British Museum

‘Ah, the Silk Road!’ you nod, sagely. That romanticised overland route between Asia and Europe that flourished in the Middle Ages as intrepid Chinese merchants took silk over the arduous routes in the West. Camels! Deserts! Caravans! Marco Polo! In fact, as with much of history, ‘the silk road’ was somewhat made up in retrospect to describe a less tangible phenomenon. The British Museum’s new exhibition Silk Roads contains little in the way of first person accounts of adventurous journeys from one end of the world to the other, because a few intrepid explorers aside, this simply wasn’t a thing that happened. Instead the silk road of myth was the sum of myriad trading networks – of everything, not just silk – between Japan, north-east Europe and West Africa. Was the sixth century bronze Buddha unearthed on the Swedish island of Helgo in 1958 directly traded there by a wandering salesman from present day Pakistan, where it was forged? Probably not, but the two were sufficiently interlinked by trade that its presence is perfectly explicable. Camels were involved at times, but so, more prosaically, were boats – some of the best preserved items in the exhibition are mass produced Chinese crockery made for the export market, retrieved from an ancient shipwreck in 1998. What Silk Roads is great at is conjuring an image of a Dark Ages that was far from dark, a teeming, interconnected world in which cultures were shaped by nascent religions – Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, weird offshoots

No object is just an object: everything is a symbol. And in Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s excellent exhibition of items from the British Museum’s endless archives and stores, every object is a symbol of power, dominance and exploitation. Locke (who recently filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with a kaleidoscopic carnival) spent two years digging through the stores, finding maps, photos, sculptures and artefacts that tell countless clashing stories of empire, countless narrative threads. There’s the beautiful Queen Mother Idia mask that Locke uses to symbolise African culture, a golden replica of a British machine gun used to slaughter opposing armies, sculptures of sacred beings carved by Amerindian natives of Jamaica. Locke’s own masked figures sit above all the display cabinets, watching, protecting, judging and celebrating the death of empire. But the show isn’t a straightforward narrative. It’s complex. There’s a huge Medieval English ewer jug that was prized by the Asante court but looted back to Britain in 1895, there’s a canon traded to the Benin army by the Portuguese and then stolen 350 years later by the British, there’s a vast portrait of Queen Victoria wearing the enormous koh-i-noor diamond, which was stolen from the Sikhs in 1849, who in turn stole it from the Durrani Empire, who stole it from the Afsharid dynasty, who stole it from the Mughals. Power is not linear, and it’s not eternal, but its symbols survive. There’s so much shocking, harrowing dea

Picasso never stopped. He was relentless, prolific, voracious. He apparently produced 50,000 artworks in his lifetime, including thousands of paintings, countless drawings, tons of ceramics and – as this show at the British Museum proves – a vast amount of prints. They were just another way he expressed himself, another medium for him to try. This chronological show takes you from his early etchings in Paris to his final linocuts in Vallauris. Along the way it touches on every aspect of his long, wild life. The earliest etchings are dark, troubled, manic things. A family huddles in a barren field, a fragile couple shares some scraps of bread (an image you might have seen at the RA’s ‘Picasso and Paper’ show in 2020), a woman peers out of the shadows. All the pain, poverty and anguish (and plenty of the ideas and compositions) of his Blue Period are transmuted into grey and black, but in rougher, less assured form than his paintings. When it clicks, it’s Picasso at his freest, funnest, loosest. That’s because throughout his life, printmaking was a chance to experiment, to try out ideas without committing paint to canvas. So his moves through cubism and surrealism, his obsession with bulls and Minotaurs, his relentless simplifying of line and curve and form, all get tried out here, messed with, tested. Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes his figures are messy and poorly defined, sometimes the compositions are ugly and conflicted. But when it clicks, like it does in the orgias