Teenage dream: rapid response collecting

Unidentified designers for Eylure, 'Katy Perry lashes' false eyelash set, manufactured by PT Korindah, Indonesia, 2013, 
Victoria & Albert Museum, given by Gethin Chamberlain (CD.24:1 to 5-2014)

At the end of 2013 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London – Britain’s national museum of art and design – announced a new collection strategy aimed at ‘collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast moving global events influence society.’ The strategy is manifest in the museum’s recently formed ‘Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team’ headed up by the architectural journalist Kieran Long. The objects collected are exhibited in a new Rapid Response section of the museum’s recently refurbished Twentieth Century Gallery. The sort of things being assembled include a Liberator handgun – ‘the first 3D-printed “wiki-weapon”, Katy Perry false eyelashes made for an American-owned British company in Indonesia (£5.95) and a panel of spike studs used in London to deter the homeless from sleeping on the exteriors of the  premises of the better off. Recognising the inherent banality of many of these objects, Long argues that these usually fugitive things are precisely what a future generation will want to see in its museums ‘because lots of valuable things are kept by people’ (Rose Etherington ['Interview with Kieran Long'], Deezen 18 Dec 2013).

New Zealand doesn't have a 'national museum of art and design', but as in New Zealand, the British media tend to avoid mentioning museums – unless there’s a scandal in the making – but commentary in quality newspapers such as the Guardian, in magazines like Dezeen and on sites such as Design Observer has been generally positive. Oliver Wainwright, writing in the Guardian, emphasises how important it is to regard the material collected under this strategy against the narrative of the museum’s collection of ‘the embroidered thrones and lacquered vases of despots and dictators’, arguing that ‘Rapid Response brings these stories to the fore, as a powerful reminder that, beyond the craft of their making, every object is political.’ Nonetheless, Wainwright cautions that ‘It is a curatorial approach that at times feels a little too journalistic, a bit like walking through a “most read” list of articles-as-objects’.

Twitter profile summary of Fiona Hughes, assistant editor, arts, Evening Standard newspaper, July 2014

It’s perhaps natural that journalists would mandate the initiative of another journalist, particularly one that highlights the contemporary and the newsworthy. Equally telling is the decision by the museum's management to resource a team comprising four curators dedicated to collecting the contemporary, particularly in an institution that for much of its existence has been significantly under-resourced, at least from a curatorial perspective. There’s no indication that this situation has changed but even the most traditional observer will recognise there’s little media purchase to be found in a scholarly study of sixteenth century German stoneware vessels. One of the few negative responses in the British press to the V&A’s new strategy has been the almost predictable publication of an excerpt from the museum’s press release in the ‘Pseuds corner’ column of the satirical magazine Private Eye (no. 1369 (27 June-10 July 2014), p. 33).

Kieren Long's Twitter page, July 2014

Media savviness would appear to be the rationale both behind the the appointment of this high-profile curatorial team and the adoption of this strategy. Long has shifted from reporting news to collecting the ‘realia’ of news and being a part of the reportage. In many ways, it’s not too far removed from the role he played in the BBC series ‘Restoration Home’ where Long, employed as an architectural history pundit, would represent an anonymous research assistant’s archival work about a building to its current owners who would then use it to inform their amateur efforts to obscure Britain’s built heritage. Complementing his profile as a talking head and a widely published journalist, Long has a quantifiable social media presence: he’s on Twitter (@kieranlong) although his Facebook presence is mediated through the museum, as indeed are blog entries from members of the Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team. The Twitter feed for the new strategy has its own hashtag: #RapidResponseCollecting.

Twitter profile summary of Tom Dyckhoff, presenter of the 'Great Interior Design Challenge' show on BBC1, July 2014

All is not well though. The architectural journalist and BBC pundit Tom Dyckhoff recently tweeted his displeasure at the scale and location of the Rapid Response section of the Twentieth Century Gallery, suggesting it was 'wee' and 'tucked away' and that it should be relocated to 'the main reception'. Tellingly, Dyckhoff's tweet was retweeted by Long, which might suggest a degree of concurrence with the views expressed.  Such a repositioning might engender a new range of problems, not least the fact that instead of highlighting the material acquired under the rapid response collecting mantra against the museum's historical collection, it would be competing with the museum's shop, located prominently near the 'main reception'.

