I went today to the V&A to see a couple of exhibitions that end this coming Sunday, Pearls and Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. I'd been meaning to go for ages, and even tried to line up one friend to come with me to see Pearls as long ago as last October, but they were ill and the proposed trip to London never materialised. Then life seemed to get very busy, December was so stormy that the trains could scarcely be depended on to run, and in the New Year I was ill. Now I've been, and there's so little time for you to go that there's not much point in my saying too much about the exhibitions, since if I make them sound lovely you may curse that you missed them, while if I make them sound dreary then who cares about them anyway?
Pearls was good but very crowded, and I can think of ways it could have been staged differently to speed up the flow while allowing people to see more of the exhibits. The V&A has borrowed a lot of jewellery, really a lot, and since I love pearls I was very keen to see them. There are also some portraits of people wearing pearls, and an introductory section about how natural pearls are formed, and some interesting displays on pearl diving, and a later section on the artificial pearls industry, but the actual gems are the real draw.
The snag is that they are artfully displayed in what look like nineteenth century safes, with the doors open, obviously. I was never quite sure whether they were real safes, or if they had been built specially for the occasion, since there were an awful lot of them, but you weren't allowed to touch them to see if they were heavy enough to be real. Pearls in a black lined cabinet look sublime, but the layout meant that only about three people could look at each display at any one time. Visitors were stacked nose to tail as we politely shuffled around, but I spent a long time looking at the outsides of the safes while I waited my turn to get into a position where I could see inside. If the jewellery had been mounted in big perspex cabinets, with a dark cloth down the middle to provide a suitable background, we could all have spent more of our time looking at the exhibits and less looking at the furniture.
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting was altogether less crowded, and interesting in a visually subdued way. The exhibition starts with Buddhist religious art dating from the first millennium, then moves on to landscapes and flower paintings that to my untutored Western eye were more obviously Chinese. There are some splendid, vigorous, practically cartoonish dragons, and I was very taken with one large picture of a pomegranate tree, chrysanthemum, magpie and rooster. My main difficulty was that the light level needed to preserve the exhibits was so low that in some of them I really couldn't see the tiny boat, figures, donkey, or whatever detail the caption told me was important. A small and talkative American (or Canadian?) man made such determined efforts at conversation that I was not entirely sure whether he was simply lonely, or actually trying to chat me up.
I quite like the V&A, when I make the effort to get there. It is not really so very far, only a few stops further down the Piccadilly line than Piccadilly itself, or if I hadn't been running slightly late this morning I might have walked across the park from Hyde Park Corner. I'm not fond of it in the same way as I am of the British Museum, but that's probably because it isn't part of my regular stamping ground, and if I went oftener, and was more familiar with the layout (the internal signs are not great) I daresay I'd love it.
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