Category Archives: Museums

Lost photos from Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reveal horror of Jews’ last stand

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Images found in attic taken by Polish firefighter who risked life to record how Jewish Poles fought the Nazis despite impossible odds

The photographs are blurry, composed hastily and taken surreptitiously, sometimes with heads or objects in the foreground obscuring part of the view.

But Holocaust historians say the imperfect pictures, discovered last month in a Polish attic decades after their creator died, are nonetheless priceless. They are the only known photographs from inside the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising not to be taken by Germans.

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‘Shot two zebras. Played tennis’: Scarborough museum confronts legacy of colonial past

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Discovery of stuffed animals from central Africa and recordings from ‘human zoo’ inspires exhibition

It was when part of a Scarborough museum was being redeveloped more than a decade ago that builders found a blocked-up door. Behind it they discovered bags filled with asbestos and, under that, a collection of taxidermied animals that had been collected by a Victorian big game hunter and left to the museum.

Neglected, outdated and ethically problematic, the temptation may have been to shut the artefacts away again. Instead, the Scarborough Museums and Galleries opted to do something else with the archive bequeathed by Col James Harrison – some of it much more morally challenging than stuffed antelope heads.

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Germany returns 21 Benin bronzes to Nigeria – amid frustration at Britain

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Artefacts looted in 19th century by UK soldiers and sold on, with many more still held by the British Museum

Twenty-one precious artefacts that were looted by British soldiers from the former west African kingdom of Benin 125 years ago have been handed over by Germany to Nigeria amid laughter, tears, and some audible frustration with the ongoing silence of the country that first stole them.

The objects from the haul of treasures known as the Benin bronzes, including a brass head of an oba (king), a ceremonial ada and a throne depicting a coiled-up python, were taken from the sacked city during a British punitive expedition in 1897 and later sold to German museums in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Cologne.

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Pope Francis orders Parthenon marbles held by Vatican be returned to Greece

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Three 2,500-year-old pieces will be ‘donated’ to Greece’s Archbishop Ieronymos II amid wider conversation about future of Parthenon marbles held by Britain

Pope Francis has decided to return to Greece three 2,500-year-old pieces of the Parthenon that have been in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for two centuries.

The Vatican said in a brief statement that the pope was giving them to Archbishop Ieronymos II, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church and Greece’s spiritual leader, as a “donation” and “a concrete sign of his sincere desire to follow in the ecumenical path of truth”.

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German police recover 31 items stolen in 2019 Dresden jewel heist

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‘Considerable portion’ of priceless treasures from Green Vault museum recovered amid trial of suspects

German authorities said they have found a “considerable portion” of items stolen in a spectacular 2019 robbery of priceless 18th-century jewels from a state museum.

The authorities retrieved 31 individual items in the capital, Berlin, the police and prosecutors said.

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Early medieval female burial site is ‘most significant ever discovered’ in UK

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Find dating from about 650AD in Northamptonshire includes jewelled necklace and changed archaeologists’ view of the period

Archaeologists don’t often bounce with excitement, but the Museum of London archeology team could hardly contain themselves on Tuesday as they unveiled an “exhilarating” discovery made on the last day of an otherwise barren dig in the spring.

“This is the most significant early medieval female burial ever discovered in Britain,” said the leader of the dig, Levente Bence Balázs, almost skipping with elation. “It is an archaeologist’s dream to find something like this.”

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No 10 rules out law change for return of Parthenon marbles

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No plans to amend legislation that could stop removal back to Greece, after secret talks held over their future

Rishi Sunak has ruled out changing a law that could prevent the British Museum from handing the Parthenon marbles back to Greece, after it emerged that trustees have held secret talks with the Greek prime minister about the future of the artefacts.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said there were no plans to amend legislation under which a museum can dispose of objects within its collection only in very limited circumstances. However, it could decide to lend part of the collection to Greece.

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Greece in ‘preliminary’ talks with British Museum about Parthenon marbles

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Officials say they have met with George Osborne, and are keen to see the masterpieces back in Athens

Senior Greek officials have been in “preliminary” talks with the British Museum in what could amount to a tectonic shift in resolving the world’s longest-running cultural dispute: the repatriation of the 5th-century BC Parthenon marbles to Athens.

Revelations about the negotiations were first reported on Saturday by Ta Nea, which said that officials including the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, had met George Osborne, the chair of the British Museum, in a five-star London hotel as recently as Monday.

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British Museum works to restore ‘rare and complex’ Michelangelo drawing

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16th-century work Epifania is one of only two existing cartoons by the Italian master

One of only two surviving Michelangelo cartoons is undergoing delicate and highly technical conservation work at the British Museum in an attempt to stabilise the fragile work for the coming decades.

Epifania, created by the Italian master artist around 1550, has degraded and been subject to repeated repairs over its almost 500-year history. Now it is laid out in the museum’s state-of-the-art conservation studios as specialists consider how best to preserve the complex structure and black chalk lines.

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Criticism mounts of ‘climate killer’ modern art museum in Berlin

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Calls for construction on Museum of the 20th Century to be halted until energy efficiency issues addressed

A vast modern art museum under construction in Berlin has been castigated by conservation experts and architecture critics for its poor environmental credentials, as the energy crisis intensifies scrutiny of the efficiency of new buildings.

The Museum of the 20th Century, designed by the Swiss star architects Herzog and de Meuron, is intended to propel the German capital into the top tier of world cities for modern art, competing with New York’s Moma and London’s Tate Modern.

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Forgotten photos show how Kenyan archaeologists unearthed secrets of their own country

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Exhibitions in UK and Africa rewrite history by celebrating discoveries of overlooked black excavators in colonial era

The photographs are rare, the subject choice unusual, but what the photographer captured was a common sight in the early 20th century: a team of colonised people, hard at work under a hot sun, excavating an ancient monument.

