Alan Borg
Director
Victoria and Albert Museum
A Grand Design reveals the way in which
a great museum came into being and has grown over almost one
hundred and fifty years. It is a fascinating story, full of
extraordinary characters, great works of art, many triumphs,
and some disasters. No institution stands still, and the history
of the Victoria and Albert Museum reflects the ways in which
society, taste, perception, and scholarship have changed over
the years.
That process of growth has not stopped, and indeed this book
and the exhibition it celebrates represent just another stage
in the Museum’s continuing evolution. It is an important
stage, however, marking a revival of the V&A’s links
with some of the great museums of North America. The V&A
was influential from its earliest days in promoting the idea
that museums are engines of social improvement and education.
This was a theme taken up by many American museums, which often
looked to the V&A as a model. But this Museum’s role
as a spiritual and intellectual example for other cultural institutions
to follow was to diminish in the twentieth century, and today
we are perhaps less well known outside the United Kingdom than
we were a hundred years ago. A Grand Design will help to change
that perception and is therefore especially welcome.
All exhibitions are collaborative
ventures, both within and without the museums that present
them. In this case a very large number of the staff of the
V&A have been involved—far too many to name individually,
but I am grateful to them all. (I should like to pay particular
tribute, however, to Daniel McGrath, who took many of the
photographs for this book—including those for the cover—and
who was, tragically, killed in a car accident in December
1996.) I think all those who have worked so hard on this project
have succeeded in giving a fair portrayal of a great British
institution, but that is really for our viewers and readers
to judge. A Grand Design was first proposed by Arnold Lehman,
Director of the BMA, to my predecessor, Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll,
and the project was already far advanced when I came to the
V&A as director. The preparation of the exhibition has
been for us a useful and enjoyable exercise, not least because
of the close cooperation with our colleagues at The Baltimore
Museum of Art, especially Arnold Lehman and Brenda Richardson,
the Deputy Director. Seeing it to fruition has taught me a
lot about this Museum and given me a much better appreciation
of its amazing character. I believe A Grand Design will delight
all who see the exhibition or read this book.
Preface to the Book
Arnold L. Lehman, Director
Brenda Richardson, Deputy Director for Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art
 “The
choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
. . . To define is to exclude and negate,” wrote Ortega
y Gasset (The Modern Theme, 1923). England is a nation grounded
in tradition, a nation that has defined itself within the
boundaries of class, hierarchy, and territory. Inspired by
the model of international industrial displays at the Great
Exhibition in 1851, the institution that has since 1899 been
called the Victoria and Albert Museum was founded in 1852
as the Museum of Manufactures, an institution dedicated to
presenting the applied, or decorative, arts. The new museum’s
mission was spelled out by Henry Cole—the entrepreneur,
educator, and civil servant whose initiative and convictions
were in large part responsible for the stunningly successful
1851 Crystal Palace exhibition—in his first annual report
to the Board of Trade:
[A] Museum presents probably the only effectual means of educating
the adult, who cannot be expected to go to school like the youth,
and the necessity for teaching the grown man is quite as great
as that of training the child. By proper arrangements a Museum
may be made in the highest degree instructional. If it be connected
with lectures, and means are taken to point out its uses and
applications, it becomes elevated from being a mere unintelligible
lounge for idlers into an impressive schoolroom for everyone.1
Throughout the intervening century
and a half, the V&A (as the Museum came to be called)
has struggled with the viability and relevance of its founding
mission in relation to its ever-evolving social and cultural
context; new technologies; constantly changing audience demographics;
iconic collections—now numbering more than 4 million
objects spanning two thousand years of art in virtually every
medium—that make the V&A one of the greatest and
most comprehensive treasure houses in the world; and, not
least, the influence of the Museum’s own administrative
and curatorial staff over the years as it brought to the institution
divergent and often conflicting attitudes, expertise, and
intellectual points of view. Commenting in the 1990s on Henry
Cole’s 1850s vision, former Museum director Dame Elizabeth
Esteve-Coll wrote that
it is important to be aware, in understanding
the history of the Museum, that its educational and didactic
purposes preceded the acquisition of its collections.
It was to be a distinctive type of Museum,
oriented towards the understanding and interpretation of the
principles of design in manufactured goods, educational in
the ways that the collections were displayed, and to be enjoyed
by as broad an audience as possible.
Since the Museum was established, it
has pursued these ideals, not always with equal success. .
.2
The Victoria and Albert Museum
has been forced to struggle not simply with its frequently
splintered vision of itself, but to delineate its place within
a national culture and, more specifically, within a sociopolitical
system that often seemed to allow little flexibility or innovation.
