A Tale of Two Spice Towers

<i>Opus Anglicanum</i>: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonOctober 1, 2016–February 5, 2017Catalogue<i>English Medieval Embroidery: <i>Opus Anglicanum</i></i>Edited by Clare Browne, Glyn Davies, and M. A. MichaelNew Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016.336 pp.; 270 color ills.Cloth $75.00ISBN 9780300222005<i>The Age of <i>Opus Anglicanum</i></i>Edited by M. A. MichaelLondon: Brepols

You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonSeptember 10, 2016–February 26, 2017Catalogue<i>You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970</i>Edited by Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey MarshLondon: V&amp;A Publishing, 2016.320 pp.; 200 color ills.Cloth $60.00ISBN 9781851778911

Reviewed by: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, and: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 Kathryn Holland The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2 April–17 July, 2011; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 12 September 2011–15 January, 2012; de Young Museum, San Francisco, 8 February–17 June, 2012. Curated by Stephen Calloway (Victoria & Albert Museum) and Lynn Federle Orr (de Young Museum). The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900. Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr, eds. London: V&A Publishing, 2011. Pp. 296. $65.00 (cloth). In the pamphlet he co-wrote with William Rossetti on the Royal Academy exhibition of 1868, A. C. Swinburne declares, “No good art is unbeautiful; but much able and effective work may be, and is.” “The worship of beauty,” he states, “though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute.” He quotes Victor Hugo as an ally: “Beauty is perfect, beauty can do all things, beauty is the only thing which does not exist by halves.”1 Swinburne was writing when the doctrine of art for art’s sake was developing in opposition to conventional moral and commercial imperatives for British art and was championed by a small but growing number of artists and writers as well audiences. Billed as the first comprehensive exhibition about aestheticism, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 is a stimulating and impressive examination of the spread of the questions, principles, and productions of this movement across late-Victorian cultural fields. [End Page 659] The Cult of Beauty provides a broad view of the movement. The show asserts aestheticism’s major role in the period’s debates about how art relates to everyday experiences within and beyond the individual mind, and to substantial cultural innovation. Stencils of peacocks and William Morris patterns are projected on walls that are painted teal, sapphire, and moss; dim lighting also sets the atmosphere. A small introductory space, dominated by Frederick Leighton’s large bronze sculpture, The Sluggard (1882–85), draws the audience in with pieces from the 1870s and 1880s, the period in which public interest in aestheticism began to peak. Encompassing painting, photography, sculpture, the decorative arts, illustration and book design, fashion, and architecture, the exhibition is then split into four loosely chronological, thematic sections: “The Search for a New Beauty: 1860s,” “Art for Art’s Sake, 1860s–80s,” “Beautiful People & Aesthetic Houses: 1870s–90s,” and “Late-flowering Beauty: 1880s–90s.’” The first part of the exhibition focuses on the shifting interests of Pre-Raphaelite artists and suggests the retrospective components of this vanguard movement by highlighting Morris’s fascination with Chaucer and D. G. Rossetti’s revisioning of Dante, including Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864–70). Descriptions of Robert Buchanan’s attack on “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (led, according to Buchanan, by Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris) turn attention to some of the early public controversies around aestheticism. International influences on aesthetic productions, particularly from Japan, are well represented not only through original cobalt and white porcelain vases from the seventeenth century and the watercolors of Edward Godwin’s furniture designs (c. 1875) that were part of Japonisme, but also through paintings that illustrate the growth of the Victorian public interest in Asian material cultures, such as Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles (James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1869). The exhibition underlines the importance of cultural institutions and commercial venues for both the creation and reception of the aesthetes’ works. The rise of aestheticism from a small group of artists and productions to a distinctly public and marketed movement is linked to the establishment of the South Kensington Museum (later Victoria & Albert museum) in 1852; the sensational opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, which aimed to counter the staid Royal Academy; and the shaping of consumer taste through new interior design magazines and the sale of textiles and other items at Liberty & Co. Napoleon Sarony’s well-known 1882 portraits of Oscar Wilde, photographed in velvet, are complemented by descriptions of the impact of Wilde’s American lecture tour on the popular imagination. The still...

