Behind the veneer
The world’s first exhibition dedicated to the most versatile material of the modern age intrigues Alan Powers
THE V&A acquired its name in 1899 as the result of a government inquiry into its predecessor, the South Kensington Museum. Another result was that, in 1909, the science collections were renamed as the Science Museum, with their own building on the opposite side of Exhibition Road. It seemed a natural division at the time, but reinforced a conceptual separation between art and technology that still affects how we view this large collective body of objects.
This background is relevant because ‘Plywood: Material of the Modern World’ bridges the gap by seamlessly bringing the two sides back together. In order to understand this material, we need to know about the chemistry and action of glues and the sustainability of timber sources as well as the vision of the furniture designers and architects who used it for what we now consider design classics.
Plywood was originally imported to this country in quantity because of the British love of tea drink- ing—chests made of the material were the ideal way of packing the crop. Its subsequent story is a strange one, which Christopher Wilk, Keeper of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion, has pursued with a passion since the beginning of his career in New York. There, he curated an exhibition on Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus-trained architect-designer who designed plywood furniture for Isokon during his three-year residence in London in the 1930s. During Breuer’s exile in London, he was supported by commissions from Jack Pritchard, who had a job marketing plywood for an Estonian company, Venesta, although the real parent of modern plywood furniture was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, whose country was also a leading manufacturer of the material. When Aalto’s pieces were exhibited at Fortnum & Mason in 1933, the British took to them and provided their largest export market, showing that they were not as conservative as is sometimes believed.
In the Porter Gallery at the V&A, the tall ceiling space is filled with objects as beautiful as the furniture on the plinths below: the hulls of boats—canoes and the 1960s do-it-yourself Mirror dinghy—and the fusel- ages of planes, including the famous De Havilland Mosquito. Below, there are film clips of the ‘Spruce Girls’ wearing plywood swimming costumes, launched in 1929.
Plywood uses proliferated in the 1930s, but the material has a much older history, while also carrying a strange taint of deception, hence Charles Dickens’s use of the name Veneering for the social-climbing couple in Our Mutual Friend.
Even in current use, it’s a material that shifts ambiguously between being cheap or precious,