Enjoying William Morris

Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960
National Portrait Gallery, London
16 October 2014 – 11 January 2015

On the face of things, William Morris (1834-1896) doesn’t seem to have much of a profile in New Zealand. As a promoter of the arts and crafts movement, which, together with John Ruskin, he founded, he’s a reference, a distant source of an idea. His work as a poet, printer and a political activist, is pretty much ignored probably for the same vicarious reasons. His productions of textiles and furniture, as retailed through Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later Morris & Co), were with the odd exception (the book collector Alexander Turnbull being the notably odd exception) too expensive for the thrifty burghers of the colony and, with its socialist resonances, too devoid of imperial glory for the grandees of the dominion. While his romantic mediaeval-revival poetry and sagas found some passing New Zealand adherents in the early years of the twentieth century, they were known through cheap posthumous editions, not through the beautifully crafted editions from his Kelmscott Press; only Turnbull was financially enabled to collect those. Strangely enough, it was Morris' theorising about art that had impact in the colony, largely by its promulgation through an inadvertent process of colonialism: art education.

John Dearle for Morris & Co. Stained and painted glass window, 1910-1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased with the assistance of the Charles Disney Art Trust Fund, 2010 (GH020700)

A man who has prompted multiple biographies, Morris and his productions appear in most major collections of art and design although there aren't many of those in New Zealand. The tokenist holdings of Morris-related material in the Auckland Museum include a printed curtain, posthumously produced by Morris & Co and a 'Rossetti' chair, marketed by Morris & Co (both acquired in the 1980s). Te Papa's holdings include a stained glass window produced by Morris & Co and a sketch design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for another Morris & Co window. Morris' designs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. In 2008 the Christchurch Art Gallery was the venue for Morris & Co: the world of William Morris assembled by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the one Antipodean institute with a significant holding of his work. The focus of these exhibitions has been on Morris’s work as a designer of textiles, furniture and private-press books and on his firm's retailing of carefully co-ordinated, expensively-produced, commodities for the well-upholstered interiors of the privileged classes.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is the – perhaps surprising – venue for the exhibition Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960, curated by the independent historian Fiona MacCarthy, author of one of the more definitive recent biographies of Morris, William Morris: a life for our time (London : Faber, 1995).  Unlike its predecessor exhibitions Anarchy and beauty investigates the political dimension of Morris' design activities and the impact they had not only on his contemporaries but also on the subsequent generations of theorists, agitators, designers, planners, makers and retailers. Even with its British focus, the exhibition promotes an impressive genealogy, even if some of the more connective elements of the table are missing.

Where, for example, is that great implementer of Morris' ideology, Hubert Llewellyn Smith? Smith underwent a Damascene conversion to Morris' vision after attending a lecture 'Art and democracy' given by Morris, under the aegis of Ruskin, in the hall of University College, Oxford, in November 1883. He was so inspired that he became a Toynbee Hall pedagogue, a protégé of the Webbs, the effective founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts (by way of his 1893 report on technical education for the London County Council), the founding secretary of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade and the patron of William Beveridge, the originator – in 1908 – of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade and hence a whole line of state-sponsored design promotional organisations up to today's neutered Design Council.

Walter Crane. Bookplate design for Alexander Turnbull, 1891.
Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand (A-136-001) 

So in this glorious rag bag of those influenced by Morris' ideology we get the designer Walter Crane (represented in the exhibition among other things by his design of the membership card of the Hammersmith Socialist Society) and the socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist and early LGBT activist Edward Carpenter (represented by his Indian-made sandals) ; the anarchist geographer and philosopher Prince Pyotr Kropotkin; the Suffragette painter Sylvia Pankhurst and the stained glass artist Mary Lowndes; the painter and potter William de Morgan and the silver designer, architect and pedagogue C R Ashbee (a magnificent silver peacock brooch he designed for his long-suffering wife); the priapic calligrapher and designer Eric Gill and Ebenezer Howard, the architect and planner who developed the idea of the garden city. Leaping well into the twentieth century we encounter the furniture and textile designers Robin and Lucien Day, the industrial designer Misha Black and, lastly and certainly not in his view leastly, the retailer Terence Conran. But, as the Guardian's Rachel Cooke observes, despite all this plenitude of names and associated objects, it's fundamentally all about 'Morris, the fat spider, who sits at the heart of the web constructed by the exhibition's curator, Fiona MacCarthy'. It's Morris' insistence on the availability to all of objects that are both utilitarian and beautiful and that the acquisition of manual skills is not only essential to a well-rounded life but also a life-enhancing political act. In Morris case, beauty was to be found in the relics of Mediaeval Europe, later adherents to his thinking found it elsewhere.

