A love letter to the gallery gift shop
By Alexandra Harris
Published on 18 November 2024
Alexandra Harris tracks our enduring love affair with gallery gift shops, from eighteenth-century tea cups to postcards in space.
I admit it: I have often gone to the shop before the exhibition. I think my motive a very reasonable one. I want to see which postcards are available, and whether I’m in danger of buying the catalogue. Exhibition tactics can then be adapted accordingly. A catalogue might obviate the attempt to absorb information and remember what’s actually there in the pictures. The exhibition visit becomes a matter of atmospheres, encounters, absorbing the presence of certain works, dawdling here and passing-by there, luxuriously deferring comparisons and conclusions. A ‘no’ to the catalogue question means brain on, senses alert: the moment for both looking and remembering is now. Except – there will be postcards. Which ones are on offer? A quick survey means that whatever captures your attention in the next hour or so, you’ll know whether you can take a version of it home. And if, on this initial sortie among the card racks, you find your eye wandering to bold crockery or the shapes of a mobile overhead, if you think of the friend who would smile on dark mornings at Fauvist socks, well let it happen. These are the pleasures of the gallery shop.
For almost as long as works of art have been made, they have roused feelings of passionate possessiveness. Often it’s not a desire to own the original; no-one sane wants to take Giottos from their chapels, and the responsibility of a Van Eyck in the sitting room would drive most of us wild with anxiety. No, it’s some marker of a relationship that’s wanted, some token of having seen and having cared, preferably a token that allows us to keep on seeing.
Museum shops may be a modern phenomenon but the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century were doing an expensive kind of gallery shopping when they ordered engravings after paintings they admired in Florence and Rome. As methods of reproduction developed, art merchandise took more varied forms. Angelica Kauffman’s mournful heroines inspired a rush of products in the 1790s that would impress giftshop visitors today: teacups, painted fans, embroidered cameos, and, most of all, affordable prints to be framed for the home. Kauffman’s imagery was often melancholy, but to buy it and share it, to spot a familiar image in a new context, was already becoming a source of delight.
Imagine us all, generation after generation, holding art in our hands, exchanging it, working out what we think.
Contemporary gallery shops are stocked with such acts of translation from canvas to teacup: images reproduced and carried into new circumstances. These translations can be misleading or garbled, but they can also be celebratory and democratic. Patterns from the finest Sèvres porcelain might be printed on mugs and tin plates (we’re at the Wallace Collection), playfully exaggerating the turn from precious objects to picnicware with a dressing-up box flourish. The wings of a Fra Angelico angel might appear on a toiletry bag (this is at the Prado). Painted feathers to printed silk; sacred altarpiece to useful object; singular exquisite panel for the contemplation of monks and the glorification of God – to personal make-up pouch: it’s a complex idea to put in a handbag.
Gallery XI at Burlington House is busy on a Thursday afternoon. Since the early 1980s, this has been the dedicated RA Shop space, a grand room of enormous height which now leads through to a further gallery where limited edition works are on display. The connecting wall is lined floor-to-ceiling with books. Tables are piled with artful configurations: jugs, scarves, the well-made wooden toys adults love to give children, stuffed wool versions of Grayson Perry’s ceramic Red Alan.
I consider the Michael Craig Martin-themed fridge magnets, each printed with a green corkscrew against blazing pink. Craig Martin’s diagrammatic style is almost heraldic (winged corkscrew volant, vert and azure on purpure?). A contrast too far, I think, with the current occupant of my fridge door, Adriaen Coorte’s bundle of white asparagus, a painting of cool, luscious, muted beauty which I have never seen, but with which I have an evolving relationship by virtue of a magnet from the Rijksmuseum.
An assistant by the jewellery stand is suggesting ways to wear an independent designer’s sculptural chain-mail necklaces. Like many gallery stores, this shop takes pride in offering the work of contemporary craftspeople. But luxury goods share the shelves with notepads and pin-badges: modest tokens for the art-lover with little to spare. Perhaps it’s just a new pencil I need. Stocks of artists’ materials remind visitors that the RA is an art school, and that looking might readily be followed by drawing. Copies of Anne Desmet’s An Italian Journey are displayed encouragingly next to the empty A6 sketchbooks in which you might make your own wash drawings of Florentine roofscapes and Umbrian hills.
The Royal Academy library holds records of the gallery shop as it grew. Christmas shopping in the archive, I scan the first gift guides, dating from 1982 and ’83. Stationery, exhibition posters, academician-approved wines, are joined by knitted jumpers with patterns based on the carpet up the RA stairs. And then there’s a new kind of item: artist-designed merchandise. Sandra Blow has won a competition to design an RA scarf, and here is the order-form for her bright silk squares.
As cultural retail expanded rapidly, galleries around the world commissioned bespoke products linked to their collections; the age of mechanical reproduction entered a phase characterised by Sunflowers jigsaws and Lilypond ties. But as an institution led by working artists, the Royal Academy was well-placed to develop a distinct kind of product, of which Sandra Blow’s scarf was an early example. Designed by an Academician and commercially made, it was an affordable kind of art. It was both original and reproduced. It was sold-out already. So the conversations about further projects began, the enterprising Head of Retail working with artists through the 1990s: Have you time to design a plate? Would this lithograph suit a Christmas card better than that one? Can that be made at the factory without breakage?
