the location of the escape of the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, in 1965. Other prisoners have included Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, Reggie Kray, Eddie Richardson and Frankie Fraser.

Events such as the band Hawkwind playing a concert in the 1970s and a visit by musician Elton John are also illustrated with items on display.

The prison was the last to have an operational gallows that had been installed in 1878, re-built, located in three places and finally removed in 1993. An execution box, No.8, is on display and it contains original items including an execution rope. Details of executions including those of Jack the Ripper suspect, George Chapman, William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), the last man executed for treason, and John Haigh, the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’, are on display. The last execution at the prison (and in London) was in 1961.

Random highlights

There is a chronological order of sorts to the exhibits, but part of the pleasure of the place is the sense of unexpected juxtapositions, strange displays, odd stories, surprising objects and the general air of a Curiosity Shop of wonders.

Wandsworth was the site of 135 executions, between 1878 and 1961. This is an execution box containing some of the equipment required to set up a working gallows.

Execution box

Taking up one corners is a gallows frame complete with rope and tackle. In the background are photos of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last executioner (behind the rope on the right) and, obscured by the chain in the middle, Pierrepoint’s death mask.

The heavy chain suspended from the crossbeam was used to adjust the length of drop given to a prisoner during judicial hanging. The test bag at the bottom was filled with sand to the same weight as the prisoner, and used in pre-hanging tests to ensure the strength of the rope, the gallows trapdoor, and the cross-beam. The two single ropes with knots in were positioned so to allow prison officers to steady themselves while standing on plank bridges over the ‘drop’ during the execution.

Gallows, chain and ropes

Photo of the hanging room.

The execution room

An edition of the Illustrated London news showing the execution of Kate Webster in 1879, the only woman ever executed at the prison. She had been found guilty of the murder of her elderly employer, Julia Thomas, in Richmond.

The hanging of Kate Webster, 1879

British citizen William Joyce, known because of his radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, was the last person to be executed in Britain for High Treason. The sentence was carried out at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946.

William Joyce also known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, in the custody of British troops at the end of World War Two

This is a photo of anti-capital punishment campaigner Violet van der Elst, outside the prison in 1935, protesting the execution of Percy Anderson. Van der Elst used up her personal fortune campaigning to end capital punishment, and lived long enough to see it finally abolished in 1965.

The photo is crying out for a humorous caption in the style of a Private Eye front cover. ‘Oh not ‘er again. She’s always hangin’ round here.’

Anti-capital punishment campaigner, Violet van der Elst, outside Wandsworth Prison, 1935

There were other forms of physical punishment than execution. This is a photo of the last corporal punishment frame at Wandsworth Prison, with the punishment position being demonstrated.

Corporal punishment by either birch rod or cat o’ nine tails whip was a court punishment until 1948 and remained a prison punishment until 1967 when it was abolished under the Criminal Justice Act of that year. Its last use in Wandsworth Prison was in 1961.

The corporal punishment frame at Wandsworth prison

There’s lots to be shocked and outraged by here, if you’re of that turn of mind, starting with capital punishment itself and going on to deplore the whole concept of ‘hard labour’, explained here with a number of contemporary illustrations. There are tales of miscarriages of justice and some horrible examples of the very harsh punishment meted out, as so often, to the poor and hungry and uneducated.

For example, the case of Robert Davey, aged ten and sentenced to three months in Wandsworth for stealing rabbits, in 1874.

Photo of ten-year-old convict, Robert Davey

All this I sort of expected.

But one of the things that genuinely surprised me was the revelation of how much of the Victorian infrastructure of the prison endured right down almost to the present day. The very hospitable and informative curator of the museum (himself a prison officer) explained that after the Second World War Britain was bankrupt and forced to continue with its ageing infrastructure of Victorian prisons, despite calls to rebuild them all.

Then decade after decade went by with one Home Secretary after another continually putting off the enormous cost of rebuilding Britain’s prisons, with the result that many of the older ones, especially in London, continued to contain fixtures and fittings dating from their Victorian origins.