David Iliff, Foyer of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2012.
The museum's shop, surmounted on the mezzanine level by George Gilbert Scott's Hereford Screen (1862), is to the right of the photograph, directly in a processional line from its principal public entrance to the left.
Wikimedia Commons license CC-BY-SA 3.0

The idea of collecting quotidian and popular objects is no innovation; social history museums, for example, do it all the time. In interviews with the press, Long has cited an earlier precedent at the V&A in the activities of the CirculationDepartment, which, from the early twentieth century until 1977, collected contemporary work as part of its circulating (hence the departmental title) exhibitions programme. Although the primary curatorial departments in the V&A did reluctantly – and occasionally controversially ­– collect the odd contemporaneously made object from the start, the first systemic collection of the contemporary to be shown in its walls was undertaken privately under the aegis of the British Institute of Industrial Art (1920-1933). Following the closure in 1921 of the Institute’s short-lived Knightsbridge gallery – dubbed by a journalist wag on the Daily Chronicle ‘the state art shop’ ­– it convinced the V&A to allow it to exhibit a selection of contemporary designed objects in the museum's – rather inappropriately scaled and peripherally located – North Court. The majority of these pieces were collected by the art writer and proselytiser Margaret Hattersley Bulley (1882-1959) who, on the demise of the institute following the formation of the better-funded and organised Council for Art and Industry, endowed the collection to the V&A.

[Hannah Ritchie (1915-1940)], Cover of Margaret H Bulley, Have you good taste? A guide to the appreciation of the lesser arts (London: Methuen, 1933). 
Ritchie appears to have been a pupil at a London County Council school influenced by the theories of its inspector of art, the art pedagogue Marion Richardson

More recently the V&A has initiated other programmes addressing contemporary consumption including the 2000 exhibition 'Brand new' which took 'a challenging look at consumer culture and the proliferation of brand identities.' Unlike the rapid response collecting strategy, the exhibition critically examined the nature of contemporary consumption in particular the relationship between brands and consumer behaviour. While the exhibition was neither the result of a deliberate collecting strategy nor focussed exclusively on the contemporary, it was an interesting indicator of the way the institution had changed its approach to the contemporary. 

A collecting strategy aimed at acquiring the banal rather than the precious follows much of the thinking espoused by what might be described as the first generation of design historians – as opposed to, say, art or architectural historians with an interest in design – such as Adrian Forty and Jonathan Woodham. Forty's 1986 text Objects of desire: design and society since 1750 (London: Thames & Hudson) made what was then a radical assertion that design was shaped by economic, social and ideological decisions and that it was best expressed in everyday objects. Woodham in Twentieth-century design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) elaborated on this view declaring that the best known and by implication the most successful designs of the twentieth century were found in the marketplace, not the museum. This emphasis on the consumer experience – on the the exchange value of the commodity rather than the singularity of the design, the significance of the designer or the sagacity of the manufacturer – marks an important shift in institutional approach to collecting. It's a blurring of the distinction between the shop and the museum, locating the museum as a site of entertainment, a distraction, an asylum; no less, a contemporary Benjaminian Passegen.

It would require no great stretch of the imagination to think that the V&A's media-driven rapid response collecting strategy might appeal to the management of the handful of museums in New Zealand that acquire designed objects for their collections. It's a relatively cheap move and would require no great outlay other than staff costs and a small acquisitions budget. For all that, it probably wouldn't work for any number of reasons, not least the facts that New Zealand has neither that many design-minded media celebrities nor museums with collections of ‘the embroidered thrones and lacquered vases of despots and dictators’ to act as a contextual backdrop for the new material. 

David Jenkin (1919-c. 2002), presentation vase commemorating the production of the '100 millionth article' at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, New Zealand. 
Presented to Walter Nash, prime minister of New Zealand, in July 1959.
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, gift of the Nash family 1996 (CG00271)

