We need to talk about the Bayeux Tapestry show and its billionaire sponsor

It first comes into view, spotlit amid hallowed gloom, from a raised platform. We then descend some stairs to meet it head-on. Even before you sink into the dramatic events it depicts, the tension is almost unbearable. And up close, it is spellbinding; you daren’t miss a single detail. The Bayeux Tapestry is here, at the British Museum. Its arrival is a diplomatic coup; the exhibition is a curatorial and scholarly triumph. And yet the museum has contrived to tarnish what should be its finest hour; yet again, questions must be asked about the BM’s governance and fundraising.

First, the good stuff. The display of the 11th-century embroidery (the word tapestry is inaccurate and relates to the French word tapisserie for any kind of textile hanging) works beautifully. After a short preamble, setting the scene and introducing the main characters, we make the journey down into the long gallery housing the tapestry, which lies flat in a glass vitrine, its full 70 metres along one wall. In case, like me, you can’t follow the pithy Latin inscriptions (sample: “Here King Edward, in bed, is addressing his faithful companions/And here he is dead”), animations on screens above the tapestry highlight the key moments leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the advent of the Norman Conquest. 

Your guide in these animations is one of the birds from the tapestry, who notionally takes the role as a pacemaker, ushering you briskly along the length of the work for the museum’s preferred duration: 40 minutes. This is hopelessly optimistic; you’ll need at least double that to see it properly. So I suspect the museum may have difficulty with bunching crowds, especially for the opening sequences – you simply can’t see this work from behind a five-deep throng as you might in a more conventional show. One bum note is the soundtrack: an ambient drone along with which one half-expects to hear whale calls. Why are some museums so afraid of silence?

That is my sole quibble: everything else is pitch-perfect. It is at once a thrillingly entertaining and solemn experience. The ultimately seismic events of the central frieze are, of course, its main attraction. But the details of the upper and lower borders, from fantastical, heraldic, agricultural and domestic beasts to small anecdotes of everyday 11th-century life are just as gripping. I found myself profoundly aware of the people, most probably women, who stitched the embroidery, those whose spit eased the spinning of the linen on which it is stitched. We feel like the designer of the tapestry and the women that made it, probably in 1070s Canterbury, saw or heard of the terrible things it depicts and felt them viscerally. The piles of bodies and dismembered heads and limbs that fill the frieze and sink into the lower border, and the final scenes of corpse-looting and naked cadavers and severed limbs left on the battlefield, leave no doubt about the brutality of the battle and suggest the rawness and loss felt by those who lived to tell the tale. 

The events that marked the exhibition’s opening, attended by Emmanuel Macron and Andy Burnham as well as King Charles, recognise the scale of an achievement that until recently seemed unthinkable. They also mark what Charles describes twice in his foreword in the catalogue as an “entente amicale” between France and Britain. It is welcome evidence of the thawing of relations between the two nations, and between the UK and Europe more widely, after the wrecking-ball attitude of successive Conservative governments. At the opening, the king and Nicholas Cullinan, the museum’s director, both made stirring comments about the significance of the tapestry’s loan to London from Normandy. Charles described it as “a precious symbol of trust, at a time when trust seems sadly to be in short supply between nations”. Cullinan wrote on Instagram of the tapestry’s presence in the museum as “an astonishing testament to what becomes possible when two nations choose partnership over rivalry, generosity over suspicion, and the long view over the short one. We all need much more of this – more trust, more goodwill, more collaboration, more in common and more hope”. 

I couldn’t agree more. And this should be an unmitigated triumph. But there are lingering, inescapable, questions about the museum’s funding that leave a sour taste beneath the thrill of the tapestry show and the bonhomie of the diplomacy. On 31 August, the Guardian splashed on the news that Peter Thiel, the Donald Trump- and JD Vance-supporting co-founder of the tech company Palantir, which has provided services to ICE and the Israeli military, got a VIP preview of the tapestry ahead of the big opening ceremony. 

The museum has not commented on the claims, but reports suggest that Thiel was shown around by Charlotte Appleyard, the BM’s head of development. I can think of no reason why Appleyard would do so without the prospect that Thiel would be funding the museum in some form. Which is why his VIP visit has raised alarm bells. 

But even if the museum receives not one penny from Thiel, there is plenty of cause for concern about the individuals for whom it is laying out the red carpet. Glance at the website for the exhibition, at the posters, banners and hoardings outside, and you’ll see a name alongside and at equal scale to those of the British Museum and the French government: Igor Tulchinsky. The exhibition, we are told, is “presented by” Tulchinsky, who is the Belarusian-born billionaire founder of WorldQuant, a hedge fund and “quantitative asset management firm” and who has sponsored the exhibition to the tune of £5m. 

