Theft of 2,000 items puts the British Museum’s management model in the spotlight – 09/12/2023 – Market

Visitors to the British Museum’s grand neoclassical building in Bloomsbury, central London, were greeted by an unexpected face at the information desk last week: “Dame” Mary Beard, the classical culture scholar and museum administrator. She arrived to reassure employees after one of the biggest scandals to hit the institution in its 270-year history.

“I spoke to a friendly Australian visitor who joked, ‘I just thought I’d check to make sure the whole place hadn’t been robbed,'” Beard said. It was a painful joke. Curators held a meeting after it was discovered in August that 2,000 items had been removed from its huge collection, leading to the resignation of Hartwig Fischer, its director. Pieces include antique semi-precious stones and gold jewelry.

The museum fired one of its longest-serving curators and police launched an investigation. The alarm was first raised directly by antiques expert and dealer Ittai Gradel in 2021 after he came across some of the items for sale on eBay. But an initial investigation by senior museum officials found nothing missing.

The scandal casts a cold light on the lack of security to prevent internal theft by the museum’s curators, highly respected but modestly paid experts who wield enormous authority in their fiefdoms. The museum now believes the theft took place over two decades, with precious stones in a secure deposit being ripped from frames and computer records altered to suggest some had disappeared in the 1930s.

The revelations come at a delicate time: the museum has been under pressure to return disputed pieces to their countries of origin, including decorative bronzes seized in Benin by British forces in 1897. George Osborne, former UK chancellor and chairman of the trustees, is negotiating with the Greek government the loan of some of the Parthenon sculptures – also called Elgin Marbles – taken from Athens at the beginning of the 19th century.

News of the thefts has amplified calls for more treasures to be repatriated. Chinese state newspaper Global Times last week called on the museum to return Chinese relics acquired through “dirty and sinful means.”

Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archeology at the University of Oxford, said the museum’s claims to be a trustworthy caretaker now ring hollow: “How does an institution that has made such a virtue of its ability to protect the world’s heritage come away with the news that you’ve been stealing from yourself?”

It also undermines the central purpose of the institution, founded in 1753 as one of the world’s first universal or encyclopedic museums, intended to represent a wide range of human knowledge. It was followed by the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The British Museum began with a collection of books, coins and dried plants formed by Sir Hans Sloane, a doctor who married an heiress to plantations with slave labor in Jamaica, and has been expanding ever since. Today, its collection of 8 million items is so large and varied that 1% is on public display and only about half have been catalogued. The task of recovering stolen items will be made very difficult by the lack of documentation.

Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, which recovers stolen works, says this is “completely inexcusable and gross negligence. You can’t recover things you can’t prove you own.”

Beard describes the thefts as “a tragedy”, and says the museum owes the public a full explanation, but is stymied by the police investigation. “We hold things in trust for the nation and we have a duty to tell what happened… the best that can be said is that it will make us look even more closely at what the museum should be.”

Storage Issues

It took a long time to discover the thefts. Gradel complained to an administrator last October about being ignored, and Osborne asked Fischer to explain. In December, a full audit found parts were missing, and police were alerted. Fischer announced in July that he would retire next year, but resigned abruptly last month, apologizing for having accused Gradel of withholding evidence.

There were already tensions between Osborne and Fischer, a distinguished German art historian appointed in 2015 when Sir Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times, was president.

An administrator said Osborne was dissatisfied with Fischer’s leadership following his 2021 appointment, and the thefts further strained their relationship. “Everything is fine when a president and a director get along, but when they don’t, it’s poisonous,” comments a former director. Fischer declined to comment.

It didn’t help that Osborne publicly took the lead in negotiations with Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, over the Parthenon sculptures. “I’m sure it’s fun to negotiate with Mitsotakis, but it’s not the main job of a chairman,” says a senior administrator at another museum. Both the museum and Fischer say he was fully involved in the negotiations.

But the robberies began long before Fischer or Osborne were in office, and reflect a broader challenge in policing internal affairs. Although most art thefts are committed by outsiders, such as the theft of €113 million worth of jewelry from a Dresden (Germany) museum in 2019, insider thefts are not exclusive to the British Museum. Anders Burius, chief librarian at the Swedish National Library, stole more than 50 rare books in the 1990s.

