Search results for ""Author Julius Bryant""

Creating the V&A tells the definitive story of the formative years of London’s world-renowned Victoria and Albert Museum and the gathering of its early collections in the decade between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the death of Prince Albert in 1861.The story of the V&A’s genesis is often centred on the first director and first curator (Henry Cole and J. C. Robinson), and their competing agendas for design reform and connoisseurship. And yet there is an untold story of how the young royal couple for whom it is named were highly instrumental in the establishment of the museum, as public supporters and large-scale lenders before a permanent collection was in place. The book is also full of fascinating and colourful stories of the strategies deployed to harvest treasures on the market as the young museum sought to fill its rapidly expanding buildings and compete with the British Museum and the Crystal Palace.For anyone interested in the history of collecting and curating, and for all fans of this legendary London museum, Creating the V&A explains how the foundational collections established parameters which still inform the museum’s collecting policies, role and identity today.

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By 1862, just a decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and art-market experts. Enriching the V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-century history, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the following decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans, gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and buying power of its directors and curators. The V&A soon became a collection of collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public museums. Enriching the V&A explores the formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship, of the V&A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the transformation of private property into public museum collections.

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The building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, begun in 1857, is the most elaborately designed and decorated museum in Britain. This book is the first to consider the V&A as a work of art in itself, presenting drawings, watercolours and historic photographs relating to the Museum's 19th-century interiors. Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design. The V&A's first Director, Henry Cole, conceived the Museum's building as a showcase for leading Victorian artists to design and decorate. This book reveals for the first time the ways in which Cole's expressed policy to 'assemble a splendid collection of objects representing the application of Fine Arts to manufacture' was applied to the fabric of the building, as he engaged leading painters such as Frederic Leighton , G.F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as specialists in decoration such as Owen Jones and Morris and Company, to decorate and design for a building raised by engineers using innovatory materials and techniques.It represents a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of British 19th-century art, design, architecture and museums, and an essential backdrop to understanding the evolution of the Museum's early collections and identity.

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The story of the illustrated book from the earliest printed books to the present day, told through the collections of the V&A’s National Art Library. This is the story of the illustrated book, from the earliest printed examples to the present day, told through the collections of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London – a library that was created to bring together examples of superlative book-making on almost every subject. Gathered here are some of the most influential, compelling and striking examples of the illustrated book, arranged thematically in chapters devoted to subjects such as art, literature, religion, architecture, natural history, fashion, and shopping. Brimming with innovative and beautiful examples, ranging from well-known titles, such as Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament and James Audubon’s Birds of America, to other wonderful but less familiar publications, this collection offers a fascinating overview of some of the finest illustrated books ever created – demonstrating their enduring appeal.

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John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911) started his career as an architectural sculptor at the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum). Much of his life, however, was spent in British India, where his son Rudyard was born. He taught at the Bombay School of Art and later was appointed principal of the new Mayo School of Art (today Pakistan’s National College of Art and Design) as well as curator of its museum in Lahore. Over several years, Kipling toured the northern provinces of India, documenting the processes of local craftsmen, a cultural preservation project that provides a unique record of 19th-century Indian craft customs. This is the first book to explore the full spectrum of artistic, pedagogical, and archival achievements of this fascinating man of letters, demonstrating the sincerity of his work as an artist, teacher, administrator, and activist. Published in association with Bard Graduate CenterExhibition Schedule:Victoria and Albert Museum, London (01/14/17–04/02/17)Bard Graduate Center, New York (09/15/17–01/07/18)

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With a career spanning more than sixty years, Anthony Caro (b. 1924) is one of Britain's most acclaimed and best-known sculptors. Caro: Close Up accompanies the first survey exhibition of his work in an American museum since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. Although celebrated for his large, brightly painted abstract sculptures, Caro has also produced drawings and small-scale works of a more private nature throughout his career. The full range of his oeuvre includes works on paper, sculptures constructed in paper and cardboard, and abstract works of steel, bronze, and clay.Featuring new photography of more than sixty works drawn almost entirely from Caro's studio and family collections, this publication examines the critical responses that Caro's work has elicited from the 1950s to the present and considers his role in current artistic practice. The authors explore the ways the sculptor has used the physical properties of his materials, while Caro himself discusses his exhibition and installation practices.Published for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/18/12–12/30/12)

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This unique history brings together more than 150 spectacular objects from the National Art Library's collection of literature, prints, drawings and photographs. Housed within the V&A, the library was, from the beginning, an integral part of the Museum, formed by, and for, artists and designers as an essential element of the educational and museological project of Prince Albert and Henry Cole after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Word & Image shows how the distinct character of the NAL was formed, and how its collections created a new kind of bibliographical resource. From a fifteenth-century book of hours to William Morris's specimen pages for Jean Froissart's The Chronicles of Fraunce, Inglande, and Other Places Adjoynynge; from George Cruikshank's studies of Fagin for Oliver Twist to an Yves Saint Laurent design for the House of Dior; and from Bill Brandt's photographs to the Book of Nails by Floating Concrete Octopus, Word & Image explores some of the finest examples of 'book art' in existence.

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