A bust of Edwin Lutyens at the entrance to the Hayward Gallery exhibition.
Photo by Piers Gough. © CZWG Limited

The largest room, with bench and brick planters, celebrating Lutyens’s early houses and gardens, including Deanery Garden, Varengeville, Little Thakeham and Marsh Court. Photo by Piers Gough. © CZWG Limited

The castles section featuring Castle Drogo’s dome, kitchen table, chopping block and pestle and mortar. Other castles shown were Lindisfarne and Lambay. Photo by Piers Gough. © CZWG Limited

A room devoted to Lutyens’s public projects, including the American Embassy in Washington DC, which also showed his Mercury Ball pendant lights. Photo by Piers Gough © CZWG Limited

A recreation of the drawing room of Lutyens’s own house at Mansfield Street, showing part of it. It reproduced its bold colour scheme and included furniture and paintings mostly lent by Edwin’s daughter, Mary Lutyens. Photo by Piers Gough. © CZWG Limited

A room derived from New Delhi showing models of Liverpool Cathedral and Thiepval Memorial, made specially for the exhibition, in the final section. Photo by Piers Gough. © CZWG Limited

The Background to and Genesis of the Landmark Edwin Lutyens Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, held by the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1981 to 1982

By Janet Allen

Janet Holt Allen was an exhibition organiser at the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1970 to 1983, and one of the team who worked on the Lutyens exhibition from 1978 to 1981. She was a Trustee of The Lutyens Trust from 1992 until 2014.

Paul Waite reported in the last Newsletter on recent meetings held to commemorate the Lutyens exhibition, including a lecture I gave on the subject for Lutyens Trust members. The show gloriously rehabilitated the reputation of Edwin Lutyens that had been trashed in the years following the Second World War. The importance of this landmark show is also worth considering in the history of “exhibition making” and the study of architectural history. Significantly, two giant figures, John Harris (1931-2022) and Mark Girouard (1931-2022), both of whom died last summer, undoubtedly influenced the direction Colin Amery (1944-2018) and his team, who approached the Arts Council with the proposal for an exhibition on Lutyens at the Hayward Gallery, took.

Not many people realise now that the art department of the Arts Council  of Great Britain, based then at 105 Piccadilly, offered the most  comprehensive programme of exhibitions in post-war Britain. In the 1970s, the exhibition departments of the national museums had only just come into being and were in no position to offer the support a major show required. The other important exhibition venue was the Royal  Academy of Arts, presided over by Hugh Casson; it was struggling to  establish its “Friends of the Royal Academy” organisation and attract  financial support for revitalising its galleries.

The Arts Council’s art department had flourished after the war, striving to introduce the public to the visual arts by exhibiting modern and historical painting, sculpture and architecture and presenting new critical thinking. The department’s director was Joanna Drew, who had a long, illustrious career at the Arts Council and was one of the most influential figures in the postwar art world. After the department took over the administration of the Hayward in 1969, Drew directed an internationally renowned exhibition programme in the 1970s and 1980s.

Architecture was always included and began with a show on François Mansart, based on the research of Allan Braham (of 1970); Theo Crosby orchestrated “How to Play the Environment Game” (1973), a polemic against strident modernism, and Howard Burns, an architectural historian, led the team working on an exhibition on Andrea Palladio (1975), all of which reflected the change in approach to architectural  history. Elsewhere an exhibition about Inigo Jones (1973) was shown at  his famous building, The Banqueting House, in Whitehall, London.

There was a move away from considering buildings just in terms of formal stylistic vocabulary to the more Marxist approach of architecture seen in a socio-economic light. Girouard, a towering figure in the study of 19th and early 20th -century domestic architecture, led the way, and  published a series of books setting housing in the social context of  Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Harris, a major figure in the  architectural history world, and Roy Strong – who had selected and catalogued the Inigo Jones show and was appointed Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1973 – also played a very important role in drawing attention to the ruinous plight of many country houses in their show, “The Destruction of the Country House”, which was held at the V&A in 1974.

This exhibition highlighted the disastrous planning decisions and lack of conservation of Britain’s architectural heritage. Harris had moved the RIBA Collections, the RIBA’s collection of architectural objects, which encompasses everything from Lutyens’s surviving drawings to models, to the Heinz Gallery at 21 Portman Square, which was sponsored by the Heinz family. This soon became a hive of activity after Harris attracted a band of young architectural historians to the gallery, among them Colin Amery, Margaret Richardson and Gavin Stamp (1948- 2017), who became the leaders of the group that put together the plan for a Lutyens  exhibition. (Margaret had previously catalogued the Lutyens drawings at the RIBA.) Mary Lutyens (1908-1999), Edwin’s daughter, enthusiastically supported them.

