British Museum director Hartwig Fischer: 'We need to tell our visitors more about colonialism and slavery'
What with the huge increase in safety measures and the huge decrease in revenue, most of the world’s museum directors have found this summer a nightmare. Not so Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum.
“This is the most profound, most wonderful challenge of my career,” he tells me. The museum reopens its doors to the public on Thursday, following the longest peacetime closure in its history: 163 days. “Visitors are our lifeblood, and we’ve missed them greatly,” he says.
As at the nation’s other top art venues, people will have to book a visiting slot in advance, then follow a prescribed one-way route. For the first few weeks, access is being granted to a selection of the ground-floor galleries only. Old favourites such as the Rosetta Stone and Elgin Marbles will be among 9,000 objects on display.
That is actually just a fraction of the usual 80,000, but then Fischer, who took over from Neil MacGregor in 2016, was on a mission to give the collection “more air” – cutting back on the number of exhibits – long before coronavirus hit. Does that explain why he’s so chipper? Has reopening after lockdown given him the perfect opportunity to trial a much leaner visitor experience?
“What’s important is not the quantity of objects, but the constellation of objects,” he says. “They should all communicate with each other… The new route allows that – I think people will be blown away.”
So, instead of being overwhelmed by dense displays, visitors will better appreciate the parallels between, say, Egypt, Assyria and pre-Classical Greece, works from which are found in adjoining rooms.
A smaller number of visitors will help too. To maintain social distancing, just 2,000 people will be allowed into the museum each day (10 per cent of the pre-Covid figure). Will the drastic drop-off mean multiple redundancies, as it has at the Tate?
“I’ve spent lockdown trying to find a way to avoid that,” Fischer says. “To keep the BM family together through extraordinary times. The Government’s furlough scheme and [￡1.57 billion] package for the cultural sector have eased the burden… Hopefully, we’ll come out the other end intact.”
Fischer, 57, is speaking to me from his office via Zoom. He’s back on site full-time now. Even during the height of lockdown, he couldn’t keep away, though – his permitted daily dose of exercise consisted of a cycle to and from Bloomsbury. “I’d stop and chat to the security guards over the railings,” he says. “Socially distanced, of course.”
The BM will be the last of the UK’s big art institutions to reopen post-lockdown: some seven weeks after the National Gallery. Why the delay?
“Our collection is probably the most complex,” Fischer says. By which he means that many of its pieces date back millennia, are fragile, and in several instances – such as the Lewis Chessmen or Native American textiles – made of organic material. The accumulation of dust during closure threatened a rise in dangerous pests such as moths, woodworms and carpet beetles, so these works had to be taken out of their cases and put in storage.
“Objects have now had to be put back in their cases, which takes care and time,” explains Fischer.
Previously the director of Dresden State Art Collections, Fischer is the first German to direct the museum, and the first foreigner since Switzerland’s Joseph Planta (from 1799 to 1827). His spell so far has been quiet yet effective – with none of the books, radio shows or TED talks that marked the MacGregor years. His long-term vision involves reorganising the whole layout of the museum: for example, bringing together the Egyptian sculptures on the ground floor with the “overcrowded” Egyptian mummies currently upstairs.
Other challenges are more immediate, though. Will financial pressure force the museum to continue its partnership with BP, despite calls from environmentalists and artists for institutions like the BM to cut ties with the controversial oil company?
“Corporate sponsorship is integral to our business model,” Fischer says defiantly. “It allows visitors to see things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer. That’s not going to change.”
One thing that has changed in recent months is the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of statues such as that of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. In June, Fischer wrote a blog, declaring he and his colleagues were “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere”.
He was accused in some quarters of hypocrisy, given that many of the museum’s objects – such as the Benin Bronzes – were obtained from Africa by what might be called questionable means. Will the intense attention on monuments outdoors soon shift to monuments indoors?
“The debate about object restitution isn’t new, and it’s a debate I want to have within the museum,” Fischer says. He has no intention of letting any piece go, but concedes that “the world has a complex past, and I’m keen to broaden the authorship of the narratives we tell”.
To that end, wall texts and labels have been modified throughout the museum during lockdown with the input of experts from across the world. Visitors should notice the difference most in the Enlightenment Gallery, where – Fischer says – “the relationship between the Enlightenment era, colonialism and slavery is made explicit”. This will include a new showcase on the BM’s founding father, Sir Hans Sloane, a physician whose collecting habit was funded by the profits from his wife’s family’s sugar plantation in Jamaica.
The museum first opened its doors in 1759. How does Fischer feel about reopening them 261 years later? “Very excited,” he says. “The pandemic has obviously been tragic for many people, but the British Museum is bigger than Covid-19.”
The British Museum reopens on Thursday. To book tickets, go to britishmuseum.org
