THE PROFOUND SOUNDING yet plaintive questions: ‘Where am I? How do I find my way around? How can I find what I am interested in?’, echoing the title of Gauguin’s celebrated painting in Boston, could not be more pertinent at present for a visitor to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They are, in fact, taken verbatim from the currently available map to this famously intractable building, a colour-coded fold-out plan that bears 341 circles containing numbers or symbols, looking much like the map to a global underground railway network, guiding us from Europe to China, with halts at Silver, Raphael, Leighton and more, but all too frequently passing through a stop called Closed. New stations, however, are well underway with, for example, sculpture in Britain (chiefly, it appears, by Continental artists) opening this summer on the ground floor and, due in November, sacred silver and stained glass housed next to the National Art Library. But so extensive are the plans for the Museum’s future renovation and redisplay that a visit can be a baffling and fragmentary experience. We must, however, be patient, even stoical, during the next four or five years when, so we are told, the climax of the whole £30 million operation will take place with the opening of the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries in 2009.1

Several changes have already occurred as part of what the Museum calls its ‘FuturePlan’ and our purpose here is briefly to take stock of some of them within the context of what remains on view and of what is to come. The collections being so vast and various, there is still, fortunately, plenty to see and some of it is superbly displayed, even if sometimes tucked away on one of the building’s seven levels. But it is worth pausing for a moment on first entering the Museum from Cromwell Road. A visitor may well be greeted by the sounds of drilling and hammering; certainly he or she will be confronted by a wealth of ‘signage’ which includes two high, dangling screens with back-projected announcements of events and exhibitions. Discreet though it is, the yellow illuminated-panel installation by Eva Jiricna around the entrance’s revolving doors and, further inside, encircling the information desk, cannot be ignored. High above the latter, a cascading glass chandelier of wriggling pasta, happily only on loan to the V. & A., by the American glass-sculptor Dale Chihuly, partially obscures and oddly lights, as an alert visitor will notice, the view of George Gilbert Scott’s immense Gothic-revival screen rescued from Hereford Cathedral, up on the balcony-walkway ahead. To the left is the Museum shop; to the right a sculpture installation by the Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami (on show to 5th June); beyond, the low-ceilinged space that until recently contained medieval art stands empty, pondering on its imminent transformation into the Museum’s shop (thus freeing the excellent gallery it currently occupies). The message is confusing but it seems we are being told that this is no moribund museum but a hive of activity plugged into the present and facing the future. Such optimism is not to be questioned; it is the taste through which it is manifested that might well cause misgivings. Going deeper, we come to the courtyard; no sign here now of the comparatively recently laid out, funereal Pirelli Garden; instead we are told that next month (from 6th July) we shall see lemon trees in glass planters, lit from within, hear bubbling jets of water and find ‘retail outlets’ at the perimeter. This new focus of the Museum, designed by Kim Wilkie Associates and costing £2 million, is the gift of John Madejski and will be named in his honour. Such alfresco chic will date, much as interactive IT has grown old within.

But even the humble pull-out drawer has not yet been mastered. The new Architecture Gallery, which opened last year and ranges in effect from the banal to the highly instructive, contains many drawings from the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects. A number of these sublime and influential sheets are placed in low, sliding drawers – but the tops of most of the exhibited drawings (by Wren and Pugin for example) remain virtually invisible, for the drawers do not fully extend (and are not easily accessible to the spinally challenged). Elsewhere there are extremely good displays – the great collection of miniatures, notoriously difficult to show, has recently come vividly alive; the glass galleries brilliantly interweave the development of form and style with technical exposition; and the twentieth-century rooms mingle quotidian and modernist one-off objects with narrative lucidity, raising the hopes that one day they will receive treatment similar to the British Galleries (1500–1900) which opened in 2001.

The redisplay two years ago of the paintings collection, a frame-to-frame explosion of the Museum’s mostly nineteenth-century British holdings (hung above a continuous, label-bearing white-tiled shelf that, it must be said, puts one in mind of a hotel wash-room) was generally greeted with enthusiasm. But the hoary question persists as to the collection’s presence and function at the V. & A. Consisting of individual bequests and gifts and, as such, a valuable guide to taste, it has an almost shocking incoherence within the Museum, and its masterpieces – by Turner, Constable, Millet, Degas – are lost to many a visitor. Wholesale long-term loans to more appropriate national collections is surely the only solution. Certainly the Museum would be advised to reconsider this cuckoo in its nest on any revised edition of its FuturePlan.

Years of neglect of many galleries and the divisive re-organisation of the curatorial departments reached a nadir in the Museum’s fortunes during the 1980s. Much of this has been or is being addressed. There is, however, still a sense of jealously guarded departments, of inharmonious labelling throughout (from the non-existent to the succinctly perfect); some areas prompt scholarly investigation as well as visual pleasure, while others have an air of shop-window display. But none of these things is insurmountable. There will be teething pains, there will be criticism, but of the drive behind achieving, once more, world-class status for the Museum, there is no doubt.

1  See the Editorial in this Magazine, 144 (2002), p.267.