The strange decline of the British Museum. By A N Wilson.
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The other day, on the anniversary of my father's death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together.
The Prints and Drawing Room used to let us both in - child though I was - to leaf through paintings and drawings of clouds by John Constable.
Now there is a deadly little exhibition there – Gesture and Line. Yawnsville. ‘Four post-war German and Austrian artists.’ A legacy, I suppose, of the disastrous period when Hartwig Fischer was the director, and on whose watch large numbers of artefacts were stolen.
The British Museum is observably in a bad way. Fischer has to take a lot of the blame. But so does the vulgarian Chairman, George Osborne, and the Trustees, who have been chosen for their trendy or celeb status or because they are rich, not because they have any feeling of what a Museum actually should be.
The Trustees positively writhe with embarrassment at the idea of Sir Hans Sloane, the Enlightenment figure on whose collection the Museum was based.
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