The original Wonder House

The Victoria and Albert Museum

So ... Where to begin coming to grips with this behemoth - the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. A collection that grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851. A lifetime of study couldn't do it justice. We have allowed just two hours ... In the end, we spend all day there, focus on a few rooms, and leave - elated, satisfied, inspired. The theatre and performance galleries - an obvious draw card - are inexplicably closed. No one seems to know when they may re-open. But we see some fabulous objects, anyway.

The fashion gallery has some wonderful items, including a beautifully cut 18th Century woman's riding jacket, and a complete Pierre Cardin ensemble in bold pink. The only Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood on display are not immediately eye-grabbing.

In the jewellery display I am interested to see items made of Whitby jet, which has intrigued me since reading AS Byatt's 'Posession'. But for me, the show-stealer is the set of peridots given by the Prince Consort to the governess of his daughter, Charlotte. There is an entire unspoken back-story implicit in the very discreet caption: "So there's this Princess, right, and her name's Charlotte, see, and she's a real baggage, right? She's got these governesses and their aunt, and they're really awful, right? Charlotte calls them 'Famine & the consequences', OK, and she's really down on 'em. She's such a laugh about 'em. Anyway, her father the Prince Regent is all making eyes at one governess, and sending her these jewels, and we're all 'Hello, what's going on here, then?'. He wouldn't be doing that unless he was getting a bit of the other, right? Anyway, then Charlotte dies, right? Which just goes to show you can be a Princess and it can still go pear-shaped". Anyway, peridots are my favourite gems, and these are winners.

In the 20 Century gallery I enjoy seeing the Aalvar Alto bent plywood stools - a design classic. I'm very familiar with these from my visits to the Alto house and studio in Helsinki. I also liked seeing the classic Arne Jacobsen 1957 stacking plywood chair, made famous by Lewis Morley's iconic 1963 photo of Christine Keeler.

Too soon, we are out the door. We pause on our way, and see the damage on the side of the building, facing the Natural History museum. Big scratches and gores in the stonework, a result of the Blitz. I am moved beyond imagining, that such destruction came so near, but in this case narrowly missed this remarkable and important part of our shared world heritage. 

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The Wonder House of Lahore

A walk through some London museums.

In "Kim", Rudyard Kipling starts the story with Kim and his friends playing outside the Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, a museum of antiquities and local arts. He describes the contents with a sense of awe:

"In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum".

The museums of London are wonder houses of similar style, contains some truly marvellous pieces. Here is a bit of what we saw.

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Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy

Kiefer was a young boy in Germany at the end of WWII. His work is filled with the heavy burden of guilt and uncertainty that affected that generation. The show has paintings, drawings, and mixed media works that range from small pages to vast, gallery-filling canvases. The smaller works showed a delicacy and intimacy that I found very moving. His art is distinctive, symbolist, allegorical, and often quite disturbing. A series of pictures purport to be landscapes, filled with eerie, floating, classical statuary. Tucked away in each, off-centre and out of notice, like the figures in Jeffrey Smart paintings, are self portraits of the artist as a young boy, wearing his father's army greatcoat, and making a Hitler salute. They were very powerful. Kiefer was controversial in Germany, at a time when people avoided talking about the Third Reich. He said that as the Nazi's appropriated art to further ideology, it was important for artists to reclaim it, to fight back. I found this show fascinating and very moving. The looming U-boat pack in the forecourt was especially menacing.