Report from Europe

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Miriam Kramer

This month a museum within a museum opens in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum's British Galleries, five years in the planning, will welcome their first visitors on November 22. The galleries display all aspects of British design from 1500, when Henry VII was king, to 1900, when Queen Victoria reigned. From opening day onwards there will no longer be an admission charge to the entire Victoria and Albert Museum.

The last major overhaul of the British collection was undertaken after World War II under the directorship of Leigh Ashton. The works were then installed in what were called the English Primary Galleries, and the method of display was radical because, for the first time, objects of different types were displayed together. Previously, objects in different mediums were not shown side by side even though they were contemporaneous. The English Primary Galleries were among the first in a major museum to integrate categories of objects.

The planning and implementation of the British Galleries were overseen by Christopher Wilk, a curator and writer with degrees from Vassar College and Columbia University. He worked in the decorative arts department of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City beginning in 1983, and in 1988 joined the Victoria and Albert Museum as assistant keeper in charge of twentieth-century furniture. Two years later he was appointed chief curator in the department of furniture and woodwork, and in 1996 he began work on the British Galleries project. The budget was [pound] 31 million of which [pound] 16 million came from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The philosophy behind the British Galleries, according to Wilk, is to show a history of taste. As he phrased it, around 1500 "England was on the fringes of creativity If you wanted to know about innovative design you had to go to Rome, to the Low Countries, possibly to France. By the eighteenth century Britain was exporting ideas, designs, and wares by such innovators as Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Chippendale, and by 1900 we were at the center of everything."

In effect, according to Wilk, the display presents style and innovation in interiors maintained by royalty, the church, the nobility, the gentry, and eventually the middle class. There is a great emphasis on textiles, which Wilk points out were often very important in relative value. A set of bed hangings, for example, could have cost as much as the amount spent on all the rest of the furnishings in the house.

Not surprisingly, given the origin of the museum, the nineteenth-century collections are impressive. As Wilk says, "We have the greatest collection of Victorian work in the wodd, and we were part of the creation of taste in Victorian times. Many displays came straight here from the Crystal Palace [the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London]."

The display of period rooms in the British Galleries marks another departure. The floors in the rooms are historically correct, and the rooms have four walls rather than the usual three, which Wilk feels "gives a greater sense of reality" For greater ac curacy the ceiling from the actor David Garrick's house, designed by Robert Adam, will be shown with objects designed by Adam but not set off by conjectural walls made by joiners on the museum's staff, as it has been for the past fifty years.

Wilk is passionate about explanations in the British Galleries, and labels are often supplemented by audio or video narratives For example, next to a gilt vessel a video shows the process of gilding, and adjacent to a desk that looks like a chest of drawers is another video in which the desk is opened step-by-step so the visitor sees how it functions. Audio presentations relate contemporary accounts relevant to the object on view. Wilk emphasizes that these audio and video additions do not oversimplify the display "We are exploring new kinds of interpretation, which are designed to get people to look and engage with the object," he affirms.

"These galleries are intellectually challenging, and we never forget that surveys have shown that thirty-eight percent of our visitors have post-graduate degrees but they are nor decorative art specialists."

The British Galleries occupy about thirty-four hundred square meters of space on two floors. This is about twenty-five percent more floor space than there was in the English Primary Galleries. Of the three thousand objects currently on view only ninety have been borrowed from other British institutions. The rest are from the museum's collection and about two-thirds of them have never before been displayed. The corner galleries on both floors are study areas. Each of the upper study areas has an oculus in the floor revealing its counterpart below.

The other architectural changes made to realize the British Galleries were designed by Alastair Gourlay of GA Associates. Dinah Casson of Casson Mann designed the layout of the galleries as well as new display cases and a variety of interpretive elements such as videos showing the object on display in use or being made. David Mlinaric of Mlinaric, Henry and Zervaduchi served as the consultant on historic decoration. He advised on the historically appropriate color scheme for all the galleries as well as on the redecoration of the five complete period rooms.