The British Museum Lectures
Our British Museum Lectures series is a rich and collaborative programme of events with British Museum curators across our four bookshops, each accompanying a magnificent new exhibition in London. This is the British Museum - brought to your doorstep!
Upcoming Lectures:
Picasso: Printmaker
Catherine Daunt is Hamish Parker Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at the British Museum. She joins us to talk on the upcoming major forthcoming British Museum exhibition she is curating for the British Museum Picasso: printmaker, opening in November 2024.
Picasso was one of the most creative and experimental talents ever to explore the medium of print. This book charts his career as a printmaker, which was characterised by close collaboration with skilled printers, through which extraordinary artworks were produced.
Silk Roads
Sue Brunning is Curator, European Early Medieval Collections in the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory at the British Museum. She joins us to talk about Silk Roads, an exhibition she is co-curating, opening in September 2024.
The term ‘Silk Road’ conjures a range of romantic images. Camel caravans crossing desert dunes. Merchants trading silk and spices. Far-flung commerce between ‘East’ and ‘West’. The reality was far richer. Focusing on a defining period between 500 and 1000 CE, this beautifully illustrated book reimagines the Silk Roads as a web of interlocking networks linking Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Ireland, from the Arctic to Madagascar.
Previous British Museum Lectures
Michelangelo: the last decades
This exhibition ran at the British Museum between 2nd May - 28th July 24.
Tracing the final 30 years of Michelangelo's career, curator Sarah Vowles examines how the great master used art and faith to explore the common human experience of ageing in a rapidly changing world.
Legion: life in the Roman army
The Legion exhibition ran at the British Museum from the 1st February - 23rd June 24.
The scale and organisation of the Roman army was unprecedented in the ancient Western world. This book tells the story of everyday aspects of the army in the heyday of the Roman Empire – from life in a tent to the food soldiers consumed – and explains its hierarchy, roles, equipment and place in a vast multi-ethnic society divided between citizens and subjects.
Richard Abdy has been a curator of Roman coins at the British Museum for many years, with particular interest in the middle and later imperial periods of the Roman Empire.
Salon Culture in Japan: making art, 1750 - 1900.
Salon Culture is the first book to celebrate the British Museum’s rich collection of technically sophisticated artworks created as part of Japanese cultural salons in the late 18th and 19th centuries, featuring lively figures in daily life and festivals, elegant birds and flowers, ferocious animals, and lyrical landscapes.
We will be joined by Akiko Yano, Mitsubishi Corporation Curator and Rosina Buckland, Curator of the British Museum's Japanese Collections.