This paper examines the travels and travel writing of Henry Cole in the 1850s and considers their importance for the early development of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Cole's travel writing is contextualised both within his career and within the development of practices of art history. Cole's travels in continental Europe supplied him with objects for the V&A collection and ideas which subsequently influenced the institutional and architectural development of the museum. Cole's travel journals provided an outlet for reflection on issues relating to heritage and museology and enabled him to frame complex and paradoxical views of foreignness: for example, Cole revered the historical material culture of Italy, but viewed its contemporary condition as degenerate. It is argued that these views provided premises for the V&A's appropriation of historical foreign material culture. The paper concludes with a brief account of the relationships between travel and the museum; it considers museum interiors in which foreign, historical contexts are recreated, and explores the notion of the museum visit as surrogate or compressed travel.

Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura).

The Victoria and Albert Museum, itself an archive of material culture, houses several collections of archival records. The Museum’s Registered Papers are divided between the Museum itself, which holds those papers relating to objects in the Museum, and the Public Record Office, where papers relating to Museum buildings and administration can be found; all papers produced since 1984 are to be housed together in a newly established V &amp; A Archive. The quality of the archive of Registered Papers is uneven due to the lack of a controlling and unifying policy; this, and questions of conservation and administration, are being addressed as part of the current restructuring of the Museum. For the same reason the archives of the different Departments, though important, vary considerably not only in content but also in their organisation. The National Art Library, part of the V &amp; A, includes archival collections of ephemera, comprising examples of printing and graphic design, and of manuscripts, including artists’ papers; it also includes the Archive of Art and Design, founded in 1978 to avoid the splitting up of significant archives between the Museum’s Departments.

This edited volume, published with Routledge in 2011, was the culmination of a three-year project, led jointly with Dr Glenn Adamson (Victoria and Albert Museum) and Dr Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick). I co-wrote the introduction and co-edited the volume, including intellectual direction, author selection, funding applications and chapter editing. The project, funded by grants from the Design History Society and the Florence H. and Eugene N. Myers Charitable Trust, convened 26 historians, designers, architects, sociologists, anthropologists and other humanities and social science researchers active in the UK, Europe, Australia, Asia and America to identify and assess questions and methods for writing histories of design in global networks. Each chapter was paired with a response, designed to expand the discussion and test the methodologies on offer. A major focus was the applicability of methods in the emerging field of global history for design history, and vice versa; this project was the first in any field to investigate these questions directly, and as such was quickly contracted by Routledge as having potential for undergraduate and graduate teaching. The project was public-facing from the onset. Participants first presented their chapters in three open symposia, held at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA), the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in 2008 and 2009; these were followed by participants-only workshops and correspondence between participants to refine chapters for publication. Topics included: - the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture - the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth-century - the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of ‘import substitution’ - German design in the context of empire - Australian fashions employing ‘ethnic’ motifs - an experimental UK-Ghanaian design partnership - Chinese social networking websites Public responses to the book to date have included invitations to present the project to history and anthropology researchers and students in America, Turkey and Japan as well as extended discussions of the book as part of academic paper presentations and plenary session panel discussions at international conferences in Canada and Brazil.

