Stealing from the British Museum: How, why, who? - BBC Newsnight / British Museum Director Resigns After Worker Fired for Theft / Artefacts stolen from British Museum ‘may be untraceable’ due to poor records

British Museum Director Resigns After Worker Fired for Theft

 

Hartwig Fischer, who had led the museum since 2016, said that the museum’s failure to respond to earlier warnings “must ultimately rest with the director.”

 

Hartwig Fischer

Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/arts/design/british-museum-director-resigns.html

Aug. 25, 2023

Updated 12:45 p.m. ET

 

Just days after the British Museum announced that it had fired an employee who was suspected of looting its storerooms and selling items on eBay, the museum’s director announced Friday that he was resigning, effective immediately.

 

Hartwig Fischer, a German art historian who had led the world renowned institution since 2016, said in a news release that he was leaving the post at a time “of the utmost seriousness.”

 

Mr. Fischer said that it was “evident” that under his leadership the museum did not adequately respond to warnings that a curator may be stealing items. “The responsibility for that failure must ultimately rest with the director,” Mr. Fischer said.

 

The crisis became public when the British Museum announced last week that items had been stolen from its collection. The museum did not say how many items were taken, but said that the missing, stolen or damaged pieces included “gold jewelry and “gems of semiprecious stones and glass” dating from as far back as the 15th century B.C.

 

Ever since, a stream of revelations around the museum’s handling of the thefts undermined Mr. Fischer’s position. On Tuesday, The New York Times and the BBC published emails showing that he had downplayed concerns raised by Ithai Gradel, a Denmark-based antiquities dealer, about potential thefts.

 

Mr. Fischer, in an email to a trustee in October 2022, said “the case has been thoroughly investigated” adding “there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations.”

 

Mr. Fischer initially defended his response, saying in a statement Wednesday that his handling of the allegations had been robust and that the museum had taken the warnings “incredibly seriously.” The extent of the problem only became clear later, after the museum undertook “a full audit” of its collections, he added.

 

His defense did little to quell criticism in Britain. On Wednesday, The Times of London wrote that the thefts were “a national disgrace, calling into question the museum’s own claims for its stewardship of cultural treasures, and for which it needs to give a full accounting.”

 

In announcing his resignation, Mr. Fischer said that it was clear that “the British Museum did not respond as comprehensively as it should have in response to the warnings in 2021, and to the problem that has now fully emerged.”

 

He was already planning to leave the institution. In July Mr. Fischer announced he would leave the British Museum in 2024, after eight years in the role as director. But the crisis has brought that date far closer.

 

The museum would “come through this moment and emerge stronger,” Mr. Fischer said, “but sadly I have come to the conclusion that my presence is proving a distraction. That is the last thing I would want."

 

George Osborne, the museum chair, said in the release that the board had accepted Mr. Fischer’s decision. “I am clear about this: we are going to fix what has gone wrong,” Mr. Osborne said. “The museum has a mission that lasts across generations. We will learn, restore confidence and deserve to be admired once again.”

 

Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. More about Alex Marshall

Artefacts stolen from British Museum ‘may be untraceable’ due to poor records

 

Many examples of missing gold jewellery, gems and ancient items were not catalogued, say cultural heritage experts

 

British Museum director steps down after suspected thefts

David Batty

Fri 25 Aug 2023 17.40 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/25/artefacts-stolen-from-british-museum-may-be-untraceable-due-to-poor-records

 

Many of the priceless artefacts suspected to have been stolen from the British Museum’s collections may never be recovered because of its poor record keeping, cultural heritage experts have said.

 

Ittai Gradel, a British-Danish antiquities dealer who uncovered the suspected thefts of items such as gold jewellery, semiprecious stones and ancient glassware, said he had been told hundreds of missing objects had never been properly cataloged by the museum, making it difficult to prove they belonged to its collections.

 

Gradel, who first alerted the museum to the suspected thefts in 2020, said he understood staff had found almost an entire collection of 942 unregistered gems was missing. The museum’s records only describe the collection as a whole and do not detail the individual pieces.

 

“As far as I understand, these individual items were not described, only a sum total,” he said. “So, 935 gems are missing and the problem is, if they can’t be identified, how can they return to the museum?

 

“They have been lying there without any registration at all for over 200 years,” making them an open invitation to theft “because who could ever find out?”

 

Gradel was singled out for an apology on Friday after the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, announced he was resigning over the suspected thefts from the museum’s vaults.

 

Fischer had earlier told the Guardian of his frustration that the extent of any appropriation of artefacts from its collection was not apparent when concerns were first raised in 2021.

 

He said: “We now have reason to believe that the individual who raised concerns had many more items in his possession, and it’s frustrating that that was not revealed to us as it would have aided our investigations.”

 

But it later transpired Gradel had spent years appealing to the museum to investigate, first airing his suspicions in 2020 before handing over a dossier of evidence showing that items were being sold on eBay.

 

On Friday, Fischer withdrew his earlier remarks. He said he expressed “sincere regret” over the “misjudged” comments. “It is evident that the British Museum did not respond as comprehensively as it should have in response to the warnings in 2021, and to the problem that has now fully emerged.”

 

Speaking before the resignation, Gradel said: “The implication [is] that I deliberately withheld evidence from the British Museum. How does that even make sense? It was I who reported it and insisted that they took it seriously. It is a direct attack on my personal integrity and I will not stand for it.”

 

The museum announced last week that it had sacked a member of staff after treasures were reported “missing, stolen or damaged”. The Metropolitan police said on Thursday they had interviewed a man in connection with the suspected thefts.

 

Gradel said he believed the suspected thefts occurred over at least two decades, and media reports suggested that the number of stolen items could be as high as 2,000 – with a value of millions of pounds.

 

Christos Tsirogiannis, an expert at identifying looted antiquities, said he suspected the British Museum had not specified how many items were missing or what they looked like because it either had incomplete or no records for some of the objects.

 

Tsirogiannis, who heads illicit antiquities trafficking research for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, added: “That will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the British Museum to prove that these particular objects are the ones that they are missing from the collections. That will eliminate the possibility to identify them and claim them back.”

 

According to the museum, 4.5m of the at least 8m items in its collections have been added to its public database. About 1.64m artefacts have been photographed, although there are other images, such as illustrations, of some of the remaining objects.

 

Gradel said the museum’s incomplete records meant he was only able to identify three of the 70 items he had bought on eBay as belonging to its collections.

 

He said he contacted the museum after becoming convinced that someone with access to its collections had been stealing items not listed on its online catalogue to avoid detection.

 

It was only when the suspected thief got sloppy and allegedly sold some items that were traceable that Gradel said he realised the items he had bought may have been stolen.

 

“They also discovered Greek gold jewellery that was missing or had been physically destroyed, cut to pieces with scissors or pliers or smashed with a hammer, or the gold removed. The gold is [probably] melted down now. That’s lost for ever.”

 

Prof Dan Hicks, the curator of world archaeology at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, accused the British Museum of neglecting the work of making a proper catalogue of its collection.

 

“This isn’t a bad apple story, this is about institutional priorities,” he said. “This was a disaster waiting to happen because of the lack of investment in doing curatorial work.”

 

A British Museum spokesperson said: “We have placed great significance and resource on the cataloguing programme.”