As a museum whose collection, among other things, encompasses art, design and social history, Te Papa has, over the years, collected both the local versions of 'embroidered thrones and lacquered vases' as well as 'newsworthy' objects. The former might best be represented by the covered vase produced in 1959 by the Crown Lynn factory and presented to the prime minister, the crockery-minded Walter Nash.* It must be pointed out that no matter the slurs of his opponents, Nash hardly fitted the mould of a despot or dictator. Despite the fact that it wasn't collected contemporaneously, this crudely conceived if technically perfect vase – it has the appearance of being carved from a lump of lard – is the ideal exemplar of the New Zealand market place as it was in 1959. Its form is derivative and anachronistic and it was manufactured using outdated and imported, second-hand technology. There's a certain irony in that, arguably, Nash and his second Labour party administration (1957-1960) did more than any government, before or after, both to encourage the growth of manufacturing industry in New Zealand and to address the abysmal standard of design embodied by the vase. Except as a product of Crown Lynn's marketing department, Nash's vase had no consumer profile; despite its political resonances, no one bought or sold it and, strangely enough, while the event of its presentation was considered newsworthy, the piece itself was not illustrated but referred to, glancingly and inaccurately, in newspaper reports of the occasion as a 'loving cup'.

Unidentified designers,  'Carlton Ware' cup and saucer, commemorating the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition 1940, 
manufactured by Wiltshaw and Robinson Ltd, England, 1939. 
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, purchased 1980 with the Minister's discretionary funds (CG001344)

Equally un-newsworthy but distinctly quotidian is the collection of ceramic souvenirs from the 1940 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition acquired by the museum in 1980. These knickknacks – souvenir ashtrays, cups and saucers, egg cups and the like, standard low-end productions decorated with a clobbered transfer print of Edward Anscombe's temporary Centennial Tower – were produced in England to satisfy not so much local consumer demand for material memories of a national event but more the balance sheets of the British manufacturers, export agents, confirmers and shippers charged with supplying the New Zealand manufactured commodities market, who effectively defined consumer choice. Acquired institutionally as part of a social history collecting strategy some forty years after their production, these tawdry memorabilia of a newsworthy event were, individually, as un-newsworthy as Nash's vase. But in terms of what they represented in the way they were produced, mediated and consumed were accurate reflections of the country's material culture as it was embodied at a particular moment. 

The V&A's new rapid response collecting strategy is neither new nor is it about collecting. Its Liberator handgun doesn't even need to be collected as an object but merely recorded as a line of computing code that with the appropriate software can be produced by a 3D printer anywhere, anytime. It is, in effect, a dematerialised commodity; it doesn't need to exist physically in a collection to convey the reason why the V&A decided to mediate its existence. It's telling that a recent article on Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, quotes him asserting that '"the age of collecting is over", and that the future for museums and galleries worldwide is collaboration and loan.' (Peter Robb, 'Brand management', The Monthly (August 2014), p. 36). Brand's comment is perhaps best understood from his background as a former director of the Getty Museum where his major role seems to have been remediating and unpicking the rapacious collecting activities of the museum's former curator of antiquities Marion True rather than expending its vast acquisitions budget on extending the museum's collection. Brand's comment shouldn't be seen as merely the frustrated comments of the director of an art gallery with a notably modest collection – at least by international metrics – and little chance of improving it. Brand is, apparently, 'formidably well connected with the world's leading institutions - the Hermitage in Russia, the Harvard Museum, the Courtauld Institute in London, the American Association of Museum Directors, and so on.', so what he says has a universal currency. What he appears to be advocating is something similar to what the V&A has done with its de-objectified collecting strategy. By advocating a focus on loan-based exhibitions Brand, like Martin Roth at the V&A, is not only condoning but also encouraging a McLuhanesque shift in the public gaze, from the collection to the shop. At least Brand hasn't yet promulgated a collecting strategy that gives all the appearance of being driven by the fickle chimera of popularity.

Postscript

The underwhelming experience of what Katy Perry eye lashes created by Eylure look like when they're put on display in the V&A's Rapid Response Collecting 'gallery':

* Keith Sinclair, Walter Nash (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1976), p. 182, observed that in July 1939, during the humiliating negotiations around the 1938-39 exchange crisis, Nash 'had done a certain amount of travelling about Britain, mainly talking to disgruntled crockery and other manufacturers.' Is there a connection between Nash's visits to the 'disgruntled crockery manufacturers' and the tawdry Centennial Exhibition souvenirs they despatched to New Zealand soon after?