The English Reformation can perhaps be described as a watershed moment in England’s history – an event that changed not only the theological underpinnings of legislation and doctrine, but also the way in which parish communities experienced religion as a congregation within the context of their parish church. This thesis takes a fresh look at the English Reformation from its beginnings during the early sixteenth century through to the Restoration. How did the English Reformation become a reality within parish or faith communities and what impact did this have on those communities and on their collective faith experience? By using the methodological trajectory of material culture within the context of the Diocese of Norwich, this thesis explores the history of the English Reformation through the detailed analysis of local parish history. The focus of this thesis traces the history of eight rural parishes in Diocese of Norwich in the counties of Norfolk – North Elmham, Stockton, Redenhall, Tilney All Saints – and Suffolk – Boxford, Metfield, Cratfield, Long Melford – and one urban parish – St Peter Mancroft, Norwich - through the use of multiple sources, both textual and material culture. The primary textual sources that the thesis draws on are the churchwardens’ accounts for these churches. These exist in both manuscript and transcript form, of which significant portions of the manuscripts have been transcribed by the author and some for the first time. In addition to churchwardens accounts the thesis also incorporates detailed analyses of religious legislation, both national and diocesan, as well as the Book of Common Prayer. The material culture that the thesis draws on are the surviving contemporary artefacts within the churches in this study, some of which have not been analysed before. The thesis also draws on liturgical objects and furnishings currently on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. The thesis follows a chronological trajectory that begins with the late medieval period (chapter 2). The furnishings and the use of space was, not surprisingly, largely determined by the theology of Roman Catholicism – it was theology made tangible for the faith communities of late medieval England. This enables the subsequent changes to be analysed in light of the shift from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. It then moves on to a detailed analysis of the liturgical changes and consequent impact on the furnishings and reconfiguration of the parish church under the Tudors during the turbulent changes of the sixteenth century (chapters 3 and 4). This will show that the changes in official legislation did not necessarily equate to dutiful changes in liturgy and furnishings at the parish level. It was not only the furnishings and space that was reordered for Protestant worship, but also the rituals outlined in the new Book of Common Prayer that significantly altered how both priest and people ought to perform these rituals. Drawing on my analysis of the 1597 visitation returns for the Diocese of Norwich, the thesis will show that there were pockets of resistance towards the Prayer Book and how the liturgy ought to be performed (chapter 5). Priests and laypeople alike were prepared to “voice” their disagreement through use or misuse of objects, spaces and rituals within and around the parish church. Finally, the thesis analyses the turbulent changes of the mid seventeenth century, from the implementation of the beauty of holiness, the backlash that resulted in a second wave of iconoclasm and then the publication of a new Prayer Book in 1662 (chapter 6). All of these changes were dependent upon the manifestation of theology through the preferred material culture, or lack thereof, and the readjustment of space within the parish church. The process of analysing how churches were reconfigured by way of the reallocation of space, the objects that filled those spaces, and how the congregation interacted with these spaces and objects, brings an original contribution to the history of the English Reformation. This thesis will demonstrate the value that local stories can add to a national story, and that the adoption of material culture as a methodology is a key component in the retelling of these stories. These stories are inherently about the faith communities that traversed the difficult and unpredictable journey from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.

