Hello my name is Hugo Chapman,
I'm the Keeper of Prints and Drawings
and this is my corner.
This is where you come to look at our collection.
We have a couple of hundred works out in our galleries outside
but the bulk of our collection, somewhere between one and two million bits of paper
is accessible to everyone here in the study room.
Now obviously with between one and two million works
selecting a couple of them is rather difficult
so it's somewhat idiosyncratic choice
and I could for every day choose another one.
So behind me is a wonderful Durer engraving
and this is him carving with a burin into it into a piece of copper
I suppose this is a work that nobody had seen before
nobody before Durer,
this was a new invention of printing,
had ever made a print quite as wonderful and as beautiful as this.
That extraordinary sense of the different textures that he can get,
the softness of the cat's fur, the hardness of the bark
the luminous quality of Adam and Eve's bodies
and this is of course before the fateful moment
Eve is already poised to take that Apple from that rather wicked looking snake
and she's going to plunge us into being expelled from paradise
and if you look in the far right corner
you will see a little goat on top of a precipice
and that is a symbol of mankind poised on the precipice
which we will soon descend down.
A familiar story of mankind, I think.
And then beside it, if it's my Curator's Corner I couldn't do it without Michelangelo
otherwise I would feel bad about myself
because I did a show about him many years ago
and this is one of those drawings when I'm having a very bad day
and things seem very bleak I come and look at this drawing,
which is a black chalk study from the early 1530s
showing the Resurrection of Christ
so this is Christ after three days rising again from the tomb.
Now whether on whether or whether or not you believe in that story
I think you don't have to be a Christian you just have to have a sense of the spiritual
to get that amazing sense of Michelangelo imparts of Christ's body
which has become magically weightless as smoke
and is twisting very gently, spiraling upwards and the winding sheet
that has covered his body is is coming undone and falling into the tomb.
And while Durer's Adam and Eve is giving a sense
of the beautiful classical proportions of Adam and Eve
Michelangeloactually subverts that because, once you look at it you realise
that Christ's body is much much bigger than the soldiers around him
and he's in fact reverting to a much older tradition
where sacred bodies are bigger than human bodies.
So one gets a sense of Michelangelo's own spirituality
and his longing and yearning to be admitted into heaven.
So I think it's a very special work but of course
there are many other great things by Michelangelo here.
I think, well the reason I I love it is, is is I think that's
the imagining of weightlessness and of course you know
all of us in the twentieth century kind of know what weightlessness is like
you know we've seen astronauts bouncing around on on the moon
but for an artist to imagine what weightlessness is like
and it's just that sense of ascent but very very slow
I find utterly magical and you know it's a drawing that I go back to
and each time find something new in it
and there is there was a sort of meditative quality about it that I find very special.
So my next choice is is really to highlight the fact
that prints and drawings and indeed the British Museum in general
collects lots of work from the modern and contemporary period
but of course we're so famous for our marbles and mummies
that often that gets overlooked so to my right is this great drawing from 1968
by the American artist Philip Guston.
And Philip Guston had been a very pure abstract artist
which was the prevailing style in America
but in 1968 he began to return to figuration
and this form develops in his work which is this sort of bandaged figure
which eventually becomes a ku klux klan figure with a sort of cone-shaped hat on
and what I think is wonderful about this work
is you see that kind of form emerging so at the moment this is something like a kind of
Frankenstein figure with just the eyes
but if you follow the the dots or the dashes probably
you can see the idea that there is this triangular form sort of in in his head
and that is going to become the prevailing figure.
So this this this this kind of figure with the bandages
is at one level the kind of an everyman for Philip Guston
but at the same time has got these dark undercurrents of the Ku Klux Klan
because when he was growing up in Los Angeles
he remembered Ku Klux Klan meetings and
so that kind of suggests this sort of unpleasant racist strain in American society
and in 1968 of course America was exploding with Civil Rights
and it was a very dark year.
So there's there's many many more works by modern contemporary artists and that's really
the part of our collection that actively grows
because we have to collect the history of graphic art from the 1400s until today.
You could in a way look at the Guston figure and think about Adam and Eve by Durer
or indeed the Michelangelo figure,
you could think of his use of charcoal and look at Durer's use of charcoal,
there are so many kind of associations and that's the richness of having a graphic collection
quite so massive as ours that you're not looking just for a kind of artistic way
you're looking for what can this artwork tell us, tell future generations
about what it is to be alive today, what we're worried about, what makes us happy,
what makes us unhappy, because the artworks of the past are extraordinarily revealing about that.
Thank you very much for watching and we very much look forward to you coming
and looking at the millions of work we have available here
in the Prints and Drawings study room.
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