Museums
Full steam ahead
“Ocean Liners: Speed and Style” opens today at the V&A in London and is a perfect exhibition for the museum, suiting its founding principles to a T. These enormous vessels plied the seas, mixing unsurpassed engineering on a giant scale with the exquisite civility of the decorative arts. Curator Ghislaine Wood has got her (white-gloved) hands on a treasure trove of art deco and beaux-arts marvels – including luggage, fixtures, fittings and promotional posters – that show how selling the myth of these streamlined steamers changed graphic design and visual communication forever. Alongside the filigree are cross-sections of iron and steel, monolithic hulls that lurk beneath the Plimsoll line. “Ocean Liners” is a fathom-deep and genuinely moving exhibition on how engineering and beauty were witness to one of mankind’s more civilised eras.