Displaying items by tag: British Museum

The artist Bridget Riley, known for her striped paintings, was introduced to the British Museum’s collection of Old Master and Modern drawings as a student at Goldsmiths more than 60 years ago. Now, Riley’s foundation is funding a three-year project that has allowed around 500 university students to discover the collection.

Amal Clooney is no longer advising the Greek government on how to get the Elgin Marbles returned to Athens after officials decided to drop their legal fight.

The British barrister was hired by Greece to advise the state ahead of a possible court case aimed at forcing the British Museum to give up the sculptures, which originally came from the Parthenon temple.

Thousands of artifacts from the British Museum's priceless collections went online Thursday in a partnership with Google that will allow web-users to take a virtual stroll through its galleries.

The deal with the Google Cultural Institute, which has 800 partners from over 60 countries, also allows objects to be scrutinized by researchers around the world thanks to high-definition Gigapixel technology.

Among artifacts viewable online is the famous Rosetta Stone, which helped unlock the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens.

The world's oldest bible is among 200 objects tracing Egypt's religious evolution in an exhibition at London's British Museum, which opens Friday and spans the 1,200 years since Cleopatra's death.

Titled "Egypt: faith after the pharaohs", the exhibition covers 12 centuries, from the country's integration into the Roman Empire in 30 BC to the fall of the Islamic Fatimid dynasty in 1171.

Thirteen museums in seven countries have been named recipients of Bank of America grants for the conservation of artworks ranging from an Edouard Manet painting to a colossal ancient Chinese Buddha.

The 2015 Art Conservation Project grants totaling more than $1 million were announced Friday. The recipients include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the British Museum, the OCA Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar.

A highly respected but determinedly low-profile German museum director in charge of the Dresden state art collections is to succeed Neil MacGregor as director of the British Museum.

The surprise appointment of Hartwig Fischer, 53, has yet to be rubberstamped by Downing Street but sources at the British Museum suggested that would be little more than a formality. It means there should be a smooth transition between MacGregor’s official departure just before Christmas and Fischer’s appointment.

Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.

The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years.

The British Museum’s proposed loans for Abu Dhabi could be worth up to £1bn. The most valuable item earmarked is an Assyrian relief from Nimrud, the Banquet Scene (645–635BC), which was revalued last year at £100m. No longer on display since it was placed on a reserve list, the world’s finest Assyrian relief is now languishing in the London institution’s store, awaiting its likely loan in 2017 for a five-year stay in the Gulf.

Five other antiquities on the list earmarked for Abu Dhabi are valued at more than £250m.

As a child, Hamish Parker had to be dragged round the British Museum by his father. Now, decades later, he can’t keep away, making regular visits and extraordinary financial gifts to enable the acquisition of important treasures.

Parker is a British fund manager who has become one of the museum’s most generous benefactors. He is also one of its most private and low-key supporters.

A Wunderkammer is a collection of small, wondrous objects, both natural and manmade, often very precious and intricate in their making. Sixteenth-century princes liked putting them together and a few, all in the Germanic realm, have come down to us almost intact—the imperial Wunderkammer in Vienna, the Dukes of Bavaria’s in Munich and the Electors of Saxony in Dresden.