Mangōpare modernism

In 2009 the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe purchased at the Alexandra Palace Antique and Collectors Fair in London an earthenware plate decorated with a coloured transfer-printed kōwhaiwhai (painted rafter decoration) border. This ‘Maori Art’ plate was fabricated at the Lambeth factory of the British ceramic manufacturer Doulton & Co in about 1925. It is currently on show at the museum in a display devoted to the emergence of modernism in Europe. Surrounded by the work of George Walton, Josef Olbrich, Henri van de Velde, Mikhael Adamovich and Marianne Brandt, the plate’s abstract design seems to have been deployed by the museum to exemplify the art historical trope that links the ‘primitive’ to the modern. The positioning of this apparently anonymously designed plate amongst these modernist archetypes seems to resonate with Evan Kindley's recent observation in the London Review of Books, that there's a fear amongst historians that they 'will slip into the comfortable grooves of "great man" narratives - a tendency to which scholars of modernism, always a congress of cults of personality, are particularly prone.'

Accompanying the plate is a label that, even accounting for the constraints imposed by its function and format, is not only notable for the absence of accurate information concerning the plate’s design, production and consumption but also for the revisionist perpective it provides on contemporary British views of the relationship that existed between between the colonising power and its colonial subjects.  The label reads as follows:

Earthenware plate with ‘Maori’ pattern

English, made by Doulton Pottery, Lambeth, London,

about 1925

Doulton’s first Maori designs were made for the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch. This plate was made for the Dunedin Exhibition of 1925. The patterns based on those of a Maori meeting house (see room 24) may have been inspired by the decoration of the New Zealand pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924.

The British Museum’s plate isn’t the first example of Doulton’s ‘Maori Art’ ware to enter a British collection: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has a bone china cup and saucer exhibiting the same pattern, fabricated at Doulton & Co’s Burslem factory about 1930, which it acquired by donation in 1993. While the Fitzwilliam’s on-line catalogue description again fails to describe the pattern accurately or to acknowledge its source, it does suggest that the pattern pre-dates the ‘decoration of the New Zealand pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley’ by at least twenty odd years.

'Maori Art' bone china plate. Made by Doulton & Co, Burslem, England, about 1929

As has been previously observed on this blog, the design of the ‘Maori Art’ pattern was based on an illustration that reproduced twenty-nine kōwhaiwhai collected by the Anglican bishop Herbert Williams to accompany his chapter ‘Description of Maori rafter patterns’ published in Augustus Hamilton’s Māori Art (Dunedin: Ferguson and Mitchell for the New Zealand Institute, 1897). 

Albert Percy Godber, [Photograph of Māori rafter patterns 22-26 from Augustus Hamilton, Maori art'], 1916.
National Library of New Zealand, reference no. APG-0586-1/2-G

The Doulton pattern design most closely matches Williams' rafter pattern no. 25, Mangōpare (hammerhead shark), which he identified as coming from the wharenui named Tamatekapua (constructed in 1878) of the Ngāti Whakaue subtribes Ngāti Tae-o-Tū and Ngāti Tūnohopū, of the Te Arawa descent, at the Te Papaiouru Marae near Ōhinemutu. 

John Dobree Pascoe, 'Kōwhaiwhai on the rafters of Tamatekapua meeting house at Ohinemutu', [about 1940]
National Library of New Zealand, reference no. 1/4-001700-F

It is unclear how the Mangōpare design came to the attention of the art department at Doulton & Co’s Burslem factory, who were most probably responsible for producing the transfer plate used for the production of the first wares – in bone china – that carried the pattern. However, confusingly, the British Museum on-line catalogue description, presumably on the basis of information recorded in the 1909 registration of the design (537842), identifies the pattern as being the result of a collaboration between the Doulton Lambeth factory artist Francis Pope and its art director Joseph Mott.

Speculatively, Doulton's 'Maori Art' line may have resulted from an order placed by John Shorter, their Australasian agent. Resident in Australia since 1878, the Staffordshire-born Shorter, during the 1890s, became involved in the efforts of Richard T Baker, a graduate of the South Kensington Museum design training scheme and curator of the Technological Museum in Sydney, to promote the use of specifically Australian iconography in manufactured commodities destined for the Australian market. The idiom identified by Baker as being uniquely ‘Australian’ was its flora; Shorter’s embrace of the 'Australian flora in art' cause focused on the upper end of the market and included boldly painted porcelain and earthenware vases and plates. 