Amery chaired the exhibition committee, which also included eminent  garden historian Jane Brown. Originally this team had proposed the exhibition to the RA, an obvious venue as Lutyens had served as its President. But the RA rejected the idea and it was then submitted to the Arts Council, which accepted it. Thus the Lutyens exhibition ended up taking place at the very unlikely venue of the Brutalist Hayward Gallery.

The major problem with architecture exhibitions is that you cannot exhibit the works of art – the actual buildings. The Inigo Jones show featured drawings from the RIBA and Chatsworth, besides other 17th -century works of art and models. The Mansart show was of drawings and small monochrome photographs; it was very academic, belonged to another age and was difficult for the visitor to understand. The Palladio exhibition was arranged around magnificent models from Vicenza, drawings from the RIBA and objets d’art. Burns set Palladio in the political and economic context of the Veneto region and Venice in the 16th century. Amery and his team took a similarly societal approach with the Lutyens exhibition, which the art department wholeheartedly embraced.

Lutyens’s architecture and design were seen in the context of late 19th-century and 20th-century English society. Arranged chronologically, the survey included his early Arts and Crafts work in Surrey, the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, the houses of the Edwardian Establishment, banks and offices, New Delhi, war memorials and Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. Architect Piers Gough was invited to design the exhibition and the Hayward, with its very flexible spaces, facilitated an extraordinarily imaginative and engaging presentation.

Gough, who had the quirky imagination to capture the visitors’ attention and develop their understanding of architecture, proved to be an inspirational choice of designer. It was a monograph exhibition, with biographical material interspersed. It was not a question of classifying his work by such stylistic categories as “Arts and Crafts”, “Classical” or “Art Deco” in opposition to “Modernism” but of showing Lutyens’s brilliance as a designer and his grasp of spatial concepts. Gough worked closely with Brown on the early years and garden section, Amery and Richardson on the “great houses” and Stamp on New Delhi and the Liverpool cathedral.

Few loan requests were refused. Generous support in the form of practical help was given by Country Life magazine, the building industry, educational institutions and the architectural profession. The areas of greatest expenditure were the catalogue and installation. Terry Farrell, a rising star working in the postmodernist idiom, stepped up and organised financial support for the installation. This in many ways presaged the ending of public funding of innovative exhibitions; today sponsorship is a requirement for major exhibitions. The Hayward exhibition catalogue remains, after 40 years, one of the most authoritative publications on Lutyens and is now the basis of The Lutyens Trust Gazetteer. Piers’ manipulation of the Hayward spaces with a pastiche-built installation was visually stunning and had a momentous effect on the general appreciation of architecture.

The exhibition was a popular success, exceeding all expectations. It was very well received critically and the catalogue was reprinted. The show also caught the crest of a popular fashionable wave of interest in the Edwardian era – from Edith Holden’s book The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady to the Edwardian inspired clothing and homeware of Laura Ashley.

Lutyens’s reputation was also restored and, importantly, the exhibition went a long way to breaking down the conflict between Modernism and historical styles; all were presented as equally valid, encouraged the public’s interest in architecture and set a new standard. Subsequent architecture and design exhibitions, held mainly at the V&A, where the RIBA Collections later found a home, fully developed this approach in subsequent exhibitions – on Augustus Pugin (in 1994), William Morris (1996), Art Deco (2003) and William Kent (2014), to name a few. The RA arranged a show in 1995 devoted to Lord Burlington and The Palladian Revival, selected and catalogued by Harris, which was followed by one about Soane with an installation by Gough. The revisionist outlook of Girouard and Harris, who had inspired the Lutyens exhibition team backed by Drew, transformed the presentation of architectural exhibitions.

Change was in the air in the 1980s and the post-war settlement was faltering. The advent of the Tory government in 1979 heralded the end of the Arts Council’s art department, and in 1987 it was sent south of the river to the Royal Festival Hall and was absorbed into the South Bank Trust. The Arts Council of Great Britain became Arts Council England in 1994 and Nicholas Serota, Lord Serota, a former exhibition organiser in the art department in the 1970s, is currently its Chair. A reduction in the public funding of art institutions has meant they’re less likely to take on a proposal that is of great artistic interest but not a surefire popular success. Some Lutyens enthusiasts enquire whether it is time for another exhibition but museum cultural policy and society mores have changed and attitudes to imperialism, race and class would very probably colour its approach and perception.

The lasting benefit of the Lutyens exhibition was the founding of The Lutyens Trust to safeguard his heritage. This has been a resounding success. Gough’s exhibition design truly caught the public imagination and introduced a new audience to architecture.