Victoria and Albert Museum
Treasures of the Indus, BBC FourTuesday, 08 September 2015
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... Read more... |
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 18 March 2015
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... Read more... |
Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, Victoria & Albert MuseumThursday, 23 October 2014
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... Read more... |
Constable: The Making of a Master, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 27 September 2014
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... Read more... |
Constable: A Country Rebel, BBC FourSunday, 07 September 2014
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... Read more... |
Horst: Photographer of Style, Victoria & Albert MuseumFriday, 05 September 2014
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... Read more... |
William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, Victoria & Albert MuseumTuesday, 25 March 2014
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,... Read more... |
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900, Victoria & Albert MuseumMonday, 04 November 2013
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... Read more... |
David Bowie Is, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 20 March 2013
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... Read more... |
Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 10 March 2013
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... Read more... |
Light from the Middle East: New Photography, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 14 November 2012
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... Read more... |
Hollywood Costume, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 21 October 2012
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... Read more... |