A 1993 visit to Terry Frost in Cornwall produced a particularly long list of proposed products, from ‘Tikkers’ watches to socks, plates, and rugs. There’s no sign of Frost being concerned to protect the purity and apartness of his abstract forms: if a certain shape might work as a raindrop and make for a bold umbrella design, Frost was already trying a mock-up. Where Alexander Calder’s mobiles in the 1930s had been silent, otherworldly aerial sculptures, Frost was happy to see his half-circles and dashes bobbing and floating on affordable mobiles aimed at children.
With commercialisation reaching into every corner of life, Academicians reserved the right to resist; for a significant number of artists, though, the development of products based on their work offered helpful income and pleasing opportunities. Many called to mind the strong precedents, whether their interests took them towards Morris & Co or the Omega Workshops, the Wedgewood work of Ravilious or Hepworth’s textiles for Edinburgh Weavers, Bawden’s linocuts for Fortnum’s tea or Dunlop tyres. With varying aesthetics and philosophies, all these aimed to bring imaginative imagery to everyday spaces and objects. For the RA shop in the 1990s, Elizabeth Blackadder’s botanical watercolours were translated onto earthenware cups before a move to bone china allowed more delicate printing. Mary Fedden chose a single blackbird for a mug that continues to look modern and characterful today: a reproduction and a work of its own.
Among the panoply of items on sale at Burlington House, I’m glad there’s still room for the simple cards and prints. A large counter is dedicated to custom reproductions, the walls bright with framed examples of what you might take home. As they have done since photography first made it possible, visitors want to hold in their hands a version of something they have seen, and for a small sum make it theirs. Imagine us all, generation after generation, holding art in our hands, exchanging it, working out what we think.
A smartphone photo in the gallery gives the immediate sensation of preserving what we have seen: it’s squirrelled in our personal hoard and available to be sent a million times over. But it won’t show up decades later between the pages of a book. Postcards and prints may be reproductions without the ‘aura’ of original artworks, but they are physical things: handled, saved, passed on, spattered by life and occasionally marked by death. E.M. Forster knew that in 1908 when he wrote the astonishing scene in A Room with a View that sees Lucy Honeychurch’s photographs of masterpieces, bought from Alinari’s shop in Florence for seven lira, bloodied by a fatal brawl in the Piazza. Those stained cards are so disturbing to George Emerson that he tosses them into the Arno. Lucy’s pictures of Botticelli and Giorgione have met with the fierce, arbitrary, uncontrollable world. And the encounter is so powerful, so utterly physical, that they have had to be drowned.
At home in the evening, I reach for the striped metal tub in which I stored postcards until, about 2004, it was wedged full. The first handful all have blue-tack marks on the back. I can just about visualise how they were positioned on my adolescent bedroom wall, though Duncan Grant’s Queen of Sheba (first explorations of Bloomsbury) may have been either below or beside a card from my first visit to an RA exhibition: Braque’s Mandolin and Score (pasted at some point into a misguided ‘Cubist’ art project and later rescued). Friedrich’s Easter Morning was a little above eyeline, so I looked up into the glimmering sky of that inscrutable German mystery I had found in Spain. A detail of the landscape at the back of Van Eyck’s Virgin of Chancellor Rollin has no blue-tack because I honoured it with a frame. It was a secret revealed: that if you looked past the foreground figures, there might be something else going on. I have forgotten ever seeing the painting in the Louvre, but the card accompanied my twenties, and I still think often of those two Flemish burghers looking over the parapet while the angel delivers a crown.
Cards from my old landlady emerge from the tub: mostly portraits, mostly French. She would prop them up all over the house – the house we shared for a while – and move them regularly to keep her eyes fresh. Then she’d pass them on. Previously written cards were pasted onto new paper and written again. Admirably, she liked to keep art in circulation. A friend’s widow, some years back, responded to condolence letters by sending out cards from the vast collection her husband had amassed over a lifetime’s looking. A scattering: a dispersal of images, each given meaning by our friend having held them and looked.
A card passed on is a meeting of eyes and lives: ‘lives which often have what we might call a postcard nature’, as a regular card-sender puts it in Ali Smith’s Spring, a novel criss-crossed with the movement of postcards sent like synaptic sparks across the gaps. I’m more of a jealous guarder: hence all these cards I’ve never sent. But the long-kept cards undergo rich changes too. Walter Benjamin’s words on the reproducibility of art have become familiar, but there’s no end to the strange things that happen when copies are carried ‘into situations which would be out of reach of the original itself’. There’s an astronaut in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital who has kept a postcard from his wife for fifteen years and now takes it with him into space. And there it is: a little reproduction of Las Meninas, that grand meditation on perspective, bobbing about in the spaceship while circling the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
Alexandra Harris is Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Her new book is The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (Faber).
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