Art and its institutional place in public life were carefully
prescribed. For decades in England objects of historical and
archaeological significance were designated for the collections
of the British Museum, as were objects defined as ethnography;
paintings considered to be of universal art historical significance
were designated for the collections of the National Gallery;
modern English paintings and sculptures were directed to the
Tate Gallery, initially administratively part of the National
Gallery; and objects of applied art went to the V&A. When
occasional messy “overlaps” or uncertain definitions
were acknowledged, groups of objects would be divided among
two or more institutions.
In Britain, “Art”
and “Science” manifested themselves in distinct
fashion that rarely caused confusion among the civil servants
who administered decisions about proper disposition of objects.
However, until very recent times, art has been much more narrowly
defined than science. Even as England brought home the riches
of empire, it discriminated among the spoils available for
looting from its colonies. England, reflecting culturally
instilled biases, actively collected “refined”
Western-style Indian sculpture, for example, while leaving
behind the “much maligned monsters” (to borrow
scholar Partha Mitter’s memorable book title on this
subject) of more characteristic Indian art in the Hindu style.
Similarly, England saw the material culture of its African
colonies as “primitive”—objects of historical
or ethnographic interest and thus “Science” rather
than “Art”—and consigned those pieces to
the British Museum or the Museum of Mankind. It must be reported
that in this latter regard American and European museum experience
is not unlike that of the V&A and other English art museums.
In the United States, too, African artifacts were most often
considered within the context of anthropology and accordingly
consigned to ethnographic museums. It was not until the 1920s
that American art museums incorporated what was then called
“primitive art” into their collections as well
as their exhibition programs (The Brooklyn Museum of Art became
the first in 1923 when it purchased 1,500 works of African
art for its collection and put many of them on public display).
The difference is that the V&A, even through the twentieth
century, never diverged from its prescribed course relative
to African art, despite Britain’s colonization of much
of that continent.
Ironically, certain key aspects
of the V&A’s character derived more directly from
practices typical of museums of history and anthropology than
from those of art museums. Founding director Henry Cole adopted
education as the overriding mission of the new South Kensington
Museum and to the present day the V&A features typological
displays adapted from ethnographic paradigms. In an art museum,
“even the most disparate and foreign objects become
contemporary and accessible”; in an ethnographic or
“natural history museum, on the other hand, all is culture-bound,
and the subjective words ‘quality’ and ‘beauty’
never grace a label. The displays are left the dull task of
providing context. . . .”3
It is all the more stunning,
then, that out of this culture of certainty sprung a museum
that has had a greater and more profound impact on museums
worldwide than any other in history. At its founding in the
mid-nineteenth century, the South Kensington Museum departed
radically from everything museums were supposed to be in that
era. In doing so, the V&A introduced the concept that
museums ought to operate in the public interest and, further,
promulgated the conviction that objects within the museum
should—and could—convey educational benefit, enjoyment
for the populace, and even (by displaying the best industrial
design as exemplars of the genre) the means to economic reward.
This then revolutionary mission is today shared by nearly
every museum in North America and, indeed, by most major museums
throughout the world.
The Baltimore Museum of Art was incorporated in 1914 on essentially
the same founding principles as those that define “the
South Kensington ideal.” The BMA’s articles of
incorporation cite the new museum’s five official purposes:
(a) The establishing and maintaining
. . . of a Museum and Library of Art. (b) The encouraging
and promoting of the study and enjoyment of the fine and industrial
arts. (c) The application of art to manufactures and to practical
life. (d) The furnishing of instruction to the public in regard
to the foregoing subjects by means of exhibitions and lectures.
. . . (e) The receiving of gifts or loans of objects of Art
. . . to be used for the foregoing purposes. . . .
Though stopping short of citing
the Victoria and Albert Museum in its charter—as several
other American museum charters in fact do—it is clear
that the South Kensington approach was known to and appreciated
by the BMA’s incorporators. Like those who organized
new art museums from Boston to Bombay, Baltimore’s founders
too looked to the Victoria and Albert Museum as a lodestar
of educational innovation and enlightened public interest.
This is a moment in the history
of museums when our most fundamental purposes as public institutions
are being questioned and occasionally undermined. In the last
decade of the twentieth century certain of our greatest museums
have seen their missions and integrity compromised by extra-institutional
sociopolitical agendas and “community standards.”