Doulton was not unique in its efforts to employ Australian iconography on products specifically identified for the local market. Other British manufacturers, such as Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, also produced Australian lines, although not so exclusively and not so visually effective. Wedgwood, for example, produced from around 1882 a cream-coloured earthenware ‘Australian flora’ range decorated with painted transfer prints probably derived from botanical monographs. The qualitative difference between the productions of the two British companies seems to lie in the work of an exiled French Communard painter Lucien Henry, resident in Sydney from the late 1880s until his death in 1896. Whether he realised his role or not, the Beaux Arts trained Henry effectively reconfigured visual perspectives of colonial markets; from the documentary to the aesthetic.

From the 1840s until the early 1980s, British ceramic manufacturers dominated the New Zealand tableware market. Their goods entered the country under preferential trade tariffs that subjected non-British competitors to a range of swingeing taxes and duties. They also had an unrivalled network of local agents, but, most significantly, it was their close relationship with the London-based distribution firms who, until the advent of readily available illustrated media, controlled the British export market and, effectively, determined what New Zealand consumers knew about and purchased.

This cartel-like network was reinforced during the three major exhibitions held in the country between 1865 and 1925 which included representative displays from a number of  major British ceramic manufacturers, under either their own name or that of selected retailers. At the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition held in Dunedin, Doulton & Watts, the predecessor of Doulton & Co, exhibited under its own name while Josiah Wedgwood & Sons was represented by the Bond Street ceramic retailers William P and George Phillips; Pinder Bourne, the predecessor company of what became Doulton & Co’s Burslem plant, were shown by a local agent, M Calvert of Dunedin.

Unidentified photographer, '[The British court at the New Zealand International Exhibition]', about 1906. While the overall quality of the British court was disappointing, the impressive Doulton stand was located at the rear of the court.
Christchurch City Libraries

The 1906-07 New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch again saw British firms dominating the commercial displays of ceramics either in their own right or under the aegis of local agents. Doulton exhibited both in the British government's fine arts pavilion and in the commercial court; its wares forming a significant component of the display put together by a local retailer, John Bates & Co. James Cowan, editor of the exhibition record, declared in awed tones that the Doulton display was ‘the finest of all […] some of these masterpieces of the designer’s and potter’s arts, were priced as high as £500 each ($78,424 in today’s terms).’ (J Cowan, Official record of the New Zealand International Exhibition of arts and industries, held at Christchurch, 1906-7 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1910), p. 299).

'Kia-Ora Ware' stoneware jardiniere. Made by Doulton & Co, Lambeth, England, about 1930.
Christie's

Doulton & Co appear to have produced two lines specifically for the exhibition: ‘Maori Ware’ and ‘Maori Art’. ‘Maori Ware’, later re-labelled ‘Kia-Ora Ware’, was produced in salt-glazed stoneware at the Lambeth factory, notwithstanding the Auckland Museum's erroneous identification of it it as being produced in Burslem. Its decoration – which resembles more closely the work of Joseph Mott - consists of a series of contrastingly coloured reliefs, loosely based on Māori carving. ‘Maori Art’, by contrast, reproduced kōwhaiwhai with a degree of accuracy and was produced initially in bone china at Burslem. 

Unidentified photographer, 'Hongi at the inner pā at the New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch', [1906-07].
National Library of New Zealand, reference no. 1/1-022026-G

Doulton’s decision to deploy Māori-derived designs for its Christchurch display conformed to a wider cultural agenda. From the first of the great international exhibitions, the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, British colonial authorities and, later, New Zealand settler governments employed Māori cultural artefacts not only to promote the colony as a destination for immigration and, later, tourism but also to emphasise the country's difference from other outposts of empire. From the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition until the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition, the scale of these displays of the taonga of ‘subjugated’ Māori expanded to include wharenui. Inspired by displays of colonised people at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, a decision was made at the Christchurch exhibition to supplement a contrived display of indigenous material culture with Māori themselves. (B Kernot, ‘Māoriland metaphors and the model pā’, in Farewell colonialism: the New Zealand International Exhibition Christchurch, 1906-07, ed. by J M Thomson (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1998), 61-78.) For Pākehā, Māori presence and symbolism at the exhibition served settler need for a unique identity and iterated a sense of hegemony over what was perceived of as a ‘dying race’. By appropriating the iconography of a culture that was not their own, the Doulton wares reinforced that Galtonian view.