The blue door in the photo below, for example, is Victorian and was painted, repainted and painted again with shiny prison blue, managing to serve its function as a cell door until it was finally replaced in the 2010s. The 2010s!

(Next to it is a mannequin wearing prisoner issue denim jacket and blue striped shirt, a style introduced in the late 1970s, familiar to those of us brought up on the TV sitcom Porridge.)

Prison door and prison uniform

This is a cell card and prisoner information card holder of a design which also dates from the Victorian era, and was still in use as recently as the 1990s. The 1990s!

Prisoner information card holder

This is a blank escaped prisoner reward sheet. Probably the most famous escapee from Wandsworth was Ronald Biggs who escaped by scaling the wall with a rope ladder and dropping onto a waiting removal van. I wonder how much reward was offered for information leading to his arrest. This blank form from the Victorian era is offering a generous £5.

Escaped prisoner reward sheet

In 1932 the Governor of the day, Lieutenant Colonel Rich, invited the film star Charlie Chaplin to visit the prison. Chaplin was given a tour of the prison, including the still-working gallows on F wing. Chaplin had briefly known Jack the Ripper suspect George Chapman, from his boyhood days in Southwark.

Documentation surrounding Charlie Chaplin’s visit to the prison in 1931

James Earl Ray was accused of being the assassin of the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, shot dead on 4 April 1968. Immediately after the assassination, Ray fled to Canada, then used a fake passport to travel on to Portugal and, finally, to England.

Two months after the assassination he was arrested at Heathrow airport attempting to use a forged Canadian passport to board a flight to Belgium. He was held in Wandsworth prison while arrangements were made to have him extradited back to the US. During this remand period, Ray’s lawyer arranged a plea bargain where, in exchange for pleading guilty, he would avoid the usual sentence for murder, at that time, execution by electrocution – the electric chair.

So Ray was extradited, convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison without a trial and without the evidence against him being tested in court. Soon afterwards he changed his plea, and then spent the rest of his life (until 1998) trying to prove his innocence and that the murder had been the act of a widespread conspiracy.

Mugshot of James Earl Ray, on remand in Wandsworth prison

This is the view from a gallery of the central atrium of the prison at the centre of its famous radial design. On the right, on the ground floor against a wall, is the old wooden ‘central desk’, which is now in the museum.

The main prison centre

Prisoner food tray and cutlery.

Prison tray and cutlery

Prison issue shaving kit.

Prison issue toilet kit

Implements of restraint – handcuffs, belt, a whistle etc.

Handcuffs and other instruments of restraint

Prison officers’ equipment, including truncheons and radios.

Prison officer equipment

Modern helmets: from left to right an officer cap with Senior Officer’s badge (1990s), a Control and Restraint helmet (1990s), and an Officer issue baseball cap (2000s).

Prison officer helmets

I always imagined prisoners wearing jackets covered in arrows was a cartoon convention. Not so. Just such suits were worn until 1922. Apparently the idea stems from medieval heraldry where the image of the arrow denotes ‘government property’. It was conceived by Sir Edmund Du Cane in the 1870s after his appointment as Chairman of Convict Directors and Surveyor-General of Prisons. He intended the arrows to be a mark of shame and a hindrance to escape insofar as the characteristic outfit was immediately identifiable to anyone who saw an escaped convict. I was surprised to learn that the nails hammered into convicts’ boots were also arrow-shaped so that he left footprints in mud or sand which were also designed to show he was ‘government property’.

A convict wearing the characteristic arrow uniform

And, in amid the hundreds of factual artefacts and objects, what does it actually feel like to be locked away in prison for years? The museum has a number of examples of prisoner art, creative art, of course, being a technique increasingly used in prisoner rehabilitation.

For me this work stood out, not for any technique or sophistication, but for its simple eloquence. It seemed, to me, to be saying ‘Help’.