David Kindersley after a design by Eric Gill, 'Adam and Eve' garden roller, Portland stone and iron.
Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery)

It's in Ann Calhoun's impressively researched book The arts and crafts movement in New Zealand 1870-1940: women make their mark (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000) that we are able to understand both the impact that Morris had in New Zealand and, in part, why this legacy has been so ignored by local historians of art and design.

Design and its relation with manufacturing was an issue that had been a concern of the British state long before Morris began delving into its roots. From the late 1830s, the British government began establishing Schools of Design around the country aimed primarily at improving the quality of design and thus of industrial production. By the 1850s responsibility for overseeing the curricula for these schools was controlled via the Department of Science and Art's South Kensington Museum. As Calhoun notes, Morris became an adviser to the South Kensington Museum in 1876 and was appointed an examiner, a position he retained until his death. In the absence of any local initiative, this British art training system was imported directly into New Zealand through the establishment of local art schools – with minimal government involvement – who employed not only graduates of the South Kensington National Art Training School but also its teaching methodologies and examinations. Given the non-existence of any significant manufacturing industry in the colony and thus an associated class of 'skilled artisans' the majority of those attending these schools tended to be women and the focus of their education tended to be domestic and/or appropriate for the teaching of primary school children; drawing was an required to be taught in New Zealand schools under the terms of the 1877 Education Act.

'British art section - arts and crafts', from Isidore Spielmann, The British government exhibit at the New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-1907 (London: HMSO, 1908), p. 243. The frieze circumventing the rooms was designed by Walter Crane

Arts and crafts productions did however receive considerable popular exposure and even some acclaim in 1906-07, at the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch, but these were British made, selected by Walter Crane in his capacity as president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Crane's role didn't require him to visit visit New Zealand – he was represented at the exhibition by Alfred Appleby Longden – but he also designed the frieze used on the walls of the exhibit, although he'd executed it for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St Louis in the United States. The inclusion of these arts and crafts pieces in the exhibition seems to have been the result of significant lobbying by Hubert Llewellyn Smith in his then capacity as acting permanent secretary of the British Board of Trade. They were an highly popular component of the exhibition: many pieces sold, 321 articles by 72 exhibitors. However, as Calhoun observes, the exhibit was 'very English' and a colonial hankering for reasonably-priced relics from 'home' may have accounted for the popularity of the pieces, few of which have been identified subsequently.

Effectively, by being stripped of its political dimension, gendered as a feminine concern and its promulgation confined to the genteel middle classes, Morris' noisy, rumbustious, socialist, all people and all classes, hands-on arts and crafts movement failed to flourish in colonial New Zealand. As Calhoun's text demonstrates, there were some enormously talented designers and makers, but the marginality of art and the absence of any viable market for their productions effectively put an end to any dream of living by their work.

Charles James Fox after a design by May Morris. Memorial case of gold-plated wood containing a locket of William Morris' hair, 1896-97
Victoria & Albert Museum

As Anarchy and beauty clearly demonstrates such was not to be Morris' British legacy. His socialism may have been overtaken by larger political events, but its core values remain a part of British political discourse. His furniture, textile and wallpaper productions may have been dismissed for much of the twentieth century as old-fashioned (Morris & Co finally closed in 1940) but the objects he designed and made, as indeed are those of his followers and adherents are highly sought after and many of the textiles and wallpapers remain in production. MacCarthy's intelligently structured, slyly witty (not the usual experience one imparts from a serious exhibition), brilliantly contextualised and beautifully selected exhibition shows the vitality of Morris' thinking and, indeed, its relevance to today. Appropriately, it's also well-designed and is accompanied by an equally rewarding catalogue. A must see, if you can get there.