The British Museum’s earthenware plate was apparently produced for the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition held at Dunedin in 1925-26. The preeminent focus of the exhibition was the British government pavilion, organised by the British Department of Overseas Trade and the Federation of British Industry, both organisations legacies of pre-war Board of Trade attempts to reform British industry. It included: a ‘Hall of Empire’; an ‘Historical Relics Gallery, which included costume and electrotype reproductions of historical silver from the Victoria and Albert Museum, archaeological relics from the Guildhall Museum and models of British cathedrals lent by the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral; Naval, Army and Air Force galleries; and an ‘Industrial Art Gallery’ organised by yet another Board of Trade initiative, the British Institute of Industrial Art.

Hugh & G K Neill, ' The Hall of Empire [in the British government pavilion at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin, 1925-26]'.
G E Thomson, Official record of the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition (Dunedin: Otago Master Printers' Association, [1926])

The over-riding sense conveyed by the exhibition generally was one of imperial recycling and Doulton & Co, rebranded in 1922 as ‘Royal Doulton’, entered into this zeitgeist by using the Dunedin exhibition to launch recycled Māori patterned wares: ‘Maori Art’, produced in earthenware at the failing Lambeth factory, was given a fashionable, buttery yellow ground. Contrary to the claims of the British Museum label, if any display in the New Zealand pavilion at the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley influenced the design of Doulton products it was probably the colour of  its ‘reasonably decent show of butter and cheese’, rather than its tokenist displays of decontextualised and misappropriated Māori art.

Fleetway Press Ltd, 'New Zealand pavilion British Empire Exhibition 1924'.
The only identifiable New Zealand-sourced items in this postcard view of the façade of the pavilion are the cabbage tree/tī kōuka (Cordyline australis) and the flax/harakeke (Phormium tenax) in the foreground garden

Glitches in the modernist narrative

In 1988, in the midst of the bicentennial celebrations of European settlement in Australia, in what was the first critical attempt to evaluate the place of design in Australian history, Tony Fry - a lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Power Institute of Fine Arts - pointedly observed that: ‘From the way design has been written about in Australia, and how this writing exists in relation to a textual field from the metropolitan centres of modernity, it can be clearly seen that like much else the cultural and economic nature of design has been a product of the elsewhere.’ (Tony Fry, Design history Australia (1988), p. 77).  Fry’s observation is even more acutely applicable to the place of design in New Zealand: despite recent attempts to confect an ersatz genealogy of design history in New Zealand, the country’s design culture effectively frames a dislocated space.

Alfred Appleby Longden in Christchurch in 1907

Every now and then, one comes across an oddity, an uncharacteristic glitch, in the received narrative of metropolitan modernity. One such instance occurred in Christchurch between 1906 and 1907 and it concerns a temporarily employed British official, Alfred Appleby Longden (1875-1954), who had been despatched by the British Board of Trade to supervise the installation of British works of art and craft at the New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries.  In terms of an understanding of the modernist imperative, Longden is of relative insignificance, but for much of his working life he serendipitously, found himself associated with the emergence of key institutional indicators in the emergence of design as an identifiable set of discrete processes.

British art section: arts and crafts in the British government display at the New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch, 1906-7. 
Christchurch City Libraries

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Longden, after working as an art master in Sunderland, was recruited by the Board of Trade as an exhibition assistant, probably for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St Louis. He was then sent to Christchurch where he stayed from September 1906 until June 1907, evidently enjoying himself. Aside from his substantive work installing and running the British fine arts section of the exhibition, he toured the country, painted watercolours, judged exhibitions and fancy dress parades, identified ‘lost masterpieces’ by Watteau, Rembrandt and Turner and opined on the state of the arts in New Zealand. On his return to the United Kingdom he was appointed director of the Aberdeen Corporation Art Gallery and then, in 1912, was once again recruited by the Board of Trade for its newly established Exhibitions Branch.

In the aftermath of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 British manufacturers were increasingly disinclined to exhibit their products at the great international exhibitions. There was a growing belief that exhibitions were no longer sales opportunities but entertainments for the masses: panem et circenses sort of stuff that satisfied political rather than commercial needs. While there was some validity in the manufacturers’ complaints, the more probable reason for their disinterest was that British wares were consistently outclassed by the output of German, French and American producers and their displays outshone by those of the same nations, which were organised and subsidised by the state.