Prisoner artwork: ‘Open hands’, from the 2000s

To find out more about the museum, correspondence should be directed to:

Wandsworth Prison Museum
c/o POA Office
HMP Wandsworth
Heathfield Road
London SW18 3HS

wandsworthprisonmuseum@hmps.gsi.gov.uk

More exhibitions

More exhibitions on my art and exhibitions page

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 4, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History, Museum

Posted by Simon on June 4, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/wandsworth-prison-museum/

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre @ Great Missenden

The museum

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre is a museum in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, the South of England. Children’s novelist and adult short story writer Roald Dahl lived in the village for 36 years until his death in 1990. During that time he became famous around the world, mostly for his best-selling children’s books although he did write quite a few short stories for adults on very adult themes (witness the two hefty Penguin paperback volumes of the Complete Short Stories).

But it was for children’s books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, Danny the Champion of the World and that he became famous. At the peak of his success the local post office delivered 4,000 letters a week from young fans around the world.

After Dahl’s death, his widow, his wider family, his publishers and better-off fans all agreed it would be good to create some kind of memorial to the great man. However, the house he actually lived in and the garden where he built the famous writing shed which he worked in every day, had passed into private hands.

Then in the 2000s a derelict coaching inn and stable complex in Great Missenden High Street came on the market. The Roald Dahl trustees had the very imaginative idea of buying it and converting it into a child-focused museum, gallery, cafe and interactive space to celebrate Dahl’s life and work and to inspire new generations of storytellers.

The comprehensively refurbished space opened as the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in 2005.

Front of the Roald Dahl Museum (Photo courtesy The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre)

The Museum is aimed at 6 to 12 year-olds and their families. It has three galleries along the side of the attractive cobbled yard, as well as a café and a lunch room for school trips.

Children getting creative in the Roald Dahl Museum

Of the three galleries, ‘Boy’ focuses on the book of the same name which describes Dahl’s boyhood adventures and experiences. ‘Solo’ features his RAF flying days and moves onto his life in Great Missenden, including an evocative recreation of the writing hut Dahl built in the garden of his house, stuffed with the cosy bric-a-brac which made him feel at home.

Inside Roald Dahl’s original Writing Hut (Photo courtesy The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre)

And there’s a story centre room with crayons and paper etc where children are encouraged to create their own stories, or can gather round on the floor to discuss and share ideas.

From the museum’s bright and colourful displays I learned that:

Roald is pronounced Rooo-arl.
He was Norwegian, at least his parents were. Roald was born in Wales, in Llandaff outside Cardiff, and sent to a prep school across the Bristol Channel in England, before going on to Repton, a public school in the Midlands.
He was unusually tall at 6 foot six. He joined the RAF at the outbreak of the war and his fighter plane cockpit had to be adjusted for him.

The RAF section of the museum with a model of the kind of fighter plane he flew

He crash landed his plane in the Libyan desert and was lucky to survive; as a result, his back gave him trouble for the rest of his life. But he continued as an air ace, shooting down enemy planes for another year until finally being invalided out of the RAF in 1941. After more medical check-ups, he was sent to the USA to promote the war effort and persuade America to join the Allies.

There’s a striking photo here of tall, handsome, uniformed Roald striding next to an overweight, jowly grey-haired Ernest Hemingway.

Roald Dahl and Ernest Hemingway, 1944

It was a chance meeting with the adventure novelist C. S. Forester, who suggested Dahl write about his wartime experiences. The result was his first story, retelling the story of his desert crash and introducing the idea that he was shot down, which was published in the Saturday Evening Post.

The rest is the usual story of a writer’s long warfare with publishers and critics, editors of magazines and journals, until he had established himself as a writer of cruel and sardonic short stories.

Very roughly speaking Dahl wrote short stories for adults for 15 years after the war, brought together in collections like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. It was only in 1961 that Dahl published his first ‘novel’ for children, and what a succession of brilliant children’s fictions then poured from his pen!

James and the Giant Peach 1961
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964
Fantastic Mr Fox 1970
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator 1972
Danny, the Champion of the World 1975
The Enormous Crocodile 1978
My Uncle Oswald 1979
The Twits 1980
George’s Marvellous Medicine 1981
The BFG 1982
The Witches 1983

I really liked the presentation of all this in the museum. There are blown-up photos, a timeline, models, books and illustrations and notes, it’s all big and bright and attractive and interesting, and all the time there is the voice of Dahl himself reading extracts from relevant books. Thus the first room, Boy, features Dahl reading out descriptions of key incidents and adventures from the book of the same name describing his childhood.

