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From the July 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL.48, No.7).

Infamy! Infamy!

A Wretched Exhibition at the British Museum

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian (liberal), London, England,
April 14, 2001.

Rolling in her grave: Cleopatra

The story of Antony and Cleopatra is a rare instance in which the losers are remembered as more glamorous than the winners. Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, seduced not one but two of history’s most famous politicians, first living with and having a son by Julius Caesar; then, after Caesar’s death, having an even more public affair with Mark Antony. Antony and Cleopatra were eventually defeated and driven to suicide by Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavian; but even though he went on to transform the Roman Empire, no artist or writer was ever inspired by his story as they were by Cleopatra and her Antony.

The British Museum’s exhibition “Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth” takes this magical story and pulverizes it. It makes Cleopatra, who has seemed like our contemporary from the time of Shakespeare’s England to Liz Taylor’s Hollywood, a figure as remote as Shelley’s Ozymandias. It achieves this despite containing works of art that under normal circumstances would take your breath away.

There are Roman paintings from Pompeii lent by the Naples Archaeological Museum, a statue of Cleopatra from the Hermitage, and even the colossal head thought to be of Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar—recently raised from Alexandria’s harbor by French archaeologists. “Wonderful things,” as Howard Carter said when he first peeped into the tomb of Tutankhamen. Yet even the most wonderful things can be sterilized by a badly conceived exhibition.

The degree to which this show makes a sow’s ear out of one of history’s finest silk purses is spectacular. You walk up the spiral staircase to the Joseph Hotung Gallery with anticipation, the Egyptian statuary displayed on the way up looking gorgeous in the light and space of Norman Foster’s Great Court.

The British Museum has a problem with exhibitions...

Then there’s a surreal change of scale from the generous expanse of the Great Court to this pocket-sized gallery, which would be perfect for prints or gems, but is obviously too small for a show of this scope. Inside, the treasures of Egypt and Rome have been squashed together in what are supposed to be separate sections exploring aspects of Cleopatra’s life and legend, but their close proximity and the utterly confusing plan make it a headache just working out which bit you’re in. Within minutes, excitement gives way to bafflement, followed by boredom. Is this a bust of Julius Caesar or Mark Antony? Who’s on that coin? Where’s the shop?

This is an oppressive and cynical exercise, an unholy alliance of marketing and scholarship. The marketing department’s contribution is felt not just in the spurious advance publicity—you no more see the true face of Cleopatra in her variously idealized statues and coins than you see the real Christ on the telly—but in the patronizing layout of the show.

There are big picture boards everywhere, as if this were a corporate presentation. Above is a frieze of images of Cleopatra from the movies. It’s all so desperate, I wouldn’t have been surprised if, on the way out, there was an animatronic statue of [comic actor] Kenneth Williams in his toga saying: “Infamy, Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.”

But what kills this exhibition stone dead is its lack of any coherent point. The fact that it fails to tell the story of Antony and Cleopatra in a lucid, informative manner is bad enough. But what it does instead is bewildering. The argument seems to be, broadly, that there was a real Cleopatra, and there is a mythic one. This exhibition juxtaposes the two.

...What kills the exhibition stone dead is its lack of any coherent point.

This sounds fine, but it is misconceived. The attempt to bring us close to the “real” Cleopatra turns out to be doomed: The more artifacts you look at, the further away you get. There are also few contemporary representations of Cleopatra—and some of those are questionable. What you get instead are approaches to and flirtations with facts, the promised revelation endlessly deferred.

So there’s a section that brings together artifacts from Cleopatra’s capital, Alexandria, several of them recently discovered. There’s a lovely mosaic of a dog excavated in 1993 on the site of the new Alexandrian library—a witty, crisp work of art, but nothing to do with Cleopatra; indeed, it dates from a century before her time. Context is great, yes, but how do we get from the dog to the queen? The collection of drinking vessels from Alexandria won’t do it. Perhaps that bust is Cleopatra? Oh no, it’s just a noblewoman. And that guy who looks like Caesar? He’s not Caesar. Nothing in the ancient art seems to get us close to the “real” people in the story—and why would we expect it to?

It’s the Roman images of Egypt, full of nutty stereotype and fantasy, that kick a little life into the proceedings: A painted plaster panel from Pompeii purportedly depicting life on the Nile has pygmies riding crocodiles and fighting hippos in a graphic manifestation of the West’s image of Egypt. It was this sense of Egypt as exotic that gave the story of Cleopatra such resonance.

Then we’re on to the image of Cleopatra in later art, and this is where you get the juicy iconography whose absence in antiquity is proved here in such tedious detail. At last, Cleopatra lifts the asp to her bare breast in Guercino’s sultry Baroque drawing in red chalk, done in the 1630s. These images are fascinating, but again there’s a patchiness that stops you getting absorbed: To cover such a great theme in art history in 10 or so drawings, paintings, and porcelain statuettes is pathetic.

The British Museum has a problem with exhibitions. It seems insecure and confused about why it puts them on, and for whom. This is an appalling manifestation of that problem. It seems to be aimed at two publics. One is a mass audience who needs something crude to draw it in, and doesn’t need to take anything away except having seen the face of Cleopatra; the other is the academic community—the catalog preface enthuses most about “the exciting elements of the research program” prompted by this show.

But a national museum has a duty to create and cultivate an intelligent public. The amount of marketing flannel surrounding this show suggests the British Museum has a poor opinion of our ability to engage with the art of the past. Despite the Great Court, there’s something missing at the British Museum: a sense of purpose. The great French curator and historian Pierre Rosenberg is about to retire as director of the Louvre—perhaps he might have time for some charity work?

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Related Items:

The Times (of London), which cooperated with the British Museum on the show, has a more positive review.

More on the show can be found at the British Museum's website.

The full text of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Cleopatra the historical figure (Britannica.com)