Today, without these photos, taken in Kenya in the 1940s and 50s, there would be scarcely any evidence that African Kenyans were present at archaeological digs. Their contributions and priceless finds were credited to their European bosses – and their important role in unearthing the history of their own continent has been all but forgotten.

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‘The sheer scale is extraordinary’: meet the titanosaur that dwarfs Dippy the diplodocus

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One of the largest creatures to have walked the Earth is to become the Natural History Museum’s new star attraction

It will be one of the largest exhibits to grace a British museum. In spring, the Natural History Museum in London will display the skeleton of a titanosaur, a creature so vast it will have to be shoehorned into the 9-metre-high Waterhouse gallery.

One of the most massive creatures ever to have walked on Earth, Patagotitan mayorum was a 57-tonne behemoth that would have shaken the ground as it stomped over homelands which now form modern Patagonia. Its skeleton is 37 metres long, and 5 metres in height – significantly larger than the museum’s most famous dinosaur, Dippy the diplodocus, which used to loom over its main gallery.

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Celtic gold coins worth ‘several million euros’ stolen from German museum

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Third-century coins taken in heist involving ‘cut off’ phone and internet connections in Manching, Bavaria

Thieves have stolen a hoard of Celtic coins worth several million euros from a German museum after apparently disrupting local telephone and internet connections.

Employees at the museum in Manching discovered on Tuesday that a “showcase was broken” and the collection of 450 coins had been stolen, local police told AFP.

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Digital Benin project reunites bronzes looted by British soldiers

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Comprehensive database of Benin bronzes held by museums raises questions about where they belong

Cheerfully gnashing their magnificent fangs as they stand side by side, the two bronze leopards look back on a journey that was as adventurous as it was cruelly absurd.

Looted by British soldiers on a punitive expedition to the west African kingdom of Benin in 1897, the bronzes were shipped to the UK, where they spent some time guarding the fireplace of army captain George William Neville’s Weybridge home. They were later put in display at Moma in New York and bought by a French art collector – who eventually sold them back to the colonial administration in Lagos in 1952 with a considerable mark-up.

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Remains of 18 Indigenous people held by UK museums return to Australia

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Return is part of painstaking effort to recover thousands of ancestors stolen from traditional lands who now lie in more than 20 countries

The remains of 18 Indigenous people have been returned to Australia by two British museums, part of the laborious and painstaking effort to recover thousands of ancestors stolen from their traditional lands which now lie in more than 20 countries around the world.

At midnight Australia time on Wednesday, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum returned 17 ancestors to the custodianship of the federal government, which will hold them while further research is undertaken “to determine the traditional custodians”. Another was given to the custodianship of the south-east First Nations people of South Australia, who were represented by Robyn Campbell.

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Manchester Museum to reopen with ‘ordinary folk’ co-curating new gallery

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Director says it’s ‘time to tell new stories’ as people from south Asian diaspora contribute experiences

A museum with a dizzying, encyclopaedic collection that spans Egyptian mummies, dinosaur skeletons and live Costa Rican frogs is to reopen next year after a £15m revamp – with a promise to be more inclusive and imaginative.

Manchester Museum has about 4.5m objects from around the world, a mix of exhibits from natural sciences and human cultures all under one roof.

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Salford museum pays £7.8m for LS Lowry’s Going to the Match

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Purchase of 1953 painting beloved by football fans made possible by gift from charitable foundation

A painting by LS Lowry beloved by football fans and art enthusiasts has been bought by the Lowry museum and gallery in Salford, saving it from disappearing into a private collection.

The museum paid £7.8m including fees for Going to the Match, painted in 1953, at an auction on Wednesday evening. The purchase was made possible by a gift from the Law Family charitable foundation, which was set up by the hedge fund manager and Conservative party donor Andrew Law and his wife, Zoë. The painting had been estimated to fetch £5m-£8m.

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Stolen Tasmanian Aboriginal artefacts are finally home. But there’s a catch: they’re only on loan

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Cultural objects kept in museums around the world are in nipaluna/Hobart for an exhibition. But Aboriginal communities are calling for them to stay permanently

In 2014, pakana woman Zoe Rimmer left the British Museum in tears after viewing a 170-year-old kelp water carrier taken from lutruwita/Tasmania in their collection. As she cried, the seed of a big idea was planted: how could she get the rikawa, and other Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural artefacts sitting in institutions across the world, home?

“Seeing our ancestral belongings in a storage facility in the British Museum was quite emotional,” says Rimmer, who until recently was senior curator of First Peoples art and culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).

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‘It’s about ethics’: Nigeria urges British Museum to follow US and repatriate bronzes

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Culture minister says UK institution ‘should learn from what has happened’ as Smithsonian returns 29 Benin artefacts

The culture minister of Nigeria has urged the British Museum to follow the example of the Smithsonian Institution, which on Tuesday returned ownership of 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria at a celebratory event in Washington.

Lai Mohammed praised the move by the US National Museum of African Art, which follows a recent restitution agreement with Germany that included the handover of two Benin bronzes. Last year, Mohammed’s ministry formally requested the return of Benin artefacts from the British Museum in London.

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Uffizi Galleries sue Jean Paul Gaultier over use of Botticelli images

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Any use of Italy’s publicly owned art to sell merchandise requires permission and payment of a fee

Italy’s Uffizi Galleries are suing the French fashion house Jean Paul Gaultier for damages that could exceed €100,000 (£88,000) after the company’s allegedly unauthorised use of images of Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus to adorn a range of clothing products, including T-shirts, leggings and bodices.

The matter came to light earlier this year after the Uffizi in Florence was notified of the garments being advertised by Jean Paul Gaultier on its website and social media.

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