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Press Release British Museum Forthcoming Exhibitions 2017 Please note that exhibition titles and dates are subject to change and should be checked with the press office before publication. For images and further information please contact the Press Office on 020 7323 8394 / 8583 or [email protected]

Major exhibitions painted works done right up to his death at the age Admission charge of 90. The exhibition examines Hokusai’s personal beliefs through major paintings, drawings, The American Dream: pop to present woodblock prints and illustrated books – many 9 March – 18 June 2017 never seen before in the UK. Hokusai continued to use landscape and wave imagery as a major The Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery subject during his later years, but his interest in nature, in exploring the mutability and minutiae of Sponsored by Morgan Stanley all phenomena in his art, was increasingly tied to a Supported by the Terra Foundation for American spiritual quest. Art Treasures of the Scythians (title TBC) This spring the British Museum will stage the first 14 September 2017 - 14 January 2018 major exhibition on modern and contemporary The Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery American printmaking, The American Dream: pop to present will trace the creative momentum in The Scythians were one of the great nomadic American art over the past five decades – from the civilisations of antiquity. First mentioned by the moment Pop art burst onto the New York and West Assyrians in the ninth century BC, admired by Coast scenes in the early 1960s to the rise of Herodotus and respected enemies of the minimalism, conceptual art and photorealism. Achaemenids, they developed a powerful Using innovative techniques and with mass appeal, alternative economy which for centuries dominated the unprecedented scale, boldness and ambition of the huge region stretching from Siberia to the American printmaking was the ideal medium to Black Sea. express the USA’s power and influence, as well as This exhibition includes royal Scythian tombs in dealing with explosive issues such as race, AIDS, Siberia and Kazakhstan and shows objects of and feminism. exceptional beauty which would not normally survive. They include multi-coloured rugs, fur-lined The exhibition will feature works by artist such as garments and accessories, unique horse Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Kara Walker, headgear, beautiful gold objects and much more. Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. This exhibition is based on exceptional loans, mostly from the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave includes new archaeological discoveries and 25 May – 13 August 2017 scientific discoveries. Room 35

Supported by Mitsubishi Corporation

This exhibition focuses on the last thirty years of Japan’s most renowned artist’s, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), career from around 1820 to 1849. It features a broad selection of works - from Faith and Society (title TBC) the iconic print ‘Great Wave’ of c. 1831, to sublime 2 November 2017 – 18 April 2018 Room 35 bring the story up to the present day. The redisplay will allow the Museum to add new types of objects Faith and society is the fourth collaborative project to the gallery such as paintings and textiles which between the British Museum BBC, and Penguin. need regulated conditions for display. These will This exhibition will look at what objects reveal complement the existing types of objects on show, about the role and expression of beliefs in the lives such as sculpture, ceramics, lacquer, jade and of individuals and communities through time and metal ware. Updated interpretation, new lighting around the world. It will show that ever since the and design will allow this extraordinarily rich emergence of our own fully modern human species collection to be better seen and understood by the over 100,000 years ago, people have expressed Museum’s seven million annual visitors. beliefs in a mixture of ideas and actions usually focused on supernatural entities in the search for New exhibitions and displays the meaning of life. Free admission

Objects will reflect the need to symbolise feelings Places of the Mind: British watercolour beyond words and reveal familiar and recurrent landscapes 1850–1950 human concerns about the passage of life from 23 February – 27 August 2017 conception to death and sometimes beyond. Room 90 Beliefs support natural human desires for good health, happiness, security, hope, comfort, identity, Exhibition supported in memory of Melvin R Seiden protection and power to such an extent that the Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes project might ask whether our species should be 1850–1950 will display a selection of stunning known as Homo religiosus rather than Homo works from the British Museum’s rich collection of sapiens. A radio series and book by Neil Prints and Drawings, over half of which have MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, never previously exhibited or published, to will accompany the exhibition. examine the ways artists interpreted landscape on paper during the Victorian and early Modern The South Asia Season 2017 period. It is the first exhibition to focus on The British Museum’s South Asia Season 2017 landscape drawing during this era and explores the brings together different strands of activity to idea that each work is a construct of the mind and celebrate the 70th anniversary of Indian imagination of the artist - an attempt to convey not independence and UK cultural ties. The season merely the physical properties of a landscape but includes: two spotlight tours, one of an important its sense of place. The 125 watercolours and sculpture of Ganesha, the other on the theme of drawings on display range from highly coloured, The music of courtly India to selected UK venues; detailed Pre-Raphaelite attempts to follow John An Object Journeys display at Manchester Ruskin’s precepts to ‘go to nature’, to sweeping Museum, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the continuing development of the joint British wash sketches painted on the spot by James Museum/ Manchester Museum South Asia McNeill Whistler and Philip Wilson Steer, to the partnership gallery and long term loans to Devon abstractions from reality of artists like Graham and Durham. Sutherland and Henry Moore who followed a different aesthetic. Gallery opening The Joseph E Hotung Gallery for China and Where the Thunderbird lives: cultural resilience South Asia on the Northwest Coast of North America (title November 2017 TBC) 23 February – 27 August 2017 Room 91 The British Museum will reopen the Joseph E Hotung Gallery for China and South Asia in The Peoples of the Northwest Coast of North November 2017. The new display will include a America have one of the longest cultural new narrative for China and South Asia which will continuities in the Americas. With over 8,000 years of cultural, linguistic and genetic resilience these Hadrian and his lover Antinous, the display looks thriving societies provide lessons for us all in a beyond Europe’s classical past to explore less changing world. Utilising one of the most famous familiar themes and stories. and recognisable art traditions in the world, this exhibition will consider how peoples relationships This exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary with each other and the world around them are of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in July contained within the objects they make. The 1967. This legislation partially decriminalised evocative and powerful masks capturing the origins homosexuality in England and Wales and marks of belief systems, the form-line designs that an important milestone in the campaign for encode the family lineages and clan histories of equality. great leaders, these are objects which demonstrate how Northwest Coast material heritage continues The Print before Photography (title TBC) to shape the way people relate to their world and 21 September 2017 – 28 January 2018 conceive of their past, present, and future. Room 90

