London. Great museums are like super-tankers in that it takes them a very long time to change course. It takes the public even longer to realise that an institution may have reversed a decline.
Ever since the restructuring debacle at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1988, when traditional curatorial roles were downgraded, the role of management increased and a number of curators dismissed, the world’s leading decorative art museum has been seen as a confused, demoralised institution. Visitor figures have hovered around the million mark, when the National Gallery attracts over four million and the British Museum, nearly six. There have been a couple of disastrously misjudged exhibitions, the worst of which, “Sporting glory”, actually went bankrupt in 1993.
Perhaps most seriously of all, the V&A’s force has not been felt in international academic and museum circles. Until recently, that is. At the study-day on decorative art museums, organised in February by the Louvre, the V&A’s delegate, Michael Snodin, showed by his paper on the museum’s ornament gallery, that the V&A is thinking more deeply and responsively on the artistic language of ornament than any French museum, where the decorative arts are stuck in the nineteenth-century objets d’art categorisation. The reaction from the floor and from the newly appointed head of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Pierre Arizzoli Clementel (see this page), was that the “Anglo-Saxons” had a lot to teach everyone else, and that a major conference ought to be organised. Within the museum, things are looking up as well. The glass collection, the finest in the world after the Corning Museum, has been redisplayed for the first time in half a century by the energetic head of department, Oliver Watson, to present the 4000-year history and development of glass. By building a glass and steel mezzanine, with the study collections densely packed above, he has not only managed to get 80% of the museum’s 7000 pieces on show (including most of the twentieth-century and studio glass, previously in store), but has freed the main space for a beautifully explained thirteen-chapter history of glass through its finest examples. The effect is elegant, readable and—above all—it is the outward sign of inward thought, for which the museum has long been famous among the cognoscenti but from which the visitors have not benefited as much as they should. An excellent, unintrusive, interactive computer programme on the history and techniques of glass is available in the gallery, which opens to the public 20 April.
Another of the single material galleries, the silver collection, has just received a £500,000 donation from an English foundation that wishes to remain anonymous, and this will be matched by the Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund (the Department of National Heritage with the Wolfson Foundation) to enable the best museum collection of English silver in the world also to be redisplayed so as to reflect the modern state of research. This will be completed by 1996, under the leadership of Philippa Glanville.
Meanwhile, the head of the furniture department Christopher Wilke has launched an appeal for £3 million to redo the part of the collections which many oldtimers feel to be the heart of the museum, the English primary galleries containing the period rooms. The rooms covering 1675-1760, with such star exhibits as the Melville State bed and Grinling Gibbon’s virtuoso carving of the “Stoning of St Stephen”, are indeed very sad at present, with the dregs of a decorative scheme dating back to the early Seventies. But Mr Wilke is confident that with the recession ending and a new optimism abroad in the V&A, he will succeed.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Things are looking up'