A Museum for the World
British Museum celebrates 250 years with 280 million
visitors
and looks to the future
On the occasion of the publication of the Annual Review of
2008/09, the British Museum announces future exhibition plans for
2009/10 alongside a review of international success in the last
year.
Review of 2008/09:
2009 saw another anniversary for the British
Museum (BM), which has now been open to the public for 250 years.
It is estimated that over 280 million people have visited the
Museum’s unparalleled world collection in that time, 5.93 million
in 2008 alone. The British Museum is the most popular visitor
attraction in the UK. April, May and June 2009 have seen a 10.8%
increase in visitor figures on 2008. (1.44 million in 2009, 1.3
million in 2008)
Virtual visitors continue to grow, 13million
visit the BM’s websites each year. The BM has committed to
increasing access to the collections online. 1.25 million objects
from the collection can already be researched online with 408,000
objects accompanied by high-resolution images which can be
downloaded for free by anyone at any time. This service has been
warmly received by scholars, students and members of the public
alike.
Temporary exhibitions continue to draw
visitors, Hadrian: Empire and
Conflict exceeded its visitor target by over
100,000 (with 255,000 visitors in total), Babylon: Myth and Reality
received 162,000 visitors and Shah ‘Abbas: The Remaking of Iran
was seen by 106,000. Free exhibitions were also well
–attended with the BM’s overview of American printmaking,
The American Scene: Prints from
Hopper to Pollock, being seen by over 413,000
visitors. The exhibition is now touring across the UK.
The permanent collection is at the heart of
the Museum: growing, changing, re-imagined by successive
generations as intellectual currents and social and political
concerns evolve. The Museum spent £1.5million on acquisitions
during the year, as well as receiving significant donations and
assistance from funding bodies such as the British Museum Friends,
The Art Fund and the NHMF. These gifts highlight the vital role of
private philanthropy to ensure a relevant, dynamic and evolving
collection, the lifeblood of any museum. Prints from Japan,
America, Mexico and Australia, Sudanese rock gongs, banknotes,
treasure finds and mosaics are just a few examples of the objects
added to the collection in the last year.
Sharing the collection continues to be a vital
part of the BM’s work. In 2008/9 the BM loaned 2,669 objects
nationally across the UK, an increase of 14% on the previous year.
Internationally, the Museum lent 1,754 objects to 132 venues
outside the country. Including Bernini to LA, Charles Darwin to
Sydney and Benin to Berlin.
The Body
Beautiful in Ancient Greece continues to tour
internationally, it is currently in Alicante where it is being seen
by over 1,000 visitors a day. We hope the exhibition will then tour
Asia (to Korea, Taiwan, Japan).
Looking ahead to 2009/10:
The Museum will complete its series of shows
on great leaders of the world when Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler opens on
24 September 2009. The exhibition features new scholarship and
extraordinary international loans as a result of the Museum’s
strong relationships with colleagues in Mexico. The exhibition is
the first to examine the semi-mythical status of Moctezuma and his
legacy today and is produced in collaboration with National
Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH). Supported by
ArcelorMittal. Additional support has been given by the airline
partner, Mexicana.
Revolution
on Paper: Mexican Prints 1910 – 1950 is the first
exhibition in Europe to focus on the great age of Mexican
printmaking. The prints, including many recent acquisitions, are
from the Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will allow
visitors to focus on a more recent period in Mexico’s history and
will anticipate the anniversaries in 2010 of the Independence of
Mexico (1810) and of the Mexican Revolution (1910). Supported by
The Monument Trust and the Mexico Tourist Board.
More information on the exhibitions
below
The value of the British Museum’s collection
lies in its ability to present an overview of world cultures. In
2010 two exhibitions will allow visitors to immerse themselves in
two very different artistic traditions which flourished on opposite
sides of the world in the 15th century.
Kingdom of
Ife: Sculptures
from West Africa throws
light on the development of bronze casting in Ife (modern Nigeria)
from the 12th – 15th century. Extraordinary
sculptures and figures were produced in stone, bronze and
terracotta which are both technically sophisticated and
aesthetically supreme. This will be the first exhibition dedicated
to Ife art outside of Nigeria. This development in African art took
place at around the same time as the Renaissance in Europe and our
second exhibition will profile this important artistic period in
the west. The BP special exhibition Fra Angelico to
Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings brings
together the two great collections of this material, from the BM
and the Uffizi in Florence. Presenting an overview of the
development of drawing throughout Italy, the exhibition will cover
the period 1400 – 1510, from the beginning of the Renaissance to
the early drawings of Raphael and Michelangelo. It will offer a
rare glimpse into the mind and technique of some of the most
celebrated Renaissance artists.
