The Museum of Other People (Adam Kuper, 2023)

 

Anyone who believes the world of museums was staid and unchanging needs only read a few pages of Adam Kuper’s book to realise the civil wars that have broken out in recent years, most notably around museums of anthropology – which were typically founded as “museums of other people”, or as part of a cabinets of curiosities. It all began with terms like “civilization” in the 18th century:

Museums of civilization [such as The British Museum and The Louvre] embodied the Enlightenment theory of history. All human societies progress from a lower to a higher condition … the goal toward which all must travel is what French philosophers in the late C18 began to call Civilization.

At this point, you remember how, while most museums seem to have existed forever, some have closed, and you ask yourself why. There was once a Museum of Mankind in London, and a Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Both were in the tradition of collections of the artefacts of “primitive” people. Over time, questions began to be raised, and today, any collection with an ethnographic angle reveals a fundamental uncertainty, a defensiveness, towards the displays, as the museums have been caught unawares that their current treatment of “other people” is inadequate – we no longer call them “primitive”, for a start. This was very visible, for example, from a recent visit to the London National Maritime Museum Pacific gallery, which had many glass cases, and looked to me as if it had been set up forty or fifty years ago, but which now has signs prominently displayed at each entrance, stating something like “we recognise this collection is presented with colonialist assumptions, but we haven’t had time to fix it". That is the quickest, and most unsatisfactory, way to deal with the problem.

Kuper’s book makes for gripping reading, as museum after museum struggles to rethink its collection policy, its view on returning objects (return to where?), and lurches from justifying its collections on artistic, then on ethnographic grounds, and then changes track again.

The issue of how many of the famous objects came to be held in European and US museums, such as the Benin bronzes, is described in horrific detail – looting, or via a dealer after looting, is the usual route. Nonetheless, however compelling the reading, the problem remains for the anthropologists: how do you hold a collection that represents a people? Is it possible to build such a collection without being patronising? I don’t think the first chapter, “Faraway people”, quite matches the coverage of the subsequent chapters. A recent visit to the Museum of Manchester suggests one idea increasingly seen in museums: information boards featuring a living person, who is interviewed for the display.

This isn’t the first book to describe a problem without identifying a successful solution. Nonetheless, Kuper has a gift for narrative, and brings the unexciting subject of founding and managing museums to life. His narrative skilfully combines fascinating background details about pioneers whose name we know but whose background we don’t – who, for example, knew about James Smithson, the illegitimate son of an English duke and his lover, christened Jacques Macie, and subsequently founder of the Smithsonian? The breezy style makes for compulsive reading, and the reader doesn’t (usually) notice when the narrative drifts off to something unrelated but a good story, such as how Jeremy Bentham’s body came to be preserved at University College London. Kuper is such a fluent writer that he keeps your attention throughout, and we don’t worry too much that he is better at describing what has gone wrong rather than suggesting better solutions. He points out, for example, that the modern concept of providing “closure” by reburying skeletons dug up for experimental purposes in the 19th century may well be inappropriate, in that it was in many cases unlikely that these dead people were buried in the first place. In other words, we are still imposing our ideas of what the civilization might have been like.

I recommend the book highly, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the way that some museums claim to have solved the problem of their collections of skulls and artefacts by stating the provenance – back to the white European (usually) who acquired the objects in not very clearly stated deals.

Made in Ancient Egypt (Fitzwilliam Museum)

 

Container in the form of the god Bes (1550-1069 BCE)

Great show, but poor for children – and hence poor for anyone who is not a specialist. We learn a lot about what the conservators have been doing, but not much about ancient Egypt generally. If you want to know why ancient Egyptians tried to preserve their dead, this show won’t tell you. There is a lot of valuable information on how things were made, much of it in the section introductions to the catalogue, but I feel much more could have been made of the information. For example, one monument has the recently discovered signature of the sculptor, in hieratic characters, rather than hieroglyphics. But what is hieratic? It is briefly explained on a later caption, but not explained at all in the catalogue, nor mentioned in the glossary. A friendly attendant explained that hieratics were used in less formal settings. A comparison of hieratics and hieroglyphics would have been welcome.

