Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 29. (Budapest, 2013)

The Museum of Applied Arts in 2011-12

Art and Design for All - The Victoria

and Albert Museum

14th June - 16lh September 2012

Of all the exhibitions that took place in 2012 pride of place must go to the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition in Budapest. The Art and Design for All exhibition set out to show the birth of what was a new museum type in the middle of the 19th century, and to trace the history of applied arts museums through that of the Victoria & Albert Museum collection. The exhibition, curated by Julius Bryant and Marie-Louise von Plessen, was first shown in 2011 at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn. As the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest is one of the most important members of the applied art museum network based on the V&A model it had already played an important role at the Bonn exhibition. The exhibition in Budapest was realized in cooperation with these two institutions.

In the exhibition, the plans, paintings and the digital reconstruction of the Crystal Palace, together with a selection of objects that were exhibited there, served to illustrate how the 1851 London Great Exhibition led to the founding of the V&A. Visitors to the Budapest exhibition were then told how the new museum played a role in shaping public taste, tracing the debates surrounding the question of correct design principles from Henry Cole’s Examples of False Principles in Decoration of 1851 to the Arts and Crafts Movement. The role the V&A, and its predecessor the South Kensington Museum, played in education were illustrated with pencil studies, plaster casts and electrotype copies. The characteristic phases of the collection’s history were also covered: from the Great Exhibition purchases, the collection of Far Eastern and

4. Art and Design for All — The Victoria and Albert Museum

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