British Museum

Painting protests cause 'enormous stress for colleagues at every level', say UK's national museum directors

An open letter from the National Museum Directors' Council says "demonstrations now need to be taken away from our museums and galleries"

Ten years on from the genocide, Yazidi culture is still absent from Western museums

Institutions have a moral duty to better represent the persecuted Kurdish religious minority

Repatriation of objects is on the government’s agenda, says UK culture secretary

Lisa Nandy's apparent support for repatriation reform has been welcomed by the head of London's Victoria and Albert Museum

‘Will it cause reputational damage?’: British Museum director discusses controversial BP donation

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, Nicholas Cullinan also mulls over the Parthenon Marbles and recent thefts scandal

British Museum names architects shortlisted in controversial renovation competition

Environmental campaigners previously called on practices not to take part in the contest following a £50m funding pledge from BP

Jala Wahid confronts the colonial legacy of the British Museum in London exhibition

The Kurdish artist delves into the histories of looted artefacts and questions the ethics of their existence in Western museums

From the courts to the British Museum—it’s time to stop hiding from the realities of climate breakdown

A reluctance to acknowledge hard facts is playing into a one-sided narrative around Big Oil—and the consequences are far reaching

Another object has been stolen from the British Museum—but this time by an artist

Ilê Sartuzi's short-lived heist involving a 17th-century coin draws parallels to the recent scandal over the theft of thousands of items from the museum’s collection

Hartwig Fischer, former British Museum director, is appointed to run Saudi museum of world cultures

Fischer, who resigned after a thefts scandal at the British Museum, has been announced as the founding director of the new institution, which is expected to open in 2026

Diaryblog

Nicholas Cullinan's birthday gift for trustee Tracey Emin revealed

The new British Museum director revealed online that he commissioned the jaunty top especially

The Big Review: Michelangelo: the Last Decades at the British Museum, London ★★★☆☆

In the absence of large-scale works, the London show focuses instead on the objects that reveal the artist’s deepening spirituality

British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years

The space, once used by the likes of Karl Marx, is finally available for all visitors to the London institution to see

Behind the British Museum’s struggle to find a space to show one of its greatest Assyrian reliefs

The rare and much-studied work has been in storage for most of 18 years, but no UK institution has asked to borrow it

Museumscomment

Art of the Ice Age has a lot to teach us—it’s time the British Museum dedicated a gallery to it

The museum is only one of two institutions in the world to see Ice Age art as part of human cultural endeavour, but it needs a proper space to explain and explore this

Diaryblog

‘I am pro Crocs’—British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan reveals all in quick-fire Instagram interview

Social media film puts new chief on the spot, highlighting his favourite object and guilty pleasure

Australian blockbuster Pharaoh show could inspire British Museum's revamped Ancient Egypt galleries

Curators from the London institution said they might adopt some of the innovative ways the objects were displayed at the National Gallery of Victoria

British Museum opens new storage and research facility

Known as BM_ARC, the site in Berkshire houses around 1.3 million objects from the London museum and is intended for scholars as well as members of the public

‘We’ve got our man’ says British Museum chair as BBC programme digs deep into thefts

George Osborne’s comments were made on Thief at the British Museum, which has been released both as a one-off television show and a radio series

British Museum recovers a further 268 stolen objects

The institution’s chair George Osborne has described the total number of items returned as a result that “few expected”, though more than 800 remain missing

British Museum on the hunt for 'visionary' design team to help transform space

The institution launches competition to find an architectural firm that can transform its Bloomsbury site

The Week in Art podcast | Should UK museums charge for entry? Plus, Michelangelo’s last decades and Maria Blanchard

The case for and against the policy of free admission for UK museums, a tour of the British Museum's new Michelangelo show and an in-depth look at Maria Blanchard’s Girl at Her First Communion in Malaga

Late Michelangelo drawings—including his deeply meditative crucifixions—explored in London exhibition

British Museum show focuses on the final three decades of the Italian master’s life

'Why British museums must start charging entrance fees'

Low pay for museum workers, decreased local authority spending and a theft scandal have highlighted that "it’s time for some difficult choices," says the writer and broadcaster Ben Lewis

Social media backlash: how (and how not) to respond when your art organisation comes under fire

Lessons to be learnt after the British Museum misfired with a social media post branded as "sexist"

How a Danish museum was asked to safeguard and then return 290 stolen gems to British Museum

The Danish specialist Ittai Gradel, who first raised alarm about thefts of antiquities from the London museum, and earlier returned 61 gems bought separately on eBay, approached the Thorvaldsens Museum to help in repatriating a second, larger set of stolen pieces

UK government should intervene to prevent museum thefts, says expert after reports of missing objects across the country

Art detective Christopher Marinello believes more action is needed after an investigation by the Independent newspaper revealed thefts at the Imperial War Museum, Natural History Museum and others

British Museum’s legal action over thefts is ‘locking the stable door after the horse has bolted’, experts say

The museum's former acting head of the Greece and Rome department, Peter Higgs, is facing legal action after being accused of stealing up to 2,000 objects

Nicholas Cullinan is appointed director of the British Museum

Cullinan, currently the director of the National Portrait Gallery, faces an array of challenges in rebuilding the oldest national museum in the world’s reputation

Exclusive: international museum attendance figures back to pre-pandemic levels

In 2023, many of the world’s major museums equaled—or surpassed—their 2019 attendance figures. However, some UK institutions are still lagging behind, finds The Art Newspaper’s annual survey