Behind the scenes at the British Museum with curator
Dr Dora Thornton reveals the delights of being a curator
Arecent New Yorker cartoon showed a man chatting up a girl by claiming, ‘I curate children’s parties.’ The modern tendency encourages us all to think of ourselves as curators of just about any and every experience. So it’s easy for those of us who work in museums to feel a little sidelined, whether we spend our days squinting at cuneiform, working with contemporary Australian printmakers or deciphering blackletter inscriptions on medieval rings.
Several novels point to a peculiarly British scepticism – or even suspicion – about what curators really do. Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931) is a devastating critique of the kind of male museum hierarchies I can dimly remember from the early 1990s. Penelope Fitzgerald’s fearsome spoof on the Tutankhamun exhibition, The Golden Child (1977), reminds me how I queued as a teenager to file silently past the famous sarcophagus as if it were the tomb of Lenin.
So what do curators really do? We are people who think with things. We use objects to articulate arguments in exhibitions and galleries. We explain why pieces in our care came to be made, why they look the way they do, and how it is that these, rather than other things described in contemporary sources, have survived. That involves looking at how objects have moved from hand to hand and culture to culture, changing their meanings as they go.
At the deepest level, classification lies at the heart of what we do. When I explained that I had spent the last morning of my holiday in Ireland sexing a lobster from my son’s pot (you’re only allowed to catch males) while trying to keep the boat just off the rocks, a volunteer said, ‘That must be the exact opposite of what you do in your work.’
On reflection, no: sexing a lobster involves turning it over to look at the form of its swimmerets and tail, which is exactly what you do to sex a Tudor jewel: the form of the hook on the underside reveals whether it was made for a man as a hat badge or for a woman as a dress fitting. Sexing a lobster and sexing a Tudor jewel have plenty in common – except, for the latter, you are sitting at your desk in Bloomsbury.
The work is so unpredictable; it comes at you from all directions. There’s double entendre: American woman on the phone, ‘I have a large bust; how do I clean it?’ There are the fragile idioms: polite, foreign professor asking for the North Entrance, ‘Please show me your backside.’
We welcome visitors, recognise their interest and answer (politely) all of them. There is the woman who brought in for an opinion a piece of chewing gum, congealed but not yet hardened, prised from a temple at Paestum; or the metal-detectorist who had convinced himself that a motorcycle hubcap, fished out from under Beachy Head, was a Roman brooch rather than a Mod relic.
I long ago worked out a formulaic response to questions about the value of objects brought in for identification (we can’t give valuations): ‘Well, it isn’t going to pay for a round-the-world cruise.’
Curators, like clergy and rabbis, are used to receiving confidences, sharing revelations and responding to odd requests that arrive unsolicited by letter or email, or directly in conversation in galleries or lectures.
And then there are the overheard comments. The very sculpture gallery which inspired Shelley’s Ozymandias prompted one child to ask, ‘Granny, is this where God lives?’
You are forever primed for questions. The Holy Thorn Reliquary, a treasure in the Waddesdon Bequest, has a particular power to fascinate and provoke, partly because it holds a thorn supposedly from the crown of thorns worn by Christ at his crucifixion; partly because a forged copy of the 14th-century reliquary was substituted for the original, which was then sold. I have had questions from Jewish visitors as to whether this was done by a Jewish restorer as an act of vengeance against Christians. And a fundamentalist Christian wrote to ask, in all seriousness, if we had tested the thorn for Christ’s DNA; the unspoken implication being that we could then clone God.
I remember pointing out to a threeyear-old the miniature theatre at the base of the jewel, showing the drama of the Day of Judgement. He widened his eyes and silently raised a starfish-like hand towards the tiny, enamelled figures rising from their tombs, one of them toppling a coffin lid into the viewer’s space.
That sense of the numinous, of the British Museum as a temple of culture, obstinately refuses to go away. Museums, like Larkin’s Anglican churches, are places in which ‘someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious’.
Perhaps, on a good day, encountering history can even give us a renewed sense of what it means to be human.
Dr Dora Thornton is a senior British Museum curator
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