Billy and the Minpins

There’s a small space devoted to changing exhibitions. Currently they’re displaying 14 illustrations by Quentin Blake for Dahl’s last children’s book, Billy and the Minpins. These are, as all of Blake’s illustrations, magical, and beneath each one is displayed the relevant snippet of the original hand-written manuscript of the story in Dahl’s spidery handwriting.

Cover of Billy and the Minpins by Quentin Blake

The shop

There’s a massive shop, featuring a wide range of merchandise as well as DVDs of all the movies made from his books, a wall of wonderful prints of some Quentin Blake illustrations and, for me, most impressive of all, a wall of his books, not only the children’s books but a range of short story collections, including the famous Tales of the Unexpected, televised in the 1980s, as well as the surprising amount of non-fiction which he wrote.

Walks

The shop is a mine of information and the staff are very knowledgeable and happy to answer questions. They also give out free leaflets describing two walks you can do: one is a tour of the village of Great Missenden, taking in places and buildings which feature in the stories; the other is a longer walk across the railway line and up to the nearby woods where Dahl took his own children to play and ramble when they were small.

I went on both walks and describe them in my walking blog. The most striking feature of Great Missenden High Street is probably the beautifully preserved vintage petrol pumps which feature in Danny The Champion of the World.

The petrol pumps in Great Missenden High Street

Set half a mile away from the village, on the side of a hill overlooking the valley of the little River Misbourne is the church of St Peter & St Paul, where Dahl is buried.

Church of St Peter & St Paul, Great Missenden

It’s worth mentioning that there’s currently a Chilterns Walking Festival which runs till 1 October, with lots of group walks and other activities taking place all across the region.

Great Missenden is only a 45-minute train journey from Marylebone station and the museum is a simple five-minute walk down the old High Street. What with the village walk and the opportunity for a picnic up in the woods, this makes a wonderful day out for families with small children who love any of Dahl’s books.

Roald Dahl reviews

Roald Dahl reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 19, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Books, Childrens, Exhibition, Literature, Museum, Novel, Short stories, Walks

Tagged children, children's books, childrens stories, fiction, Great Missenden, novel, Roald Dahl, short stories, The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, walk

Posted by Simon on September 19, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/roald-dahl-museum-and-story-centre-great-missenden/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

All posts in category Museum

Expert views

Why sexual violence in conflict has gone unreported

Why it’s important to discuss sexual violence in conflict

Four charities

Why an exhibition like this is part of the solution

Gender norms

Justice

Timeline

Reconciliation

The comfort women

My overview

1. Prologue

2. Structures and representations

3. Acts and manifestations

4. Justice and reconciliation

5. Rebuilding

6. Final thoughts

Niggles

Related links

Support

Related reviews

Share this:

Numbers

Jainism

Buddhism

Hinduism

Overlap

Some learnings

Individual gods

Statistics

South East Asia

Gallery

Shiva

Buddha

Gaja-Lakshmi

Ganesha

A yaksha

Naga

Silk Buddha

Seated Jain

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

The Beirut explosion

The Asahi Shimbun room at the British Museum

The shattered glass of Beirut

Two videos

1. Responding to crisis

2. One broken piece at a time

Related links

Other British Museum reviews

Share this:

What

Where

When

1. Living landscapes

2. Early cultures and the Chavin (1200 to 500 BC)

3. Life and death in the desert

4. The Moche (AD 100 to 800) and the Chimu (AD 1000 to 1400)

5. The Wari (AD 600 to 900) and Inca (AD 1400 to 1532)

6. The Andean legacy

Why

A video review

Related links

More British Museum exhibition reviews

Share this:

Thomas’s story

The personal drama

The saint and healer

The stained glass

Thomas and Realpolitik

The Canterbury Tales

The suppression of a saint

Curators

Related links

Other medieval reviews

Other British Museum reviews

Share this:

The Asahi Shimbun displays