Another new book about museums clinging on to contested objects is hardly a newsworthy event. But the publication of Alice Procter’s latest book The Whole Picture arrives at a significant moment. 



Events, outside their control, are forcing museums to re-appraise their role in a world where the Black Lives Matter movement and pressure for decolonisation involves telling the 'whole truth'.

Is the evidence in this new book just another emotional rant, a clarion call to repatriate objects, sometimes violently removed during a past colonial era? Or does it inject a strain of sensibility into a complex ideological debate? 

It's all about the latter.

As organiser of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, Procter leads ‘unofficial’ museum tours that throw a spotlight on the full story behind colonial-sourced objects in our national collections. Some consider her an iconoclast, rejecting the role of encyclopedic museums as ‘positive examples of intercultural relationships’ (which, incidentally, she does reject). 

But critics may be surprised to learn she doesn’t use this book to make an emotional rant. Nor does she use it to make demands for summary restitution. Instead, she turns out to be a rational and lucid advocate for a more balanced approach to a complex debate, concentrating her fire-power on emphasising the unspoken narrative behind some of the more contentious objects.

This doesn’t mean museums escape criticism altogether.  Setting out her case, she bemoans museums that knowingly gloss over uncomfortable events (contrasting this with the approach taken, for example, by the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.).  Also, museums that show bias while presenting themselves as apolitical and educational (naming and shaming the V&A), as well as those  continuing to justify the retention and display of mummified heads (mokomokai), on the false grounds they are ‘sources of information about human history’ (source: The British Museum).

But Procter is realistic enough to know it won’t be easy to persuade long-established institutions to change the way they present their stories. She also admits that for some disputed objects, there’s no such thing as a “perfect home”. But she still insists there’s “much to be explored in those tense and violent moments”.

Clearly, this is a message beginning to resonate. When the British Museum opened its doors to visitors again last month, it was clear they've set out to contextualise more of the contentious objects in their collection by using new ‘Collecting and Empire’ labels. Demands by Procter and others for museums to present narratives that explain not just where an object was made, but also how it was collected, from whom and under what circumstances, are beginning to bear fruit.  In a limited way.

But does re-labelling do enough to address broader issues around decolonisation and the growing clamour for removing monuments connected with slavery? Procter believes the Black Lives Matter movement helps introduce a “new layer of interpretation” to overcome the invisibility of slavery in British history, something she believes is both the most discussed and least visible element of British imperialism. She has a good point.

Here she seems to have captured the zeitgeist of a wider, growing movement. Reactions by museums and local authorities may still be too confused to consolidate behind a single strategy, but the evidence of anxiety about slavery and monuments commemorating its protagonists is all around us. 

On its re-opening, the British Museum moved a bust of Sir Hans Sloane to the security of a display cabinet (to prevent vandalism), the City of London Corporation announced a public consultation about removing or re-labelling all the monuments in the Square Mile linked to slavery and the Natural History Museum said it's considering re-naming or even removing objects in its collection that could be seen as racially offensive.

These are all important steps, but Procter is clear that museums cannot be decolonised without being completely re-invented. Social art – art created mostly by contemporary artists beyond the gallery space – has a role to play in realising this reinvention.  It can help fill gaps in our knowledge.  But audiences can be very different inside and beyond the traditional gallery or museum space, so the impact of social art on older gallery visitors will likely be more limited than she suggests.

Still, it’s a further signal that change in our museums may involve a generational shift in thinking.

Procter is right to draw attention to the growing schism emerging within the museum community.  This could be the biggest catalyst for change of all: curators and trustees with many years of front-line experience being replaced by younger curators, willing to accept de-accessioning as a necessary evolution in their responsibilities.

Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it

Published by Cassell (2020)

Photo: Portrait of an African, probably Ignatius Sancho, attributed to Allan Ramsay
Courtesy of The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter