Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Object Lessons
By James Fenton
A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum 1997-January 18, 1998. Following its presentation in Baltimore, A Grand Design will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (February 25-May 17, 1998); the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (June 20- September 13, 1998); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 18, 1998- January 10, 1999); and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (February 13-May 9, 1999).
an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, October 12,, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Malcolm Baker, by Brenda Richardson
Abrams/Baltimore Museum of Art, 431 pp., $60.00
Photography: An Independent Art: Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum 1839-1996
by Mark Haworth-Booth
Princeton University Press, 208 pp., $39.50
In 1989 John Pope-Hennessy wrote an article for these pages entitled 'The Fall of a Great Museum,' in which, as a former director, he deplored recent developments at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[1] It was a memorable attack, full of anger and contempt—an attack which still rankles in certain quarters. It was part of a general outcry which brought about the quiet reversal of some proposed policies, but which failed to secure its chief object, the ousting of the then-director, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll. Rereading Pope-Hennessy's article recently, I was struck less by the broad thrust of the argument than by several assumptions on which it rested, all of which seem to indicate a shift of taste and intellectual approach since the days of his directorship.
Review, 5628 words
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