One problem is that curators need to handle many objects for research, and those with privileged access can easily hide small items: at the British Museum they are not searched upon leaving. It was quite shocking for the team to learn of a fellow curator’s deviations: Osborne said that “groupthink” was partly to blame.

Being trusted to do independent research is a big part of the professional appeal of curators, who are not highly paid: the average salary in UK museums is £38,500. “It’s a low-paying profession, which hasn’t kept up with university salaries. Trying to hire people from the United States now is a joke,” says a director.

Some museums have stricter rules about individuals not being alone in archives: the Tate galleries, for example, require staff to be supervised when handling drawings, primarily to avoid accidental damage. But the scale of the British Museum’s collection makes this more difficult: it has struggled for decades to record exactly what it has.

When rare books were stolen from its library by a reader in 1971, the museum hired its first full-time security officer, along with temporary staff to make up for the cataloging delay. In 1988, the National Audit Office found it had 5.5 million items – 2.5 million fewer than today – and warned of an “inexorable increase in the size of large collections” in museums.

Since then, the task has only grown. Many museums are forced to remove items from archaeological excavations or discovered by projects such as HS2. “All museums face challenges with storage. They are full of boxes and boxes of things, many of them unopened and unaccounted for,” said Lord Neil Mendoza, dean of Oriel College, Oxford, who led a government review of the Kingdom’s museums. United in 2017. One of them had a collection of vacuum cleaners in permanent storage, he recalls.

The British Museum has made progress. It has about 2 million online records covering nearly 4.5 million items, including a 16th-century carved ivory hunting horn from Sierra Leone and 72 “eccentric flints.” This surpasses the Louvre, which has around 490,000 items in its own online database.

Things are important

But like others, the British Museum has a Hotel California problem: new things can arrive at any time, but they can never leave.

Although much of what the British Museum stores is not of great financial value – even gems stolen from its vaults have been offered for less than £100 each on eBay – there are legal restrictions on the sale of items held in trust, and most curators is reluctant to part with even smaller objects: one report described this as a “taboo” in the profession.

Some U.S. museums are more open to what’s called “de-annexation”: selling items to reduce clutter, update collections and raise money. “You can’t tell me that every piece of Roman glass has to be in a museum,” Marinello said. “For God’s sake, donate it to other museums, or if it’s not valuable for display or research, sell it and fix the roof.”

One reason for their reluctance is that as scanning and dating technology evolves, more information can be gleaned from items that once seemed useless. “I know it might seem crazy that we have all these things, and Marie Kondo would say get rid of them, but there’s a logic there. It’s a conservative position, but not a foolish one,” Beard said.

The museum is preparing to raise money for a reconstruction program that could cost £1 billion, and the thefts put it under even greater pressure. He must move many items to a new warehouse in Berkshire and prove again that he is a safe custodian. It receives 4.5 million visitors a year, but as entry is free it depends heavily on government funding, which totaled £68 million last year.

Hicks says he shouldn’t stop maintaining a huge archive, but he should catalog it better and open it to the public. He cites the British Library, formerly part of the British Museum, which has made 90% of its collection of 160 million books accessible for study. “At least half of the role of museums has to be to make objects available to the public to weave their own stories,” he says.

The idea that museums should focus more on what they have in their archives does not convince everyone. “Custodial is fundamental, but the UK’s museums are world leaders in interpretation, conservation and exhibitions,” says Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. “We would be crazy if we allowed this moment to distract us from that.”

However, the fact that the thefts at the British Museum have gone unnoticed for so long raises an alarming question: how much is being silently stolen from others?

Marinello said museums are often reluctant to admit employee theft because it alienates potential donors and undermines trust in the institution. “There are a lot of crimes we never know about. Someone needs to confront them all and ask, ‘What was taken from yours?'” he said.

In the song “A Foggy Day (in London Town)”, Ira Gershwin once wrote: “I saw the morning with much alarm / the British Museum had lost its charm.” Maybe he’s not the only one who lacks some charms.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves