Mary Beard, described as the most famous classicist in Britain, presented her lecture titled “The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass at the British Museum” on Friday, Jan. 31, in the cinema of the Lang Performing Arts Center. The Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College spoke for the 22nd iteration of the annual Helen North Memorial Lecture, created in honor of North, who taught at Swarthmore College for over 40 years.
Classics Department Chair and Scheuer Family Chair of Humanities William Turpin, who introduced the lecture and Beard’s achievements, compared North and Beard as both being leading figures in a field “where women were not unknown, but also quite rare.” He spoke to their “quiet determination” to question the status quo, a trait which was evident in Beard’s lecture where she examined various narratives regarding museums.
Beard began by showing a 1898 cartoon titled “At the Picture Gallery,” wherein an old man stops in front of a painting and, deciding that it is too warm in the room, attempts to open the window in the painting itself. Beard noted the sign placed under the painting of the window which read “Visitors are requested not to touch the pictures,” as well as the cartoon’s caption containing the policeman’s authoritative command of “Hands off the pictures!” She acknowledged the light-hearted mockery of the old man and his “hopeless stupidity” while also characterizing the cartoon as an exploration of society’s collective fear of breaking the rules at the art gallery.
A second cartoon, from which the title of the lecture came, furthered this point about the constraints of etiquette in museums while adding elements of class discrimination and Foucauldian ideas “about the museum as a site of power, exclusion, discipline, punishment, [and] potential menace.” Created by H. M. Bateman in 1916 for the British magazine Punch, the cartoon follows a young boy who breathes on the glass display at the Egyptian mummy exhibit so that he can write his name in the steam and make his impermanent mark. Like the old man in the first cartoon, the boy is taken away by a security guard; however, the cartoon extends the scene to depict him in jail, then on trial, then in a labor camp, and finally back at the museum as an old man, where he once again breathes on the glass, only to drop dead from the effort. Small details, such as the boy’s flat cap indicating his working-class status and the thorough chronicling of the boy’s incarceration, lent themselves as evidence to Beard’s argument about the nuance of the piece.
The classicist then expanded on this discussion by listing other mediums that often promote an ominous depiction of the museum, such as children’s literature and the fiction subgenre of museum crime. She also covered the real-life counterparts to this narrative of the museum as a “scary, frightening place”: targeting by various activist groups, infamous murders, and the severity of punishment mandated by numerous legislative measures for crimes involving the destruction of museum art.
These initial depictions of the museum served as “the background to the big points” that Beard would continue to make regarding questions like how museums are policed, who owns the objects in a museum, and where cultural heritage belongs. She pushed against the idea that these concerns and debates originated in modern times and instead contended that museums have historically been sites of controversy and are meant to be fought over; in other words, they are a “lightning rod for our problems and our uncertainties.”
Beard proceeded to discuss the question of visitor etiquette in interacting with artwork on display by returning to the 1898 cartoon. The history of the plaque prohibiting visitors from touching the paintings is traced back to the turn of the 20th century, when the museum became “a place for your eyes.” Beard then covered other historical eras of museum interaction, including the invention of the skiascope and British museums that allowed visitors to handle the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. She attributed the eventual shift by museums to a strict no-touch policy to the evolving class composition of visitors and the subsequent calls for increased security.
The next segment of her lecture addressed the issue of what should be displayed in museums and the demographic-based restrictions that some exhibits established. Beard brought up the secret room of erotic Pompeiian art in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which women, children, and priests were initially banned from viewing. Later, it only permitted scholars conducting academic research, reverted back to only allowing men, and finally, in 2000, opened to the entire public. The exhibit still exists in the original isolated room as a way for visitors to simulate the special access of the past, which Beard described as an example of “exclusion… still being written into the museum’s story from the museum experience.”
According to Beard, “contemporary cultural anxieties about what should and shouldn’t be on display still exist,” albeit with a new emphasis on matters concerning sacredness, racist depictions, and human remains. Beard elaborated on this last issue by raising the example of Sir John Forsdyke, Director of the British Museum from 1936 to 1950, who grappled with whether the Egyptian mummy exhibit should remain on display. He ultimately decided to keep the exhibit, as it was one of the most popular in the museum, but banned the sale of postcards containing images of the mummies. Beard characterized his solution a “hopeless museum illogicality” and a classic case of museums grappling with controversy.