It has become nearly impossible for mainstream American museums,
at least, to take on historically sensitive subjects, whether
black slavery, gay activism, Japanese internment, or U.S.
military initiatives. David Lowenthal, the distinguished English
scholar of social sciences, recently commented on cultural
critic Louis Menand’s representation that “When
[subcultures] acquire official patronage, they’re on
the way to the museum.” Lowenthal promptly responded
in a published letter, “But museums are not morgues;
as the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay fracas showed, they are
prime foci of partisan action.”4
It is precisely this reality
of the museum as an arena of partisan action that A Grand
Design addresses. The selection, presentation, and publication
of art and artifacts by museums are expressions of specific
points of view. Each such expression represents a choice,
and each point of view defines one thing while it excludes
and negates something (or everything) else. This reality is
not commonly understood by the museum-going public, which
generally sees the museum’s choices as something approaching
acts of God or, at the least, as driven by absolute and objective
standards.
To make this reality of museums
as fields of “partisan action” tangible to a broad
audience—to bring the issues into the public arena for
thoughtful consideration and lively dialogue—requires
an institutional subject prepared to be dissected, with each
of its choices, whether historical or contemporary, put under
a magnifier. The Victoria and Albert Museum is an ideal subject:
home to great collections acquired, for diverse and ever-evolving
reasons, over a century and a half; vast archives documenting
specific actions over that same period; a commitment to intellectual
rigor; a staff eager to advance understanding of the V&A’s
history as a means to better understand the meanings, influence,
and implications of museums worldwide; and a willingness to
engage in candid dialogue about the full spectrum of the Museum’s
actions, whether those actions in retrospect appear to have
been foresighted or retrograde, informed or uninformed, benign
or malevolent.
Aware of the seminal role played
by the V&A in the formation and ideology of museums of
fine and applied arts internationally—along with the
knowledge that this unique and complex institution had built
over its century and a half one of the most exceptional collections
in the world—it seemed not just worthwhile but potentially
important to present and publish a broad selection from the
V&A’s collections that might serve to crystallize
the central issues that face all art museums today. Such a
presentation would also acquaint a much enlarged public in
North America about this great museum, its influential history,
and its dazzling collections.
The format for A Grand Design
took shape only over a period of years, ultimately assuming
a thematic structure designed to reveal layers of collection
development from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Each of six sections focuses on one thematic aspect of choices
made by this uniquely complex Museum: (1)“The Great
Exhibition and the Industrial Ideal” addresses the idealistic
goals of the V&A’s founders—most especially
the Museum’s first director Henry Cole—to present
industrial arts as a means of improving national design standards
among manufacturers and working classes; (2) “Teaching
by Example” talks about the fundamental—and then
revolutionary—concept promulgated at the South Kensington
Museum that art objects can be used to educate a broad public;
(3) “An Encyclopedia of Treasures” focuses on
the era when the museum’s profoundly influential first
curator, Superintendent of Art Collections John Charles Robinson,
brought great treasures of Italian Renaissance art into the
Museum’s collections, and the implications of the “encyclopedic
schoolroom” becoming a “treasure house”;
(4) “The Engagement with the Orient” candidly
scrutinizes the politics of empire, colonialism, and racism
as it impacted decision making at the Museum; (5) “The
Idea of ‘Englishness’” looks at the V&A’s
renewed consideration in the early twentieth century of national
heritage and the importance of collecting major works of British
art; and (6) “Collecting the Twentieth Century”
addresses the delicate matter of engaging with contemporary
artists and craftspeople and collecting the art of our own
time (art whose significance and merit are as yet untested
by the passage of years).
The Victoria and Albert Museum
is called “the V&A” or “the Museum”
throughout A Grand Design even when the nomenclature is anachronistic.
The Museum was founded in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures
(at Marlborough House), renamed the Museum of Ornamental Art
in 1853, opened as the South Kensington Museum in 1857, and
renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum on 17 May 1899 by Queen
Victoria (b. 1819; reigned 1837–1901) in her last official
public appearance. A tribute to her beloved consort Prince
Albert (1819–1861), the name has led to confusion about
the Museum’s identity among the public, many of whom
are said to visit the V&A in the belief that it houses
the personal collection of Victoria and Albert. In fact, the
V&A’s collections of more than 4 million objects
are drawn from two thousand years of cultural history, and
include ceramics, metalwork, jewelry, furniture and woodwork,
sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, prints, and rare
and illustrated books. The Baltimore Museum of Art is extremely
proud to join in partnership with the Victoria and Albert
Museum to present A Grand Design in North America and, by
the year 2000, in the United Kingdom as well.
| Footnotes |
| 1. |
V&A,
1991, p6. |
| 2. |
Ibid. |
3.
|
Lyle Rexer,”Art
for Science’s Sake Is a Whole Other Story,”
The New York Times, 21 July 1996, p28. |
| 4. |
David Lowenthal,
letter published in “The Mail,” The New
Yorker, 17 February 1997, p10. |
|
