Victoria and Albert museum to expand the Gilbert Galleries

Next March, V&A Museum in London will unveil newly renovated galleries dedicated to the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection. Following the refurbishment, the number of galleries will increase from four to seven.

This article is also available in Russian here. 

The Gilbert Collection, which today numbers around 1,200 objects, includes gold and silver pieces, enamels, and miniature mosaics. Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert began their careers as fashion designers in wartime London before moving to Los Angeles, where Arthur became a property developer and began collecting decorative art. In 1996, the couple donated their collection to the United Kingdom. It was first displayed at Somerset House and, since 2008, has been part of the V&A’s permanent collection.

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The main innovation will be a new space devoted to the provenance of artworks and the complex journeys of museum objects throughout the 20th century, including cases of Nazi and Soviet confiscations. Among the highlights will be a pair of gilded gates created around 1784 by the craftsman Alexis Timothy Ishchenk for the Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra monastery, commissioned by Empress Catherine the Great. After the Russian Revolution, the gates were removed from the monastery and in 1935 were acquired by American media magnate William Randolph Hearst from art dealers. Their story will serve as a starting point for a scholarly conference at the V&A next autumn, exploring Ukrainian heritage through the lens of material culture.

Alongside this research focus, visitors will be able to see masterpieces of 18th- and 19th-century decorative art. These include around 200 gold boxes—some set with diamonds—commissioned by Frederick II of Prussia. For the first time, the galleries will also feature large-scale micromosaics by the Italian artist Domenico Moglia, depicting the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Each work is composed of thousands of tiny pieces of coloured glass, some only a few millimetres across.

The expansion of the Gilbert Galleries aims not only to improve the display of the collection but also to spark a wider conversation about the complex histories of cultural objects—their origins, their journeys, and the ethical responsibilities of museums today.

Cover photo: Thomas J Price, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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