Scholars have long recognized the centrality of the home in Cold War discourse. They have also broadened research into the Cold War by looking at design and daily life behind the iron curtain. David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, and others have brought the design and material culture of the Eastern Bloc to the fore, and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cold War Modern: Design, 1945–1970, curated by Crowley and Jane Pavitt with contributions by Reid and Greg Castillo, dedicated a significant portion of the exhibition and its catalogue to designs from Eastern Europe.1 In Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, architectural historian Greg Castillo continues this trend, offering an informed reading of the interiors and material artifacts exhibited at trade fairs and exhibitions held in divided Germany and elsewhere. He situates the Cold War home and its material culture at the center of the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and reinforces Beatriz Colomina’s argument that “everything in the postwar age was domestic.”2 Castillo elaborates on the work of historian Robert H. Haddow and expands our understanding of trade fairs and exhibitions by breaking down the polemic of case studies. Anne Massey’s essay, for instance, on the design of ocean liners, provides a detailed expose of the complex and collective design process involved, while Alison Clarke’s essay, examining the home furnishing choices of a retired couple, highlights the transitory nature of a domestic interior and the way in which stylistic aspirations and biographic memories structure its evolution. Like Clarke, Pat Kirkham’s essay on the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California, also emphasizes the active and ongoing construction of interior spaces by their inhabitants as she analyzes the way in which the couple used their home to entertain. In this, both Clarke’s and Kirkham’s essays exemplify the influence of material culture studies, noted by Keeble in his introductory essay, as the interior is viewed as a performative setting, which is an ongoing process requiring constant work. What is less evident in the anthology is the way in which material culture studies has sought to uncover the normative practices that structure the domestic interior.6 While Keeble suggests, correctly, that much of this work ignores the importance of style and aesthetics, and can tend toward a synchronic analysis of the interior, there are some notable examples where the demands of both are interwoven with excellent results. Judy Attfield’s seminal essay “Inside Pram Town: A Case Study of Harlow House Interiors, 1951–1961,”7 for example, explored the ways in which women responded to “modern” open plan living and the strategies of resistance they developed as a means to appropriate “modernity to their own designs [my italics].”8 A little more analysis of such “ordinary” interiors would have been a welcome addition. Of course an anthology must draw its boundaries somewhere, and Designing the Modern Interior pulls together essays that both extend and refine existing (albeit dispersed) works of historiographic significance as well as essays that present new research, providing a stimulating and authoritative introduction to the history of the modern interior. Indeed, the quality of research— in particular the detailed archival research—is excellent throughout, and where the anthology is particularly successful is in its “spatialization” of history, which, as Sparke claims, leads to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the subject. This is backed up by extensive endnotes and a select bibliography that provide a rich source of information to any student wishing to learn more. With one hundred illustrations and an engagingly lucid text, Designing the Modern Interior should be essential reading for such students. While some of the essays and issues raised might leave those more familiar with the subject desirous of longer and more extended analyses, this should not be read as a criticism; rather it is an acknowledgment that the subject of this quality work warrants further investigation and publication.

These essays, explorations in the interdisciplinary territories currently developing around the site of the museum, can be seen as exercises in the cultural history of objects. With empire as focus, tracing this cultural history amounts to locating objects within the competing discursive frameworks of colonized territory and imperial metropolis, the museum and the collector mediating the changing meanings as objects move between the two. The book has its origin in a 1995 art history conference--fittingly, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, "indicating the web of continuities between the colonial past and postcolonial present" (1)--and the volume reflects its origin in the wide range of work, the tendency toward narrow study, and the mixed quality. Even the weaker pieces, however, illuminate the interesting territories revealed by interdisciplinary cultural excavations of empire. As the editors note: "The intersection between colonialism, museums and objects unites [. . .] three substantial bodies of contemporary theory; post-colonial theory, museum studies and material culture studies/design history" (2), and the Introduction handily summarizes recent directions in each.

Between virtual and material culture: translation in the new museum. Digital technologies have the potential to broker fluid identities at the same time as transforming the visitor experience in the museum by facilitating new research methods and creative opportunities. Working across the once clear distinction of the material and the immaterial (and subject disciplinary boundaries with their own distinct histories and procedures) is not however as easy as the utopian rhetoric would suggest. Although initiatives such as ‘Culture on Line’ (2002-2007) and ‘Every Pictures Tells a Story’ (Victoria and Albert Museum) were not an unalloyed success much was learned from them in terms of on-line user participation and the re-interpretation of material culture into the digital. Although digital worlds can seem remote from ‘the real thing”, the artefact or painting, and crucially the embodied museum experience, managing and organising the exchange of cultural understanding through museum collections would be enabled by digital technologies. In tandem with technological change, the self-reflexive, historic museum is also changing to accommodate rapidly altering social identities, moving away from a unitary voice to poly-vocal interpretations of artefacts often collected under the auspices of Empire building. For instance, the recently reopened Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has reconceptualised its collection thematically under the rubric of ‘crossing cultures, crossing time’. The new architecture is designed to literally shed light on and between cultures rather than develop essentialist notions of cultures and communities. This chapter draws on salient examples to explore the issues at stake in the brave new world of heterotopias where translation across mediums, not just linguistic translation, is required if diverse cultures are to understand and communicate with each other. From verbal to non-verbal cultural forms technology has the potential to create spaces where narratives can be shared and mutual comprehension established. Given the scope of ambition for the inclusive museum, technology will be required to broker between multiple identities and historically circumscribed colonial collections: reconfigured to support the global citizen. This chapter hopes to establish the kinds of collaborations that will be needed to realise such ambition.

