A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and: Photography, An Independent Art: Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum 1839-1996 (review)

Like an old dowager, the Victoria and Albert Museum is a formidable presence in London, its staid appearance offering no hint of the Museum’s varied history nor of the challenges that this venerable institution faces today. Perhaps it is the new millennium that has spurred on the V & A to take stock of its founding mission, assess the state of its vast and rich collection, and produce these two comprehensive, handsomely illustrated catalogues of interest both to students of museology and afficionados of the institution.

In association with the Baltimore Museum of Art, the V & A offered a sampling of its collections through the traveling exhibition “A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum” and its companion catalogue of the same name. A legacy of the exhibition, the catalogue also makes an important contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on museum histories. In describing the “reality of museums as fields of ‘partisan action’” (12), Arnold L. Lehman, director of the V & A, and Brenda Richardson, former deputy director for art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, set the hard-boiled tone for A Grand Design. Whereas the V & A beckons the public to its labyrinthine galleries to forget the banality of daily life, Lehman and Richardson remind the reader that all aspects of the museum—from the selection of objects to the way they are exhibited—result from choices made by directors, curators, and donors, as well as from England’s constantly changing political, social, and economic climate.

A Grand Design proposes to trace three broad thematic strands informing the V & A’s collection and its modus operandi: provenance (including the reasons for acquiring particular objects); the history of displays (how objects are periodically reinterpreted); and the visitor response to the collection. The first two are successfully addressed in two sweeping historical essays, an illustrated chronology, and six narrowly focused sections with entries and introductory essays that grapple with concerns that have shaped the V & A from its founding as the South Kensington Museum in 1852 to today. The third strand—the visitor’s response—is traditionally more difficult to gauge and hardly discussed in this catalogue.

The V & A set the standard for the modern museum, especially for museums in North America, because it promoted itself as an institution for the masses with an educational mandate. As the South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899), the institution promoted an unabashedly didactic program to educate the public through art and to elevate the standard of wares by presenting the finest objects from Europe, India, and Asia. Whereas precedent existed for such a pedagogical mission (the British Institution and the National Gallery were both founded with the same stated purpose), the V & A evolved from the School of Design (chartered in 1836) and a small teaching collection. Americans followed suit with cultural committees in New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island, among other states, clambering to establish design schools and museums. The Women’s Centennial Commission of Rhode Island established the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877, hoping a “good School of Design with a subsidiary Gallery of Art [. . .] would benefit all classes and both sexes as the experience of English schools had already proved” (38). Although the authors only briefly allude to gender issues, the fact that women’s cultural groups in America rallied for schools of design and museums that would train both men and women further supports the thesis that the V & A heralded the future.

The origins of a museum dedicated to design had its roots in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated design and technology from European nations. Organized with...