Bringing together for the first time objects from the People are now so used to the deluge of Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a, photographically-derived imagery of the modern Tsimshian, Salish, Nuu Chah Nulth and Makah world that it is difficult to imagine when every communities covering thousands of years of pictorial image had to be designed by someone Northwest Coast Art, this exhibition highlights the and cut by a craftsman onto a copper plate or cultural resilience of these peoples. Where the wooden block using no mechanical aids. These Thunderbird Lives will show how the Peoples of were then printed by a different expert and the Northwest Coast of North America can provide distributed by printsellers to buyers around the an inspiration for all cultures seeking to hold on to whole of Europe, a period which lasted from their identity and preserve their way of life in a around 1400 to 1850. It was a huge business, globally connected world. which gave work to thousands of people, and the exhibition will reveal some of the complexities of A Little Gay History (title TBC) the process, the varied nature of the prints May 2017 - October 2017 themselves, and the ways in which buyers used or Room 69a collected them. The exhibition follows the publication by the British Museum of a book with Supported by Stephen and Julie Fitzgerald the same title.

This display provides glimpses into LGBTQ The currency of Communism (title TBC) (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer) 26 October 2017 – May 2018 experience across time and around the world Room 69a through the British Museum’s collection. The objects offer insights into to what the novelist E. M. Supported by the Art Fund Forster described as ‘a great unrecorded history’. This exhibition, coinciding with the centenary of the Ranging chronologically from ancient history to the Russian Revolution, explores how communist present day the objects often prompt questions, states radically re-structured their economies to challenging the contemporary viewer to question reflect Marxist ideology. Communist regimes have the assumptions that they bring to objects from been established all over the world, leaving a rich other cultures and the more distant past. The visual record of life under the planned economy. display draws on material from across the breadth The display looks at all aspects of the monetary of the Museum’s collection including coins, medals, system, from the coins and banknotes issued by and prints. As well as highlighting famous figures the state, to barter, voucher systems and the black such as the poetess Sappho, and the emperor market. The Asahi Shimbun Displays Amaravati Sculptures reopening in November Room 3 2017. The collection forms the single most Room 3 sits just inside the Museum’s main important group of Indian sculptures outside the entrance and hosts a series of free, regularly subcontinent. changing displays focused on a single object or theme. The series is supported by the Asahi The Asahi Shimbun Displays Shimbun. Stepping into Britain (title TBC) 14 September – 12 November 2017 Room 3 The Asahi Shimbun Displays Japanese Woodblock Printing (title TBC) Stepping into Britain will explain the evidence of 16 March - 28 May 2017 northern Europe’s earliest settlers from the Room 3 remarkable discovery of human footprints on the This display will explore the little known but finely Norfolk coast at Happisburgh. Dating to nearly a tuned processes—the precision craftsmanship – million years ago, they show a small family group that lay behind the making of a traditional colour pausing at the edge of an estuary on an ancient woodblock print. The focus will be a full-colour course of the River Thames. The footprints were triptych print by the leading artist Utagawa only visible for two weeks before destruction by the Kunisada, which shows a rare depiction of women tides, but stone tools with animal and plant remains enacting the stages by which a print was made. have survived. The display will show how humans This triptych, published in 1857, helps us to were competing with hyaena for the grazing herds visualise the accumulated wisdom of more than of deer, elk, horse and mammoth. As the first two centuries of print-making during the Edo period pioneers in northern Europe, they were pushing (1600-1868). the boundaries of human endeavour, trying to find new ways to survive the long, cold winters. The Asahi Shimbun Displays Amaravati Sculpture (title TBC) 22 June – 20 Aug 2017 Exhibitions at other venues in the UK Room 3

Throughout 2017 the British Museum will be This display will focus on the Great Shrine at touring exhibitions to venues across the country Amaravati. Founded before 200 BC, probably to through our National Programmes, supported by house a relic of the Buddha, the Great Shrine at the Dorset Foundation, in addition to contributing Amaravati in Southeast India flourished for over a loans to numerous other exhibitions and displays thousand years. Slowly abandoned sometime nationwide. Please contact the British Museum during the 14th century, by the late 18th century press office for more information. materials from the site were being recycled for new buildings and temples. In the 19th century a series British Museum International Exhibitions of archaeological campaigns recovered the surviving sculptures. Today, the pieces are shared The British Museum will be touring exhibitions to across a number of museum collections in India several international venues in 2017. Please and around the world. The British Museum houses contact the British Museum press office for more more than 120 sculptures from Amaravati, which information. are housed in the Asahi Shimbun Gallery of

For images and further information please contact the Press Office on 020 7323 8394 / 8583 or [email protected]