The BBC India Season is bringing us a cluster of programmes amounting to a fascinatingly varied series of visits to the subcontinent. Incidentally, and not coincidentally, there is also an India Festival with myriad exhibitions, conferences and lectures at the Victoria and Albert this autumn.Sona Datta began her career at the British Museum and is now the lead curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the most important museum in the USA that Europeans have never heard of, which has significant holdings in Indian art. British by birth, Bengali by heritage, she is Read more ...

Alexander McQueen designed some dresses to die for. Dominating a wood-panelled room dedicated to Romantic Nationalism, in acknowledgement of his Scottish origins, is a crimson cape worn over a simple white dress. The high collar, puffed sleeves and long train lend the shimmering red taffeta a baronial splendour perfect for dramatic entrances.Nearby is a white tulle dress whose bodice is encrusted with tiny red beads, worn beneath a red silk taffeta jacket layered into exaggerated folds reminiscent of coral. One could imagine sporting these garments with great pleasure, knowing that they made Read more ...

Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and galleries small, there is little room to show off these superb exhibits to their best advantage. Only the initiated will, I fear, brave these claustrophobic corridors and persevere long enough to appreciate the goodies on offer.Faced with walls painted bright red, labels hung too low and hard to read, copious detail about each production but little Read more ...

This revelatory exhibition goes in search of the revolutionary magnificence which infused Constable’s compelling landscapes through an unusual prism. The narrative spine is clear. It follows Constable’s intense work playing upon as profound a knowledge of the Old Masters as was possible at the time, and reconciling it with, as he phrased it, the greatness of nature from which all originality must spring.  We see nothing, he said, until we fully understand it. Beyond looking to the acute observation of his own eye, Constable read energetically, too – treatises from Leonardo to Read more ...

Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the opening sequence he set the scene, biking straight across – and not at the traffic lights, either – the Cromwell Road to get to the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the film is timed to preview the major show “Constable: The Making of a Master” that there opens on September 20. That museum has the largest collection of Constable, which Read more ...

If events in the Middle East, the prospect of the school run or the onset of autumn are conspiring to lower your spirits, then escape to the V&A and immerse yourself in the dreamy elegance of Horst P. Horst’s magical fashion photographs spanning a career that lasted 60 years.One of his most famous pictures (pictured below right: Mainbocher corset © Condé Nast/ Horst Estate) was taken in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It's of a woman in a corset – not a promising subject – yet from this banal starting point Horst creates something supremely memorable Read more ...

Initiating the tercentenary of the arrival of the Hanoverians and thus the foundation of our German royal family, this startling and beguiling exhibition of  the work of the polymath William Kent (1685-1748) crams 200 objects – drawings, paintings, plans, photographs, furniture, illustrations, models – into an illusionistic array of gauzy rooms, evocative of real interiors. The profusion is deliberate. Long before art nouveau, Kent’s interiors left no surface without rich ornament. His own admirations are clear; the exhibition shows us at its very beginning marble busts modelled Read more ...

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 is just what it says: a spectacular collection of nearly 80 banners, handscrolls, hanging scrolls and fans, gathered from major collections in China and Japan – many of which have never travelled west before – as well as the United States and Europe. The status of painting, drawing and poetry was extremely high through millennia of Chinese history until all traditions fractured in the revolutions of the 20th century.  The visual arts, often incorporating the finest calligraphy, an art form in itself, (the poems giving further meaning to the Read more ...

How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. However, metaphorically speaking, the title would have still held since Bowie's influence as a multifaceted creation is still everywhere in our culture. There is much – in fact almost too much – to enjoy in this show. But let’s get a couple of Read more ...

Jewels, gold, silver, arms and armour, silks, embroideries, tapestries and lace: the world of the very rich and very powerful royals – and merchants – in Russia and Britain half a millennia ago is set out in glittering array in the V&A’s latest exhibition. The English imported fabulous furs from Russia, delighting in the finest sables, but also wood, hemp and tar, the better to build British ships. The Russians acquired beautifully crafted objects and above all arms, a perennially sought-after commodity which the British were skilled at supplying.Britain’s Muscovy Company was established Read more ...

This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.”Framed in three different labelled sections  - Recording, Reframing, Resisting – the exhibition is an unusual and welcome collaboration between the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, with support to the tune of £100,000 from the Art Fund. The gift was shared between the two museums who each bought for their own collections. The results, dating from Read more ...

Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a trip down memory lane, from Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to John Wayne’s cowboys and gunslingers. And we’re brought bang up to date with Keira Knightly’s green evening gown from Atonement, a ball gown from Anna Karenina, and then into digital with Avatar – a complex technique called motion capture – and animation.There are three chapters: Deconstruction Read more ...