I visited the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum with two children, aged five and eight. They enjoyed the show, and tried whatever interactive tools were available

 

No attempt to show any hieroglyphics

The two young visitors are very keen on hieroglyphics, and there were plenty of these to be seen. But there was an opportunity missed by not providing any indication, either in the captions or in the accompanying  guide of the hieroglyphic names of the person celebrated on the object. This was tantalizing! We are told this is, for example, the Stela of “Dedia” – but where does this name appear on the stela? To write the catalogue entries, someone must have known what these names are in hieroglyphics.

 

Catalogue has no index

This is a fundamental error. If this is a book accompanying a show, we should be able to find items in the show, and see wherever they are mentioned.

 

Interactive exhibits don’t display their actual function

Some of the interactive exhibits were great – a do-it-yourself squared template enabled children to create their own drawing of a possible sculpture. But other interactives looked more informative than they turned out to be. An example of this is a model showing how a bow system can be used to turn a drill. By moving the bow backwards and forwards, the motion is transferred to a circular turning of a drill that then makes a hole in stone or wood. But the example showed nothing being drilled. Children could move the bow, but to no purpose. It didn’t advance their understanding in the least.

 

14 pages of quotes by experts

These are mildly interesting, but only peripherally. A few of them are conservators, but most of them academics. One conservator compares the baskets in this exhibition with an example at the British Museum (not illustrated) which is apparently “close to perfection”.

 

Lack of background information about ancient Egypt

I know little about ancient Egypt, but this exhibition didn’t increase my knowledge very much. There is no mention of dynasties (although most of the exhibits are from the New Kingdom and Middle Kingdom) and no indication of changes in practice during this thousand-year period. I know this was an exhibition about makers, but most of those visiting will have little knowledge of ancient Egypt. For example, exhibit 27 is a lovely figure of Bes, described as “a popular household god … closely associated with protecting women in childbirth and children”. But that’s all you get – the rest of the catalogue entry is about the making and details of the object.

 

Overall

Great show, but I recommend any visitor starts with the permanent Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam before seeing this rather technical show. Some of the captions in the permanent Egyptian galleries at the Fitzwilliam are more informative than those for this exhibition. 

William Nicholson

 

 

The Pallant House Gallery exhibition of William Nicholson was a fascinating visit. On the basis of this show, which looked to be a representative survey of the various types of his work – portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and book illustration – he strikes  me as immensely talented, but not achieving as much as I would have hoped in any of those categories. His later work seems to me very poor; many of his best works look to have been done before the end of the First World War, when he appeared to be more able to take risks.

In caricature, he had a genuine talent – the drawing of Queen Victoria was what made him famous, and his illustration of Rudyard Kipling is wonderfully evocative.

 

 

Portrait of his son Ben at age 7.

His portraits of children were sensitive, but there seem to be very few examples of adult portraits. He was good at painting women, following the style of Corot, with a dressing-up box in his studio so his models could adorn themselves with wild hats. Nicholson himself was quite a dandy – his polka-dot dressing gown appears in more than one image of him. Later portraits by him can be woeful, such as the Sidney and Beatrice Webb portraits (1928).

 

 

Nicholson can capture the wildness and elemental quality of some Sussex landscapes. He certainly followed Whistler in being prepared to eliminate any unnecessary detail to focus on only one or two objects.

There are few depictions of specific locations, but one stunning view of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Are there other, similar works? A landscape from Bengal could have been painted anywhere.

Still life

Nicholson chose simple objects, rarely a combination, and often depicted the reflections of light on a silver jug or vase. He shows talent, but many of the compositions appear to me rather sparse, not a satisfying mise-en-scene. One or two of the flower paintings are good, such as the Cyclamen (1936).

 

 

Caricature and illustration

Nicholson’s drawings and designs are full of life and movement. Even sketches for costumes have a satisfying vividness about them that makes them worth viewing in their own right, not just as preparatory sketches for a theatre play. They have a very characteristic thick  line, which I think must have been done with a carefully handled brush – there is little sign of Nicholson using an ink pen, although there are traces of pencil in many of the orks.

 

I’m afraid to say, despite William’s talent, his son Ben Nicholson goes beyond anything the father produced. Just one work in the permanent collection was enough to make this clear, an abstract work called “1946 (Still Life – Cerulean)”.