The joy of Danish design

Notwithstanding the fact that Danish design appears to be a current favourite of at least one New Zealand auction house (it forms a significant component of Art + Object's Nordic design sale on 22 October 2014), in the unlikely event that New Zealanders give much thought to the history of the subject, it’s most probable they’ll opine it emerged, fully formed, with the architect Arne Jacobsen’s well-known Myren stol (Ant chair) in 1951. There may be some slight awareness of earlier design endeavours including, possibly, a conflation of Scandinavian design (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) with Finnish design and a vague recollection of the work of the influential modernist Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). In terms of accuracy, this is probably on a par with believing that New Zealand comprises the pristine, clean, green paradise of the Saatchi and Saatchi ‘100% Pure’ advertising campaign for Tourism New Zealand, rather than the deeply compromised colonial landscape of pest plants and animals, factory farming, industrial forestry and motorways that it has become. It's always difficult to correct ill-informed myths.

Outsider views of the development of Danish design have tended to reflect its marketing as a thoroughly modern, contemporary, phenomenon. This stance is not entirely uncommon; most people tend not to think of the historical antecedents of the objects they commonly surround themselves with. In Denmark things are a little different thanks, in part to a long-standing educational programme about design that dates from the establishment of the Royal Danish Academy, Det Kongelige Danske Skildre-, Billedhugger- og Bygnings-Academie i Kiøbenhavn (now known generally as Kunstakademiet), in 1754. This programme of design pedagogy gained significant momentum following the striking success of Den Nordiske Industri-, Landbrugs- og Kunstudstilling, the Nordic industrial, agricultural and art exhibition, which was held in Copenhagen in 1888. In the aftermath of the exhibition and inspired by the activities of the Paris-based Union des Arts Décoratifs, a collaboration between Danish industrialists, artists and historians sponsored the establishment in 1890 of a museum of Danish design, Det Danske Kunstindustrimuseum (known, more colloquially, as Kunstindustrimuseet). Since 2011, the museum has been known by the gimmicky neologism Designmuseum Danmark.

Originally located near the Tivoli pleasure gardens, the museum moved in 1926 into the restrained rococo premises of the former kongelige Frederiks hospital (Nicolai Eigtved/Laurids de Thurah, 1752-57) on Bredgade (the hospital is best known to history as the place where Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855), near Eigtved’s equally delightful and better-known Amalienborg palace (1750). The conversion of an eighteenth century hospital into a twentieth century museum of design was undertaken by the furniture designer Kaare Klint (1888-1954) and the architect Ivar Bentsen(1876-1943). The integrity of their redesign of the hospital space remained intact until recently suggesting not only the simplicity of their re-arrangement of the space and its flexibility but also the enduring quality of their design.

A remnant display of late nineteenth century Danish design in the galleries developed by Kaare Klint and Ivar Bentsen in Kunstindustrimuseet. The glass cases along the right wall were also designed by Klint

The museum’s collection reflects both the extraordinary creativity of Danish designers and makers over the past two and a half centuries as well as the scholarship and research interests of not only its curatorial staff but also that of major donors to the collection over the past 125 years such as Hugo Halberstadt whose collection of Japanese arms and armour – given to the museum in 1941 – was, in the estimation of Nobuo Ogasawara of the National Museum of Japan, ‘one of the finest collections of its kind anywhere in the world’. The museum’s collection of Asian and European ceramics, while relatively small when compared with those of, say the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is encyclopedic and of a notably high quality. Moreover, the museum has one of the most comprehensive (and delightful) libraries of decorative arts and design to be found anywhere in the world.

