WITH the sort of discreet fanfare that is precisely in keeping with the majestic dignity of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), a new gallery — the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art — opened there in late August. The gallery, gutted and refurbished to show the museum’s collection of Islamic art to its best advantage, has a character that sets it apart from, yet is harmonious with, the rest of the V&A.
The refurbishment of the eponymous Gallery which was carried out for something in excess of SR35 million, was made possible by the generosity of the Abdul Latif Jameel Group and was made in memory of the founder of the group and his wife, Nafisa.
So why was a new gallery needed? With more than 10,000 objects in the Middle Eastern collection — 18,000 plus if you count all the potsherds — the V&A is an invaluable repository of Islamic art. The most prized of the objects — a dull word for such an exquisite work of art — is the Ardabil Carpet. The carpet spent the last 53 years on a wall behind glass but it is now the centerpiece of the new gallery.
The opening of the Jameel Gallery, said Tim Stanley, senior curator of Middle Eastern Collections at the V&A, happened at a time when the population of Britain has changed completely since 1950. “When this gallery was designed,” he said, “it was not designed for people who had no connection with the Islamic world — we designed it for British Muslims as well.” That he thought sent a message to visitors from abroad. “It’s a sort of ‘good news’ story about Islam. In the Western media at least there is too often nothing but bad news. People are encouraged to feel quite hostile to Islam.”
He hopes that they will be able to look at Islamic art from the past and recognize the greatness of the civilization in the medieval and early modern periods, how self-confident it was and how unique and beautiful the art was and how open it was to the outside world.
In the gallery are several items made by Muslim artists for Christian patrons. One remarkable piece that demonstrates the religious tolerance that existed in the Middle Ages is a cope, a vestment worn by a priest. Although a garment, the intricately woven cope is actually a carpet with the texture of velvet. The cope was in regular use but eventually became too worn to use. Clippings were taken from it to use as carpet samples. Some of them were restored to their original position in the 1920s/30s. “We’re hoping that some of the others will turn up some day.”
The whole history of the V&A is intimately linked to Islamic art and its derivative design. The collection was formed in 1852 when the museum was founded as part of a collection that would educate the taste of the British public in the hope that they would become more discriminating. It was to provide models to inform British art and industrial design — which was then thought to be very inferior to French industrial design.
Owen Johns gave the inaugural lectures at the opening of the museum. In 1852 he was Britain’s leading expert on Islamic art. He gave lectures on “the true and the false in decorative art” — promoting the idea of what was good in decorative art and it became the museum’s manifesto. He thought the type of art that best represented the principles he espoused was Islamic art — so he promoted Islamic art as examples to be followed. Thus, it is not surprising that the museum officials began to acquire such objects in the second part of the nineteenth century.