More information on the exhibitions
below
For further information please contact:
Hannah Boulton – 020 7323 8522, hboulton@britishmuseum.org
Katrina Whenham – 020 7323 8583, kwhenham@britishmuseum.org
Katie McCrory – 020 7936 1282, kmccrory@brunswickgroup.com
Additional information on forthcoming temporary
exhibitions:
Moctezuma: Aztec
Ruler
24 September 2009 – 24 January 2010
The Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II who reigned
from AD 1502-1521 was heir to a highly sophisticated civilisation
based on fundamentally different technologies and beliefs from
those developed in Europe. This exhibition will tell the
story of the first moment of European contact with the Aztec world
in the early 16th Century, a time when Moctezuma
commanded an immensely successful and aggressively expanding Aztec
state. Moctezuma witnessed the collapse of the native world order
and the imposition of a new civilization that gave birth to modern
Mexico. The legacy of these tumultuous events and the
semi-mythical status of Moctezuma himself continues to be
re-assessed, especially in the light of on-going archaeological
discoveries being made in Mexico City. The exhibition is supported
by ArcelorMittal. Additional support has been given by the airline
partner, Mexicana.
Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints
1910–1960
22 October 2009 – 28 February 2010
This exhibition will focus on the great age of
Mexican printmaking in the first half of the twentieth century.
Between 1910 and 1920 the country was convulsed by the first
socialist revolution, from which emerged a strong left-wing
government that laid great stress on art as a vehicle for promoting
the values of the revolution. This led to a pioneering programme to
cover the walls of public buildings with vast murals, and later to
setting up print workshops to produce works for mass distribution
and education. Some of the finest of these prints were produced by
the three great men of Mexican art of the period: Diego Rivera,
José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The exhibition
will also include earlier works around the turn of the century by
the popular engraver, José Guadalupe Posada, who was adopted by the
revolutionaries as the archetypal printmaker who worked for the
people, and whose macabre dances of skeletons have always
fascinated Europeans. Supported by The Monument Trust and the
Mexico Tourism Board.
Kingdom of
Ife: Sculptures from West
Africa
4 March – 6 June 2010
From 12th-15th centuries
Ife flourished as a powerful, cosmopolitan and wealthy city-state
in West Africa (in what is now modern Nigeria), and as a major
centre of the Yoruba-speaking people. Its influence was maintained
over several centuries through its access to and control over
extensive local and long-distance trade networks enabling it to
prosper as an important economic, political, cultural and spiritual
centre. Ife developed a refined and highly naturalistic sculptural
tradition, many of these sculptures are thought to be associated
with kingship but much about this ancient culture remains
enigmatic. This will be the first exhibition outside Nigeria to
focus on Ife culture and includes loans from Nigeria and Europe.
The exhibition has been developed in collaboration with the Museum
for African Art, New York in collaboration with Fundacion Marcelino
Botin of Santander, Spain and the National Commission for Museums
and Monuments, Nigeria.
The exhibition will serve as a platform for
the launch of a season in 2010 to mark the 50th anniversary of the
Year of African independences, 1960, when 17 countries (nearly a
third of the continent including Nigeria) became independent
nations.The season will b e developed in close collaboration with
the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM)
as a capacity building exercise. It will contribute to continuing
development of relationships and partnerships between the BM
and our Nigerian museum colleages.
Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian
Renaissance Drawings
22 April – 25 July 2010
The exhibition will consist of 100 Italian
Renaissance drawings from the period 1400–1510 selected from the
British Museum and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, two of the
world’s best collections in this field. It will chart the
increasing importance of drawing in artistic practice in
15th-century Italy, with a particular emphasis on Leonardo, that
laid the foundations of the High Renaissance style of Michelangelo
and Raphael. It will demonstrate the importance of drawing to
painters of the period, as it allowed them to experiment with a
freedom not always reflected in their finished paintings. Artists
featured include Fra Angelico, Jacopo and Gentile Bellini,
Botticelli, Carpaccio, Leonardo, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna,
Michelangelo and Verrocchio. The exhibition is supported by BP.