Twentieth century furniture displays dating from the early 2000s located within the intact Klint and Bentsen galleries

However, along with its change of name, the museum seems to have decided that Danish design is best represented by exhibitions of modern Danish furniture and its current displays reflect this partial belief. Alongside a long-installed gallery of twentieth century Danish furniture, the museum is currently showing three temporary furniture exhibitions: Øvelse gør mester: Kaare Klints møbelskole (Practice makes perfect: Kaare Klint’s furniture school), which focuses on Klint's pedagogical activities; Møbler til folket! Børge Mogensen 100 år (Furniture for the people! Børge Mogensen’s centenary); and Wegner: bare een god stol/just one good chair, a comprehensive exhibition devoted to the work of Hans Wegner (1914-2007) curated by Christian Holmsted Olesen.

The Wegner exhibition, which runs until December 2014 and comprises some 132 objects, is the most scholarly and the best displayed of the three temporary exhibitions. The exhibition is complemented by a meticulously researched and illustrated catalogue that, conveniently, is available in an English language version. The Klint exhibition (on display until February 2015) is undermined by an obscure take on the subject, intrusive exhibition design and a touching belief in the effectiveness of electronic gadgetry. The Møgensen exhibition is comprehensively overwhelmed by the others.

Unidentified photographer, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States of America, seated in Hans Wegner's 1949 designed 'Den runde stol (The round chair)' in 1960. The chair was manufactured in oak by Johannes Hansen Møbelsnedkeri.
Designmuseum Danmark

From a marketing perspective Wegner was the archetypal post-war Danish designer. Aside from his sheer productivity, the popularity of his designs in the United States, particularly during the 1950s and 60s, prompted a massive expansion in the export of Danish furniture around the world. The notable exception to this trend was in New Zealand and Australia where protectionist tariffs and import licensing regimes made its acquisition financially unfeasible for most consumers. Would-be Antipodean consumers of modernist furniture in the 1950s and 60s had to put up with what, more often than not, were shabbily-produced, pirated travesties of the Danish originals. Contemporary Antipodean consumers of modernist Danish furniture might be well-advised to visit the exhibition before indulging their tastes. If that proves impossible, then the acquisition of Olesen's impressive book would be an adequate, if less tangible, substitute. 

It's unfortunate that in pursuit of it's recently announced strategy 'of pursuing alternative exhibition and communication approaches' and re-jigging itself as a 'central exhibition venue', Designmuseum Danmark has decided to move its public focus from a collection that provided it with a unique identity and fostered a remarkable, scholarly, research culture. The museum's pursuit of the chimera of public relevance is hardly unique  – witness the sad spectacle of the V&A's social media-driven 'rapid response collecting strategy' – but it's depressing to see it being embraced with such unreflective abandon. 

An incidental impetus?

Milner Gray (1899-1997), logo for the Society of Industrial Artists, about 1933

In April 1949 the New Zealand Listener published a short article by the poet, lecturer, textile printer, music critic and general gadfly A R D Fairburn entitled ‘Art and industry’. Seen from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the article has good claim to represent a bit of a threshold moment in the history of design in New Zealand as it was probably the first time the subject of industrial design was raised in a popular forum, rather than in specialist publications such as Home & Building, The Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand or the recently launched New Zealand Design Review.

Probably the first popular discussion of industrial design in New Zealand. A R D Fairburn, 'Art and industry',
New Zealand Listener, 20: 513 (22 April 1949), p. 8

Fairburn’s article discussed a visit to New Zealand by the British industrial designer Milner Gray, then president of the Society of Industrial Artists, a design practitioner body formed in 1930 'to advance and protect the interests of [designers] and to raise the standard of [design] in [Britain]'. Between 28 March and 10 April 1949, under the aegis of the British Council – the propaganda arm of the British government, Gray delivered a series of lectures on aspects of industrial design to audiences in Auckland and Wellington. Fairburn’s article, while the only critical commentary, wasn’t the only published record of Gray’s New Zealand expedition. His itinerary was tracked in the newspapers – in the women’s columns (‘Housewives helped by good design’, Auckland Star (29 March 1949), p. 3.) – and abridged versions of his lectures were subsequently published in the Wellington-based Design Review and some months later in Modern Manufacturing and the New Zealand Manufacturer as well as in The Australian Artist; Gray's tour also encompassed Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of Design Review, 2:2 (August-September 1949). Gray's visit coincided with the Architectural Centre's commissioning Taylor to re-package the New Zealand Design Review. Taylor's cover design incorporates one of Gray's pre-war designs; the issue contained an abridged transcript of Gray's lecture 'Package design in Great Britain' 

