Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington SW7 2RL
www.vam.ac.uk Instagram: @vamuseum
The V & A is the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, with 145 galleries housing a permanent collection of approaching three million objects. But how does it fare if judged as a fine art gallery? Pretty well, for three reasons.
First, a fair proportion of its special exhibitions are art-orientated. Take ‘Frida Kahlo: Creating yourself’ (2018), ‘Renaissance Watercolours: from Dürer to Van Dyck’ (2020) and ‘Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection’ (2024). Or consider the annual exhibitions linked to the Jameel Prize (for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition) and the Prix Pictet (for photography and sustainability).
Second, the collection includes substantial amounts of material that has always been classified as art: sculpture, painting, prints, photographs… For example the collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture is the largest outside Italy, the V&A holds the national collection of portrait miniatures, has the surviving seven of Raphael’s ten full-scale designs for tapestries in the Sistine Chapel, high quality Constable and Turner and twenty works by Rodin.
And third, the divisions between art and craft or design are not as rigid as they used to be: ceramics, glass and textiles, for example, are mainstream art materials nowadays, and the V&A has a comprehensive collection of them all, including recent developments made as art. My illustration is from a current display of work made by artists with residencies at the V&A in 2024: Luca Bosani takes platforms to a sculptural and performative extreme as a means of interrogating the notion of the high-heeled shoe as a gendered item.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