The British government hubristically concluded that the fine arts were probably the best way the country could maintain a presence at these increasingly showy displays of international one-upmanship. The decision was influenced by the activities of the art entrepreneur Isidore Spielmann (1854-1925) who, from the 1890s actively promoted British art, initially in a private capacity, but later as a representative of the British government. Spielmann’s great moment came in 1906 when David Lloyd George, president of the Board of Trade appointed a committee to enquire into ‘The participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions’. Spielmann was appointed a member; his recruitment was made on the recommendation of Hubert Llewellyn Smith (1864-1945), the recently appointed permanent secretary of the Board who, inter alia, had an obsessive interest in the industrial arts.

After almost a year’s deliberation the committee reported back recommending the establishment of an exhibitions branch to co-ordinate British representation at international exhibitions. A critical factor in the committee’s decision was the success of the British art exhibit at Christchurch (sales exceeded those made at all previous exhibitions) and ‘the small and unrepresentative nature of the trade exhibits’, allegedly the consequence of ‘distance and the want of market’. As his reward, Spielmann was appointed honorary (unpaid) director of art of the newly established organisation. 

The Exhibitions Branch was a game-changer: for the first time the resources of the state were harnessed to the promotion of British industry under the direction of the state, rather than the manufacturer, individually or collectively. This separation of role between producer and promoter laid the grounds for the emergence of design as a discrete process in the production and consumption of commodities.

Once formed – in 1908 – the Exhibitions Branch took charge of the appearance of British displays at international exhibitions, not only in terms of the venue but also of the selection of items. The branch’s taste was conservative: the pavilions it built were either faked-up replicas of historic British buildings or grand, imperial confections – the British School in Rome, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was constructed as the British Fine Art Palace for the 1911 Esposizione internazionale dell'arte in Rome. The contents chosen to fill these halls were equally traditional, academy paintings and, daringly, the whittled, bashed, blown and woven essays of the members of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society.

The work of the Exhibitions Branch was suspended soon after the start of the First World War. While it was resurrected after the war it also prompted the formation of the British Institute of Industrial Art (1919) which morphed into the Council for Art and Industry (1936) which in turn was transmogrified into the Council for Industrial Design (1944) - now known as the Design Council – which, in turn was one of the inspirations for the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (1967). A full circle, if you like.

As for AA Longden: at the outbreak of war he joined up and, as an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery, was awarded a DSO and twice mentioned in dispatches; for the rest of his life he was known as Major Longden. After the war he was employed as director of the British Institute of Industrial Art (another Llewellyn Smith innovation) until that was defunded in 1923. That same year he returned to working on exhibitions, being appointed assistant director (applied art) for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. After the uncertainty of the Institute, Longden seems to have enjoyed himself both as one of the selectors of the British fine art exhibits and as cicerone to visiting worthies. These included the Australian architect John Sulman who took his advice in assembling a collection of 'cheap applied arts' which he intended as a gift for the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sulman's generosity was rejected by the gallery trustees and ended up at the Sydney Technological Museum (now the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, known colloquially as the Powerhouse Museum, after its principal venue) where, in the 1950s, it was dispersed and, in part, disposed of as being of little value; the remaining material has been reassembled subsequently.

A selection of John Sulman's 'cheap applied arts', mostly acquired in London in August 1924
 on the advice of  Major AA Longden.
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Following his success at Wembley and having wangled a transfer back to the successor body of the Exhibitions Branch, the Exhibitions Division of the Department of Overseas Trade, Longden worked on a series of international and imperial exhibitions throughout the 1920s and 30s, in the process seemingly ingratiating himself with various authoritarian regimes (he was made a knight grand officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1938). In 1936 he was appointed joint secretary of the Council for Art & Industry but his genial incompetence infuriated its chairman Frank Pick and so he was despatched to the recently established British Council where, as secretary of its Fine Arts Committee, he survived until his retirement in 1947. His last job, at the age of 72, was as director of the Wernher Collection, an extraordinary assemblage of nineteenth century nouveau riche taste and Romanov trinkets then housed at Luton Hoo and he was still there when he died in 1954.