These reports and transcripts were for some time the only published records of Gray’s fortnight-long visit. Notwithstanding the singularity of the event, Gray's foray into the Antipodes has been excised from his biographies as being of no relevance to his role in creating design as an identifiable practice. From a New Zealand perspective, the visit subsequently became something of an embarrassment and the presence of one of the key figures in British design circles, was, until recently, air-brushed from the history of design in New Zealand, possibly because it was considered a diversion from the emerging national design discourse. In part, this reflected political reality. Some seven months after Gray left for Sydney, a conservative National party government was elected. The new administration had no interest in design matters and withdrew the scant funds that had been previously made available in the fields both of research and promotion on the grounds that subsidising such activities was inappropriate in a country whose primary function was to export the barely processed products of grass and to import the manufactured commodities of the ‘mother’ country.

Gray's lecture 'The industrial design profession in Great Britain'was published in the winter 1949 edition of The Australian Artist, edited by Richard  Haughton James, the first president of the Melbourne-based practitioner body, the Society of Designers for Industry. Reference to Gray's text is made on the upper left of the cover

The idea of sending someone to the Antipodes to talk about design generally and British design specifically seems to have occurred to British Council in early 1948. Design was not an unknown field to the council. The influential secretary of its Fine Arts Committee until late 1947, Alfred Appleby Longden, had been involved in a number of the British government’s design promotion initiatives since 1906; the committee's long-standing chairman was Eric McLagan, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and, prior to the Second World War, a member of the Council for Art and Industry. However, the most notable exponent of design in the committee was the ubiquitous Kenneth Clark, formerly director of the National Gallery and an active member of the Board of Trade sub-committee that, in 1943, had recommended the formation of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID); the Council came into being in December 1944. Clark was, incidentally, from 1945-47, adviser to the Melbourne National Gallery of Victoria’s Felton Bequest and was a close friend of the recently appointed Herald Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, Joseph Burke – formerly private secretary to the British prime minister Clement Attlee – who had not only been involved in the formation of the CoID but was also acquainted with key members of a recently-established, design practitioner body, the Melbourne-based Society of Designers for Industry (SDI). 

In March 1948 Violet Merriman of the Lectures Department at the British Council, approached Cycill Tomrley, design advice officer at the CoID seeking advice as to who might be recruited as ‘a practical speaker with a knowledge of the distributive and selling side of consumer goods as well as the design side, so that he (sic) is equipped to inform and enlighten any sort of audience even the specialist trade audiences and students of design, rather than discuss the social and theoretical aspect of industrial design’ (University of Brighton Design Archives, 85/12, Memo from C Tomrley to M Hartland Thomas, 06 April 1948). After extended discussions with the CoID and having rejected a number of the proffered candidates – such as Bill Newman, editor of the retail trade journal Store – the British Council finally selected Gray.

Milner Gray (1899-1997) for A J Wilkinson Ltd, 'Bizarre for Clarice Cliff' earthenware plate, 1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. Gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001946)
CC BY-NC-ND license

As a practicing designer, Gray was perhaps not the obvious candidate for a tour of the frontiers of what was still referred to as 'the Empire'. His urbanity and wit were qualities not usually held in high regarded in provincial circles, but he was an articulate speaker and an effective motivator. He had been the key figure not only in the establishment in the late 1920s of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), the most enduring design practitioner body in Britain but also in its post-war reconstruction. During the Second World War, Gray had been appointed head of the Exhibitions Branch and principal design adviser at the Ministry of Information. He also played a part in the formation of the CoID where he both acted as an advocate for design practitioners as well as contributing to the understanding of what design entailed amongst those directly responsible for its formation. In 1942, together with Misha Black, Marcus Brumwell and Herbert Read, he founded one of the most successful twentieth century British design consultancies, Design Research Unit.

Unidentified photographer, Meeting of the Design Research Unit's board of associated designers, March 1948. In what seems to be a parody of the iconography of the Christian 'last supper', Gray is seated third from the left
From M Cotton, Design Research Unit 1942-72 ([London]: Koenig Books, [2010]

British Council tours of the Antipodes – which began in 1946 following a change in government foreign policy – had hitherto focussed on exporting British cultural values: music, art, the theatre and literature. In 1947 the Old Vic Theatre Company, led by Lawrence Oliver and Vivien Leigh, and the Boyd Neel Orchestra toured Australia and New Zealand to considerable acclaim and profit. In 1948, the Council exhibited Henry Moore drawings and sculpture in the Australian state capitals – although not in New Zealand – again and surprisingly, to popular acclaim. This new proposal for a design-focussed tour with ‘a practical speaker’ was, as Merriman acknowledged ‘rather the opposite of what one would expect of the British Council’.  

The rationale behind the British Council's design tour is obscure but it is evident that it was not prompted by any specific recognition of an interest in design emanating from either Australia or New Zealand, notwithstanding the emergence of a modernist design discourse in both countries. While the British Council’s representative in Wellington, John Bostock, was undoubtedly aware of the activities of the Architectural Centre and its publication the New Zealand Design Review, this was not a factor in the Council’s decision. Moreover, the decision to add a New Zealand leg onto Gray's touring schedule seems to have resulted from concerns in the newly-established Wellington office of the British Council that New Zealand businesses and consumers were increasingly swayed by United States influences. In 1946 New Zealand negotiated a settlement of its Lend-Lease Agreement debts with the United States in a manner that ensured the acceded funds –  some USD4million –  remained in the country, being used to acquire property locally and to foster cultural initiatives such as the United States Foreign Information Service (later the United States Information Agency) and the Fulbright Programme. As in Europe and Japan, assimilation of United States technologies and management methods largely stemmed from local manufacturers, businessmen and, to a lesser extent, officials from government agencies.

While design had next to no profile in New Zealand at government level, the British post-war Labour government saw design as a critical component of the country's export-led economic recovery programme. As Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of Trade, declared in a speech to the SIA in December 1945 'The efficiency of our industries depends to a very great extent upon our combining the latest results of scientific and industrial research on the part of large and small firms alike with an attractive and suitable appearance and shape.' (S Cripps, 'The industrial designer', Democracy alive (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1946), p. 87). Cripps' vision did not sit well with British manufacturers who, rather than subscribing to this brave, new world, reverted to manufacturing the sort of thing they had produced prior to the war, employing the same outmoded processes in the expectation that their overseas markets were as conservative as their taste. In an effort to overcome this opposition to innovation, Cripps inaugurated a series of working parties formed of representatives from both employer and employee organisations. A part of their brief was to address the issue of design and its applicability to industry. In the case of the Pottery Working Party, this move failed to gain the support of both manufacturers and the unionised workforce; it was rejected out of hand. Designers, the Pottery Working Party argued, should, primarily, be industry-trained and, in any case, 'Creative designers are born, not made'. The government's industry-based Design Centre proposals were summarily dismissed as something that might be contemplated in the future. (Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery (London: HMSO, 1946), p.23; p. 32.)

Reforming British industry or vindicating existing practices. Unidentified designer, cover of Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery 
(London: HMSO, 1946) 

Charged with articulating the government line, the CoID responded to the snub. Writing in the trade journal British Industries, its newly appointed director Gordon Russell asserted 'The Council is most anxious to be of service to industry and there is little doubt that there are many firms whose design standards are not good enough to maintain sales in the face of real competition. I was told the other day of a case in New Zealand where a consignment of a certain British commodity was being jobbed off at about 50 per cent of the ceiling price because the standard of design was low.' (G Russell, 'Britain a pioneer in design', British Industries, 35:5 (May 1948), p. 135.) Just as the success of the British fine arts pavilion at the Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906-07 had sparked a British government design initiative - the formation of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, so reports of trading failures in New Zealand seem to have prompted the British Council into entering into the field of design promotion.

