Rediscovering a Gothic genius: the V&A’s great Pugin exhibition, thirty years on

On 15 June 1994, an exhibition opened at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum devoted to the life and work of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Now widely acknowledged as one of the key architects and designers of the early Victorian period, Pugin was described in a follow-up exhibition in New York in 1995 as “Master of Gothic Revival”. Three decades ago, things were rather different.

Pugin, though famous (and sometimes infamous) during his short and astonishingly creative life, gradually vanished from public consciousness following his death in 1852 at the age of 40. By the 20th century he was really only known to scholars, academics and design historians. Indeed, the V&A’s exhibition was the first major Pugin display since his Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The V&A had been thinking about a Pugin exhibition for some time, encouraged largely by the late Clive Wainwright, the museum’s senior research fellow in 19th-century studies and a great Pugin enthusiast. Things came to a head in 1991, thanks to generous sponsorship by the media company Pearson, for a two-exhibition package: first Pugin and then William Morris two years later. Wainwright, the obvious person to curate the Pugin exhibition, was not in the event able to do it, and so another curator had to be found – and quickly.

The first I knew about it was a phone call in April, asking me to come to the museum to discuss an exhibition. Though certainly no Pugin specialist, I did know quite a bit about 19th-century art, architecture and design. I was also known to the V&A, having been an external curator for two previous exhibitions; I knew what to do. In many ways this was as important as specialist knowledge of the subject, for the curator’s job was then wide-ranging and included things like budget, design and marketing as well as scholarship, the selection of objects, the arrangement of loans and the management of a major enterprise. Things are very different now, but I was given the job and left to get on with it, greatly aided by Wainwright, who was extraordinarily generous with his knowledge.

Exhibitions have to have a raison d’être and a set of aims. With Pugin it was very simple: to put him back where he belonged as one of the great architect-designers of the 19th century and one of the key figures in creating the “look” of modern Britain. There was also The Grange, the house he built for himself in Ramsgate, Kent, in the 1840s; it was then in private hands and facing a very uncertain future. This Grange had to be secured for the nation, partly because it was one of very few houses designed by an architect for his own use.

Getting to know Pugin was the starting point. This involved reading correspondence and his books; he was a great letter-writer and his missives are remarkable, eccentric, opinionated and valuable guides to his character – and to his views on design. He was also an outspoken polemicist with clear and often challenging views on architecture, design, society and religion. He was, of course, a fervent Catholic and his relationship with newly emancipated Catholicism determined his life and way of thinking. His major clients were the Catholic Church and the great British Catholic families.

Seeing his work was crucial and so, with the photographer Graham Miller, I set out to explore and document inside and out as many of Pugin’s buildings in Britain and Ireland as possible. During this great odyssey, I came to know Pugin quite well and began to understand how he thought, why he did things the way he did and to appreciate his working methods. The statistics are exceptional: six cathedrals, 40 churches, a range of other ecclesiastical buildings, houses and domestic interiors, and the decoration inside and out of the Palace of Westminster – all in a working life of 15 years.

Largely untrained, Pugin designed buildings and all their contents; he was a great traveller and collector with a passion for Gothic, which for him meant everything from Romanesque to the Renaissance. He wasn’t really a revivalist or a copyist of the past; rather, he believed absolutely that Gothic was the right style for a modern Britain, and used the past for historically accurate inspiration. He had no fear of the modern world and used machines and modern techniques whenever possible, while maintaining principles such as truth to materials, honesty and integrity in design and manufacturing and a respect for craftsmanship. He had no time for Classicism, which he regarded as deceitful and pagan.

Pugin’s passion for Gothic was comprehensive, but a key element was his under standing of colour. With his stained glass, wallpapers, textiles, tiling and metalwork, and aided by new technologies such as colour printing, he turned early Victorian Britain into a very colourful place. I knew from the start that this had to determine the style and look of the exhibition, and so the choice of designer was crucial.

In any exhibition the relationship between curator and designer is key: it is something often undervalued or overlooked. For the Pugin exhibition there was, as always, a competitive process. Out of three entries, one was dull and predictable and one was interesting but utterly impractical. The other came from John Outram, then a leading British post-modernist architect at the peak of his career.

At first John seemed an unlikely candidate, acknowledging freely that he knew little about Gothic, less about Pugin and had never designed an exhibition before. As an architect, however, he was famous for his use of colour and so had an instinctive grasp of what Puginian Gothic was all about.

It was immediately apparent to me, and luckily to others, that he was the obvious choice. He gave himself a crash course in Gothic, I told him all about Pugin and he quickly understood that an exhibition was temporary architecture. In September he submitted his first outline scheme, an explosion of Puginian colour and theatrical Gothic.

The detailed design meetings that followed were memorable, exciting and unpredictable, with ideas bouncing round the table: some great, some useful, some impractical and some just plain crazy. Pugin would have loved them, and particularly the way in which John, sitting at the head of the table, was continually and rapidly sketching out these thoughts in brightly coloured felt tip pens. Themes, ideas and selected objects came together as the final plans took shape; that excitement continued through the building process up to the exhibition’s opening. “Pugin”, ran one review, “founder of modernism, in a riot of polychromy at the V&A.”

A polymath of integrity, warmth and generosity, Pugin worked himself into an early grave. His reputation was maintained by subsequent generations of architects and designers through to the Arts and Crafts movement, but then he was largely forgotten. Sadly, within this was a strong element of anti-Catholicism. For their 15 years of work in creating the Palace of Westminster, Charles Barry received a knighthood and Pugin nothing; he died full of despair and a sense of failure.

Yet Pugin’s modern Gothic became in effect the style of state, with an enduring impact on Victorian Britain. Today, Pugin is known internationally as one of the key designers of the early Victorian era, and his legacy is widely acknowledged. Thrty years on, I think that it’s fair to say that the V&A’s seminal Pugin exhibition in 1994 achieved its primary aim. Not only that, but The Grange was saved – and is now in the care of the Landmark Trust.

Paul Atterbury is a writer, broadcaster and curator who is well-known for his work on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow

The post Rediscovering a Gothic genius: the V&A’s great Pugin exhibition, thirty years on first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Rediscovering a Gothic genius: the V&A’s great Pugin exhibition, thirty years on appeared first on Catholic Herald.