miércoles, 13 de junio de 2012

British Museum sends priceless treasures around the country

Regional museums will not have to pay for loans of popular artefacts including Egyptian bronze cat.

One of the best-loved objects in the vast British Museum collection, a small bronze cat with its tail sedately wrapped around its feet and wearing golden rings in its ears and nose, is off on a journey its creator could never have dreamed of in Egypt 2,500 years ago – to Lerwick in Shetland.
The cat is one of a series of spectacular artefacts that the museum is sending out on loan to regional museums.
The lucky recipients, many pummelled by local authority and other funding cuts, will not have to pay a penny towards their distinguished visitors. The British museum is funding the loans through £100,000 from the Art Fund museum prize, which it won last year for the phenomenally successful Radio 4 series and exhibition A History of the World in 100 Objects.
The museum's director, Neil MacGregor, said there were good geographical reasons for some of the loans: the 13,000-year-old carved ivory tusk of a swimming reindeer is going to Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, where ice age inhabitants were making art in the same period, and the Mildenhall Great Dish is going to Ipswich, near the site where it was excavated. But others had no justification other than sending something wonderful where it had never before been seen.
The award-winning Shetland Museum and Archives at Lerwick is rich in boats, traditional woollen sweaters and a re-creation of an extinct native furry pig, the Shetland grice, but it has no Egyptian material – and it would be quicker and probably cheaper for the local population to follow the sea route of their Viking ancestors and visit museums in Scandinavia than to get to the Egyptian galleries in the British Museum.
The little cat is such a star object in Bloomsbury that it was the subject of a special exhibition a few years ago, and it appears on a wide range of souvenirs in the shop. It is known as the Gayer-Anderson cat after the donor, the renowned Egyptologist Major Robert Greville Gayer-Anderson, who acquired it in Egypt in the early 20th century during his career as an army doctor and administrator. He was also known as an occasionally overenthusiastic restorer, and there were some doubts about the authenticity of the cat. However, x-rays revealed that although heavily repaired, and possibly given a coat of green paint and smart new earrings by the major, it is genuine.
The Mildenhall Great Dish, one of the most spectacular pieces of silver from anywhere in the Roman empire, spent some time on a Suffolk sideboard, taken down and placed on the family dining table for Christmas dinner, before it came to the museum. It was part of a massive hoard of Roman silver found by a ploughman in 1942, but only declared a "treasure trove" when the war ended. It is going to the Wolsey Art Gallery in Ipswich from July to October as part of the redevelopment of the gallery and museum.
The first of the loans, a superb 2,000-year-old bronze of Herakles, the legendary founder of the Olympic Games, is off next week to the De La Warr Pavilion on the seaside in Bexhill, East Sussex, an icon of 20th-century modernist design.
"I dreamed of bringing a piece of classical sculpture into this very modern space which is known for contemporary art," the curator, David Rhodes, said, "but my wish-list to the British Museum was mostly big lumps of stone. The Herakles is really wonderful – he is so beautiful and sexy, but he is not a golden youth but a real athlete who has had a hard life, with his broken nose and lumpy forehead."
Rhodes spoke at a conference last year at Turner Contemporary in Margate, where other museum professionals were dubious about the possibility of extracting major loans from the British Museum. Rhodes, who began his career as a volunteer in Bloomsbury, insisted it could be done. His peers will be visiting to look enviously at the proof of his thesis.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/12/british-museum-treasures-galleries-country?newsfeed=true

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