After the British Museum scandal, we’ve lost our faith in art institutions

Wouldn’t it be lovely, when looking back at the year in art, to begin with some paintings? To shine a light on one or two of our museums’ significant recent acquisitions, such as Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai (c 1776), which, together with the Getty in Los ­Angeles, the National Portrait Gallery secured for £50 million? 

The National Gallery now owns Henri Rousseau’s Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909), depicting the Hungarian art dealer sitting in a wicker chair, smoking. The Royal Collection rediscovered a “lost” painting of Susanna and the Elders (1610) by Artemisia ­Gentileschi – that most modish of Old Masters for our MeToo moment – in a Hampton Court storeroom. (Although, to the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t wrapped in an Ikea bag, as Vincent van Gogh’s Spring Garden (1884), stolen from a Dutch museum in 2020, was when it was handed back this year.)

Wouldn’t it be great to dwell on the most memorable contemporary paintings, such as Peter Doig’s vision of an alpinist in a ­harlequin’s costume traversing the Alps, seen at the Courtauld? Or Camden Art ­Centre’s superb exhibition of the Iraqi-born, London-based Mohammed Sami’s creepy, dreamlike paintings evoking life under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad.

But brilliant art cannot make up for a catastrophic year for our most cherished institutions – most conspicuously, the British Museum, which suffered a self-inflicted annus horribilis that will have long-term consequences. This summer, it was revealed that around 1,500 artefacts had been stolen over 20 years from the museum (with a further 500 damaged) which, in the words of its chairman, George Osborne, had been the victim of an “inside job”. (A senior curator was sacked earlier this year; he denied wrongdoing, according to his family.) Director Hartwig Fischer was compelled to resign over the handling of the affair, but, overnight, the mus­eum’s reputation as a safe repository for millions of treasures was shattered. This month, it even became the butt of a joke in an online competition: “Did you hear about the Christmas cake on display in the British Museum? It was Stollen.”

The fiasco intensified the longstanding row about the Elgin Marbles, which flared up again recently, when Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting at the last minute with the Greek prime minister following the latter’s call, during a BBC interview, for the Parthenon sculptures’ return – provoking a front-page rebuke to our PM from one of Greece’s tabloids: “F— you b——!” There was also disquiet that, a decade after it closed to the public, the splendid domed Reading Room remains out of bounds.