Another aspect of the “cultural anxieties” is the debate over objects that have been removed from their cultural origins. The classicist referenced an idea by the French art theorist A. C. Quatremere that “museums killed what they contained,” which she said could be applied to current arguments about indigenous art but also to similar sentiments in the 19th century that Christian art should not be removed from places of religious significance.
Furthermore, Beard argued that museums’ placement of objects and “classificatory scheme” also speak to what ideologies the institutions consider to be valid, which “often seems to reflect hierarchies of power.” The audience chuckled as Beard projected a photo of a museum directing visitors to the African section with a large down arrow. She cited efforts by some curators to create museums based on geographic origin, like a dedicated Indian museum in London, or by no criteria at all, like the open-plan museum created in the 1880s in Cambridge, England. These forays all expectedly produced controversies about the appropriateness of the arrangements.
For the final theme of the night, Beard covered three lesser-known cases centered around issues of what objects museums should own and what should be sent back to their place of origin. This encompassed the distinction between owning an object and displaying it in addition to the difficulties of geographically tagging objects that were created before an eventual modern nation-state existed. She named the Great Bed of Ware, the Lewis chess pieces, the sculptures of Sperlonga, Italy, the Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals, and the Broighter Hoard as part of the debate over where museum objects belong and the complications arising from territorial histories. Beard argued that, although the communities where these objects were found or created may stake a claim of ownership, oftentimes there is little connection between the modern occupants and the object beyond the fact that they existed in the same location at separate points in time. Even in situations where “the meaningfulness of objects to particular communities” is obvious, it is still difficult to adjudicate where exactly the objects belong. Beard questioned the assumption that objects should remain where they were uncovered, especially given that many arguments to return objects to their place of origin are based on moral instincts rather than a logical principle.
“These are contested objects. There are difficulties in here,” said Beard in conclusion. She emphasized the role of museums as “spaces safe or not safe where we can debate difficult questions about how we see ourselves and the world” and cautioned against delusions about the process being simplistic or novel to our current generation.
The classicist ended with a personal anecdote about the first time she went to the British Museum as a child and encountered a kind museum curator, who, unlike the authority figures in the cartoons, took an object out from its display and allowed her to examine it up close. The experience exposed her to a different narrative that “opening cases for other people is what the museum’s job is about.”
The lecture was followed by questions from the audience, during which Beard expanded on topics that included determining the criteria for objects to be considered art, the role of digitized pieces in museums, and the ethics of museums possessing large reserves of art out of sight from public view. With all of this in mind, a comment from earlier in the talk sums up the evening succinctly: “Museums challenge your certainties, even if they don’t give you very concrete answers.”
“Beard argued that, although the communities where these objects were found or created may stake a claim of ownership, oftentimes there is little connection between the modern occupants and the object beyond the fact that they existed in the same location at separate points in time.”
This feels like a white supremacist argument, and by its logic there’s generally even less of a connection between modern museums thousands of miles away, so the ‘modern occupants’ of the areas where objects were found or created still have a stronger case. But this is a straw man, anyway. The question to ask is: how did those objects arrive at a given Western museum in the first place? Oftentimes, there’s a grim story there, and one element of repairing any harm is to return the objects. And even when the story is relatively innocuous, what is the justification for keeping objects of historical significance from abroad?
I’ll use an example. The oldest book printed with movable metal type is not the Gutenberg Bible. It’s Jikji, published in 1377 in the Goryeo dynasty (modern day Korea). And where is it now? France, in the Manuscrits Orientaux division of the National Library of France, which it received as a donation from a jeweler, who had purchased it from a diplomat, who had acquired it in Joseon (the dynasty after Goryeo).
For some time, Korea has argued that France should return it. France’s arguments have been, “The National Library of France says that as an important historical artifact of all mankind, the Jikji should remain in France as it represents a common, worldwide heritage, and does not belong to any one country. In addition, they claim the Jikji would be better preserved and displayed in France because of the prestige and resources the Library possesses.”
This is giving big All Lives Matter energy, as well as “only we cultured Westerners can preserve such a piece” energy, which we can plainly recognize as white supremacist sentiments. (Insultingly coming from the people who won’t let us call our Champagne Champagne.)
And circling back to Beard’s argument, this is a Buddhist manuscript. Buddhism has been practiced on the Korean peninsula for thousands of years, and is still practiced by millions there today. Are we to believe these ‘modern occupants’ of Korea have little connection to this object? That it may as well just be in a French museum?
This is one example. There are thousands. Many of them in the British Museum, perhaps the largest launderer of Orientalist imperialism in human history.