|
| |
"The Best Mode of Extending Taste": The Origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Michael Conforti |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
From its earliest days, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (known as the South Kensington Museum until it was renamed by Queen Victoria in 1899 in memory of her late husband) was an institution dedicated to the practical and moral education of the public in the decorative and applied arts. Against a context of the history of museums in Europe, Michael Conforti traces the ideals behind the museum's establishment. |
 hen the South Kensington Museum opened in the 1850s, public education was a benignly assumed but rarely stated goal of the many organizations that called themselves museums, whether these institutions focused on paintings or objects, and whether the objects were of aesthetic, historic or scientific interest. The values of the Enlightenment had encouraged royal collections like those in Vienna and Dresden to be made publicly accessible in the last half of the eighteenth century. Dresden's collection derived from the mid-sixteenth-century Kunstkammer of Augustus the Strong. Literally translated from the German as "art room," but understood at the time as a "Cabinet of Curiosities," the Kunstkammer was a collection of objects, usually intermingling examples from art, nature and science that were seen as novel, extraordinary or wondrous. |
Dresden's was one of the first "working" or teaching collections, with areas provided to allow the king's craftsmen to work with its tools or study its holdings. Providing objects to bolster the royal image was the ultimate purpose of this training opportunity. Similarly, in 1708 when the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz advised Russia's Peter the Great to create a public collection "as a means to perfect the arts and sciences," Peter eventually embraced the idea with the words, "I want the people to look and learn." The ultimate goal of the St. Petersburg Kunstkammer, however, like that of its earlier Dresden counterpart, was to advance the level of craft production at Peter's ambitiously Westernizing court. |
The political value of a public display of art also drove the founding in Paris of the most influential museum of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Louvre. In the spirit of the democratic ideals of the Revolution, the French royal collections were made available to all French citizens. The Louvre displays were not only splendiferous, but, like a handful of German collections of the time, were installed chronologically and by national school, with French painting maintaining a special pride of place. This politically purposeful bow to the pedagogical goals of the Enlightenment was expressed in French attitudes toward the useful arts and trades as well. The government-sponsored École des Arts Décoratifs, an organization that still operates today, was founded in Paris in 1762 to train artists to work in industry. This institution in turn led to a regular series of exhibitions of industrial arts from 1798 on; and, in the wake of the Revolution, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was established, a museum of industrial art that collected objects and explained their construction and use. |
By the opening years of the nineteenth century, a number of industrial training schools, societies and collections of the "useful arts" had been established on the Continent. While they would sometimes later be incorporated into a city's South Kensington-style applied arts museum, as often as not they remained separate from the larger effort. England's privately organized study and support group, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, had begun in 1754. Open to both men and women from its founding, it regularly awarded prizes for exceptional work or deeds, and is still in existence today. Prince Albert was elected the Society's president in 1843. He met and was impressed by Henry Cole at Society meetings, some of which were convened to help organize the Great Exhibition of 1851. Albert's presence gave the Society new energy, for it had gone through its weakest period in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a time when Continental countries enjoyed established and sometimes government-supported industrial arts training efforts. |
While the success of the future South Kensington Museum was ensured by the positive relationship that developed between Prince Albert and Henry Cole at the Society of Arts in the 1840s, the movement to establish Continental-style education programs in the applied arts had been initiated by a newly elected group of English reform politicians a decade earlier. Wondering how aesthetic education and industrial training might be worked into their own liberal mercantile program, they formed a parliamentary committee to investigate the problem. |
Gustav Waagen, director of the recently opened Altes Museum in Berlin, was prominent among those who testified in 1835 to this Select Committee. Its members were attracted by the reputation of Waagen's new museum, but they focused more specifically on the school of crafts and industrial arts that he oversaw. When asked about the Committee's primary purpose--what might be "the best mode of extending taste and a knowledge of the fine arts among the people generally"--Waagen replied, "accessible collections." He further suggested that the Renaissance connection between workman and artist could be restored by organized educational efforts within such collections "... by giving the people an opportunity of seeing the most beautiful objects of art in the particular branch which they follow; by having collections of the most beautiful models of furniture and of different objects of manufacture ... It is not enough, however, merely to form these collections; there must also be instruction to teach the people on what principles those models have been formed." |
Not only was it widely recognized that English art and design industries commanded little respect in the world, it was clear, too, that the museums and schools currently operating in England were not equipped to address the issue as Waagen had recommended. The National Gallery, begun in 1824, was still a private preserve for picture connoisseurs. It would not establish its reputation as an art museum until the third quarter of the century under its first formidable director, Charles Locke Eastlake. The British Museum had a decidedly academic orientation, limiting its collections, beyond ancient art, to objects of historical, scholarly or ethnographic interest. Until reforms linked to increased government subsidies were initiated in the mid-1830s, the public it embraced was primarily "the curious" among the educated classes who had to apply for tickets in order to gain entrance, then only to be led around its disorganized array of specimens at a frantic pace and often in groups of five to ten. |
The Select Committee realized that new institutions had to be established to reach its goal. A School of Design was chartered a few months after the Committee adjourned in 1836. While it initiated a collection in the 1840s, its teaching program was never considered a great success. The opportunity to address English design education arose again, however, in 1851 when, in the wake of the Great Exhibition, the School of Design was incorporated into a museum that opened at Marlborough House under the directorship of Henry Cole. |
By 1853, with the museum and school incorporated into a newly named Department of Science and Art, an organized program of lectures and classes had begun. A staff also had been appointed, including the artist Richard Redgrave, the designer Owen Jones, the erudite German expatriate architect and theoretician Gottfried Semper and the young connoisseur John Charles Robinson. The government's charge to Cole and his colleagues was the reform of art and design training in England, a reform that would ultimately improve English goods from an artistic perspective, enabling the country to compete more favorably in foreign markets. What resulted was a museum and associated teaching program brilliantly innovative in adapting that directive to a broader educational purpose, all the while remembering its given audience of artisans, designers and manufacturers. |
From 1857, Cole's Museum at its South Kensington site became the most imitated and programmatically influential museum of the late nineteenth century. During its first 25 years of operation, the South Kensington Museum's commercially driven mission came to be inextricably integrated with contemporary social ideals associated with the belief in a practical, even moral, education for the working classes through their collective experience of art. This, in turn, had somewhat surprising results in the collections that were formed during the Museum's earliest years, a period when it virtually cornered the European market on important medieval and Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts. |
The scope and ambition of the enterprise created huge audiences of domestic and foreign visitors, resulting in the widely held perception of the Museum's extraordinary success in reaching its goals. Importantly, this perception endured longer abroad than at home. Indeed, the Museum spent much of the last two decades of the nineteenth century extracting itself from charges of confusion of purpose arising, on the one hand, from conflicts between its government-mandated mission and the wide variety of collections it often was forced to display and, on the other hand, the staff's broad and experimental way of articulating the institution's exhibition and training program. It could even be argued that the legacy of this history of divergent expectation and reality affects the Museum to this day. |
This story is an extract from pages 25-28 of "The Idealist Enterprise and the Applied Arts," by Michael Conforti, in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, edited by Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson, published by V&A Publications. The exhibition "A Grand Design" was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum. © The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997. |
|
| |