In the eyes of the British Council Gray's fortnight in New Zealand passed off satisfactorily, almost successfully. In the afterglow, Fairburn declared that Gray had 'done more, perhaps, than any other man to raise the profession of industrial designing to its present high status', an observation that suggests he had been speaking to someone with direct experience of Gray's activities in the SIA - possibly his friend Eric Lee-Johnson. In both Auckland and Wellington Gray delivered four carefully scripted lectures to audiences of between 150 and 200 persons in Auckland and around 100 in Wellington, as well as undertaking radio interviews in both cities. Throughout his lectures Gray sought to counteract the perception that British design was deficient although he allowed that 'The design of cheap mass-produced articles is still, with few exceptions, as unsatisfactory in Great Britain as in most countries.' The problem, Gray asserted, lay both with manufacturers and designers and he argued that 'the approach to industrial design must be a synthesis of the three ideals of form and function, sales appeal and economic production–fitness for purpose, design for selling, and design for making.' (M Gray, 'Design in everyday life', New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949), p. 10).

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949). The most tangible record of Gray's visit was the 'Industrial Design Number' dedicated issue of the Design Review, which reproduced abridged transcripts of two of Gray's lectures.
New Zealand Electronic Text Collection 

But if the British Council was hoping that Gray's tour might prompt a resurgence of faith in British manufactured commodities they were sadly mistaken. Reporting on Gray's visit Bostock observed that 'owing to the pressure of other business, it was impossible for the Minister of Education and for the Minister of Industries and Commerce to meet Mr Gray'. Instead he was lunched by the governor general, Bernard Freyberg, attended 'a small cocktail party given by Mr Vernon Brown, architect and lecturer at the [Auckland] University [College], and attended by representatives of the University [...] and the Auckland Manufacturers' Association.' A meeting with members of the Manufacturers' Research Committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research led to a request for 'a small travelling Exhibition to illustrate good design'. Bostock speculated that Gray's tour might prompt the formation of a local 'Society of Industrial Artists, whose members would initially be drawn from the fields of Architecture and Art, there being no recognised Industrial Design Specialists as yet in this country.' Such a society, he opined, would probably 'reduce the "piracy" of designs which is at present widespread here.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Letter from J Bostock to Lectures Department, 12 April 1949).

Bostock's prognostication as to the incidental impetus Gray's visit might have on New Zealand design proved wrong. By the end of 1949 the Auckland Design Guild, 'an association providing for the exchange of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design', which had been established in the July following Gray's visit had folded on unrecognised ideological grounds; the incoming government had withdrawn the small subsidy provided to the Architectural Centre for publication of the Design Review; and New Zealand manufacturing companies, notably the newly established Crown Lynn brand, continued to pirate imperfect imitations of British commodities. Moreover, the production standards of British manufactures continued to be criticised: in July 1952 a National party backbencher, T P Shand, was moved to comment in the House of Representatives about the quality of imported British goods, declaring that 'I say to the English manufacturer and his agent in New Zealand that they are doing a very bad turn when they put rubbish on the market [...] we have had some shocking rubbish by way of English crockery in the last three or four years [...] I think it fair to say the the New Zealand manufacturers of crockery got blamed for some of it' (NZPD, vol. 297, (June- August 1952), pp. 86-87). By identifying the connection between manufacturer and importer, Shand got it right. The problem with British manufactures wasn't the deficiency of British design, but rather a deficiency in what was despatched to this, the least critical of consumer markets; Gray's 'cheap mass-produced articles', invariably retailed in New Zealand at highly inflated prices. 

In his post-visit report to the British Council, Gray was somewhat less sanguine than Bostock in his opinions, observing that 'No Australasian style of design in mass-produced goods has yet evolved, and in most cases it is evident that little or no thought has been given to the subject. There are few competent designers practicing in either Australia or New Zealand, and the present tendency is for those of outstanding ability to emigrate to the UK or USA, where greater opportunities are offered.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Memorandum from M Gray to the British Council, 21 April 1949). The British Council heeded Gray's advice; industrial design was subsequently deemed a subject best ignored when considering tours of New Zealand. It would take the best part of a decade before steps were taken to invest design with an independent institutional profile in New Zealand. 

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?