The British Museum has really gone to bat for Tulchinsky, beyond the usual sponsor treatment, like the prominence of his logo on all the exhibition materials and the expected thanks and sponsor’s foreword in the catalogue. In the foyer of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition is a newly commissioned portrait of him by the British painter Jonathan Yeo, who you may remember from that scarlet portrait of King Charles that became most famous for its depiction of his “sausage fingers”. At the Art Business Conference in London this week, Charlotte Appleyard from the BM hosted a “keynote” conversation with Tulchinsky. 

Who is Tulchinsky? First, some detail on his hedge fund. Among WorldQuant’s most recent ventures, as reported in April by Israeli financial news organisation Calcalist, is the creation of an “innovation lab” in Israel called WorldQuant Genesis. The report states that the venture capital fund will seek out research companies “combining AI, robotics, and biotechnology”. WorldQuant Genesis is run by Saar Tzur, a former commander of the Northern Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and has reportedly already invested in Navairo, an Israeli defence-tech startup.  

In an interview in March for a Jerusalem Post  podcast, in which he wears a baseball cap that he says was given to him by the terrorism unit of the IDF’s special forces, Tulchinsky discusses how, in the aftermath of the Hamas massacres on 7 October 2023, he “was helping the [Israeli] army financially.” Asked to elaborate, he replied: “I gave them money, and they did whatever.” What they did, in Gaza, in the weeks and months that followed, has been described by The United Nations independent international commission of inquiry, by leading genocide scholars, by various humanitarian organisations and by numerous nation states as a genocide. 

Then there is Tulchinsky’s support for Trump and the Republican National Committee in the US. He has made donations to the tune of several hundred thousand pounds to the latter (and, to be fair, smaller amounts to some Democratic candidates and political action committees (PACs)). But by far his standout donation, as listed by the Federal Election Commission,is a $1m donation in March last year to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. 

Even as I write this, the Trump administration is engaged in a sustained assault on the scholarly freedom and independence of museums, and particularly the part-federally-funded Smithsonian Institution, based in Washington DC. A report published on 4 July by the White House described the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as having been captured by “radical, activist ideology” and that it “consistently denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians, and Americans in educational materials and programming”. Later, Trump signed an executive order that ordered signage to be placed outside the museum correcting “inaccurate information presented in the museum”. 

This is the tip of the iceberg of the US president’s interference into cultural institutions in the US. When Tulchinsky writes, in the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition catalogue, that “education was, and remains, at the heart of it all”, does he not see the glaring disjunction with the anti-educational and censoring policies of a man whose campaign he has funded to the tune of a million dollars? 

The billionaire’s support is part of a pattern of dubious fundraising ethics at the museum, about which concerns have grown over the past decade. Much has already been said about its recent acceptance of a £50m donation from BP, a company most other museums have cut ties with due to concerns about fossil fuels and the climate emergency. That the museum’s chair is George Osborne, the former chancellor and architect of a period of austerity that led to the closure of around 800 libraries in the UK, offers little hope of progression in this regard. 

Was there really no better funder for the admittedly huge cost of the tapestry project? This is the museum event of the decade, possibly the century so far. It has garnered a deluge of publicity and anticipation, some of the most ecstatic reviews I’ve ever read from the critics. Are we really to believe that a more ethical partner, whether individual or corporate, would not have jumped at the chance to be involved? 

Of course, this is an enormously difficult, complex funding environment for cash-strapped museums. I am not naively or puritanically suggesting that cultural institutions should discount donors with conservative leanings: only that they adopt  policies that bear a close relation to the values expressed in their mission statements. Some commentators think an ethical approach to funding is pointless, that bad people have always supported culture: “Look at the Medici in the Renaissance”, they cry. But this is a canard. If you didn’t do what the Medici and their ilk in Renaissance Italy ordered, they might have you killed. Titian had to ask for a safe-conduct before travelling to Ferrara because he feared the Duke of Ferrara might murder him due to a delay in delivering his paintings. 

No one is holding a gun to the British Museum’s head to accept funding from Tulchinsky: it is a choice. And it is a choice that runs counter to those virtues Cullinan described in relation to the partnership with France – generosity, goodwill, trust, collaboration and hope – not to mention the deep humanity that is inherent in the tapestry and its brutal evocation of the reality of war. The governments that Tulchinsky supports are actively dismantling and destroying those precious values and right now waging wars that threaten their possibility in an increasingly unstable world.

So go to the British Museum; beg, borrow or steal a ticket. Be poised to join the online queues when the next batch is released on 21 October. It is worth the hassle. But if, like me, you care about the human values embodied by our great cultural institutions, your wonder at this marvellous spectacle might be tinged with disquiet at the people who are “presenting” it.

The British Museum and WorldQuant were approached for comment but did not respond.

Ben Luke is the Nerve’s art critic. An art historian, critic and broadcaster, he hosts the podcasts A brush with... and The Week in Art and is a contributing editor at the Art Newspaper