Robin Schuldenfrei, ed. Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture Abington, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2012, 301 pp., 85 b/w photos. Cloth, $170.00, ISBN 9780415676083; paper, $49.95, ISBN 978415676090; e-book, ISBN 9780203142721 The publication of this collection of interdisciplinary scholarly essays, many of which were presented in a session organized by the book’s editor, Robin Schuldenfrei, at the 2010 conference of the Association of Art Historians, demonstrates just how far the historiography of midcentury modern architecture and material culture has come since the appearance of Thomas Hine’s groundbreaking Populuxe in 1986.1 In the more than twenty-five years that have elapsed since that lavishly illustrated text, replete with bold color images drawn from advertising, movies, and television, suggested to a wide readership that the field was worthy of both broad popular interest and in-depth scholarly study, investigators from a number of fields have contributed to the making of a richly detailed and critically complex historical picture of the period, its architecture, social history, and visual culture. Architectural history and design studies in this area, building on the foundation laid by the earliest research, have generally concentrated on interdisciplinary and syncretic approaches; more important—and perhaps because of the crossover activities of the principal Bauhaus designers and their followers—architecture, interiors, and material culture have often been studied as interlocking elements rather than as separate entities or areas of study. Collectors, curators, and researchers, ranging from online bloggers and Flickr posters to museum-based scholars and gallerists, have researched products, designers, and manufacturers, establishing reliable chronologies and identifying the many newly invented materials and production technologies that played such significant roles in the architecture and design of the period. Drawing on new archival research, scholarly monographs on architects such as Richard Neutra (the earliest of which appeared in conjunction with a Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1982), Philip Johnson, R. M. Schindler, and Eero Saarinen, along with important new studies of …

This article explores the evolving transnational Indo-Caribbean diasporic identity through artistic expressions. I examine the work of British-Guyanese ceramicist, Jacqui Ramrayka, whose recent exhibition, ‘Redefining the Hyphen’, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, highlights the tensions between cultural preservation and identity formation within the Indo-Caribbean communities in London, New York and Toronto. Through a conversation with Ramrayka we interrogate how material culture, memory and migration shape diasporic consciousness. We unpack how Ramrayka’s clay and conversation workshops in these three cities present an innovative approach to capturing how people in different migratory contexts construct meaning and interrogate their cultural identity through interaction with objects. Additionally, this article contextualizes Indo-Caribbean identity within broader socio-political structures of the diasporic communities in the Global North. By engaging largely with second-generation communities and their negotiations of belonging, this conversation contributes to the discourse on transnationalism, diasporic identity and the role of artistic practices in navigating histories of indentureship and migration. Ultimately, it foregrounds the hybridity of Indo-Caribbean identity as an ongoing process of redefinition and reclamation.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRhythm & Colour: Hélène Vanel, Loïs Hutton & Margaret MorrisRichard EmersonEdinburgh: Golden Hare, 2018.624 pp.; 261 color and b/w ills.Cloth ₤35.00ISBN 9781527221703Jane PritchardJane PritchardCurator of dance, theater, and performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 25, Number 2Fall–Winter 2018 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702327 Views: 20Total views on this site © 2018 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous article No AccessExhibition ReviewsAlexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonMarch 14–August 2, 2015Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkMay 4–August 7, 2011 CataloguesAlexander McQueen: Savage BeautyAndrew BoltonNew York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.240 pp.; 293 color ills.Cloth $50.00ISBN 9780300169782 Alexander McQueenEdited by Claire WilcoxLondon: V&A Publishing, 2015.336 pp.; 440 ills.Cloth $85.00ISBN 9781851778270Fruzsina BekefiFruzsina Bekefi Search for more articles by this author Fruzsina Bekefi studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in fashion history. She currently works as a freelance writer, researcher, and curator.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 22, Number 2Fall–Winter 2015 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685879 Views: 384Total views on this site © 2015 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.