Alexander the Great review – cultural treasures reduced to the status of comics

British Library, London
This infuriating show shoves Scrooge McDuck next to Plutarch in a postmodern take on history which seems to forget that the Macedonian warlord was a real, live person

The problem with the British Library’s ultimately maddening trawl through medieval and modern images of Alexander the Great is there in the show’s subtitle. The Making of a Myth sounds innocuous until you discover they literally mean it. This exhibition takes such a thoroughly postmodern view of history that it tries to convince you the Macedonian warlord whose conquests linked Europe, Asia and Africa in the fourth-century BC is a figment, his life so wrapped in multiple fictions there is no truth at all to get at.

But Alexander existed. He really was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle before uniting Greece under his rule, defeating the Persian Empire and battling as far as India before dying at just 32. He founded cities called Alexandria from Egypt to Afghanistan. A new style of art, sensual and emotional, spread through the new “Hellenistic” world he created.

Continue reading...