V&A East Storehouse, London
The Victoria & Albert’s new warehouse boasts a mind-boggling 250,000 artefacts. Our art critic tries its ‘order an object’ service and gets intimate with some national treasures – including ‘the biggest Picasso in the world’
• ‘The national museum of absolutely everything’: our architecture critic visits the Storehouse
On a table in a study room at the new V&A East Storehouse, a silk-embroidered Alexander McQueen dress decorated with Hieronymus Bosch paintings has been laid out for me to see intimately. Creatures from The Garden of Earthly Delights cavort and gurn in my face, including a bird monster perched on a high stool that defecates out sinners. Ah, the privileges of a critic – except it isn’t my special experience at all. This opportunity for a personal encounter with an exquisite object is available to everyone and anyone, free of charge, as part of this unprecedented reinvention of the Victoria & Albert Museum that is V&A East Storehouse. It isn’t even difficult to arrange. All you do is look up the collection online and, if an object is in the Storehouse, you add it to your cart of up to five treasures, place an order, and in a fortnight they will be available for your private delight.
You can choose anything from theatre posters to Renaissance paintings to shoes. If they’re movable they will be brought to the study room, if not you go to them. I recommend the Ajanta paintings in the ground floor storage facility where I found one towering over me, its damaged parts covered with what looked like sticking plasters, adding to the mystery of this great mass of red and green out of which emerge sharply portrayed people. It’s a full-size copy of one of the Ajanta cave paintings in India – one of 300 made for the V&A in the late 19th century by a team from Bombay School of Art.
Continue reading…
