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Who’s afraid of Constance Spry?
The floral decorator was at the centre of the biggest museum row of modern times.
What’s sexier, a Ferrari or a fritillary? A decade and a half ago, this choice divided the museum world in an unlikely explosion of gender, status, class, and power – all in the cause of a then-forgotten society florist, Constance Spry. It is all the more fascinating to me today as we at the Garden Museum prepare to put on the first exhibition of Spry’s work since the row flared up.
The story begins in 2004, when Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum, put on an exhibition on Spry, the self-styled “floral decorator” who was a household name from the 1930s to 1950s. It led to the most public museum row of modern times. First, James Dyson resigned as chair of the museum and withdrew funding rumoured to be half a million pounds a year. Subsequently, Rawsthorn also stood down. In the national press, the late Terence Conran, the museum’s founder, weighed in on Dyson’s side; James Fenton, one of Britain’s most notable poets, stuck up for Spry.
Spry, who died in 1960, had more column inches than at any time since she designed the Queen’s Coronation flowers. Sixteen years later, neither Dyson nor Rawsthorn will discuss the issue; Rawsthorn has become one of the world’s most respected design critics, but her website makes no reference to her tenure as director. The Design Museum cannot find any photographs. I once saw installation shots in the portfolio of the show’s uber cool graphic designer, Frith Kerr. Her assistant responds nicely to my email: “We would prefer not to show our work in this context”.
Am I imagining things? Could an exhibition about floristry cut so deep? Yes, writes design historian Liz Farrelly in The Contentious Constance Spry. She takes up the story: the Design Museum had announced three exhibitions side by side: one on the Jaguar E-type; one on product designer Marc Newson (then best known for yachts and jets); and an exhibit on Spry.
In June 2004, the row first reached the public domain: Dyson wrote to The Times about how Britain’s greatness was forged in the symbiosis between design and manufacturing. But, no more: “Sadly, nowhere is the mentality of style over substance more evident than in the curators’ choice of exhibitions at the Design Museum”. Odd coming from the chairman of the museum, Dyson himself.
Flower-arranging had brought to a head a battle of wills between Rawsthorn and Dyson. In Farrelly’s view: “It was an ideological power struggle over the meaning of design”. On Oct 4, six days after Dyson resigned, Conran wrote to The Guardian to complain about the “high-society mimsiness” of Spry (“off the radar as far as I’m concerned”).
This puzzles Shane Connolly, writer and royal florist, who is curating the Garden Museum’s new exhibition. (Between them, he and Spry designed the last two royal weddings in Westminster Abbey: Spry for the Queen in 1947, and Connolly for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011).
“Spry was, at heart, an educator,” he says. “She trained as a health lecturer, and in an earlier life travelled across Ireland teaching the poor about sanitation. She saw the value of flowers when working as a headmistress in the poverty of 1920s east London. There, she realised that the beauty of nature was a great life improver to all.”
She was also avant-garde: in the archives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Liz Farrelly discovered a receipt for her to design the flowers for its 1941 exhibition of Organic Design in Home Furnishings. MoMA saw nothing incongruous in showing Spry’s flowers alongside cutting-edge plywood chairs by Saarinen and Eames.
Surely that’s as Conran as can be, I suggest to Stephen Bayley, the first director of the Design Museum. He laughs at the irony: “But what you have to understand is that Dyson, Terence and I all came out of this world of postwar design for whom industrial artefacts were sacred.”
Bayley was a brilliant young academic plucked from the provinces to set up (within the V&A) The Boilerhouse Gallery, celebrating modern industrial design. But Tate and the Science Museum turned down the millions Conran offered for a permanent wing. “I was sent by Terence to Tate and I cited MoMA, where cars and food mixers sat, as they should, side by side with Picasso and Braque. Alan Bowness, the director, looked exquisitely pained and told me that he did not think Terence’s lampshades were very exalting.”
To prove that modern design was museum-worthy, Conran and Bayley had to build their own: the Design Museum opened at Butler’s Wharf in 1989. “Terence has been proved right,” concludes Bayley. However, the latest incarnation of the Design Museum in Kensington is a temple to lampshades and typography, and its hit show last year was on 1980s electronic music.
To Liz Farrelly, this vindicates Rawsthorn “who was ahead of her time, with crowd-pleasing exhibitions on Manolo Blahnik and Philip Treacy.” The V&A has now seized that zeitgeist, she reckons, with queues down Cromwell Road for exhibitions on Dior and Bowie.
But there’s another puzzle. As a schoolboy, Conran had a secret passion for flowers; later, he collaborated with the young Dan Pearson on a garden. Dyson is one of Britain’s great planters of trees at his estate in Gloucestershire. So why did Conran and Dyson choose Spry to pick a fight over?
“Gender is part of it,” says Farrelly. After all, Dyson openly talked of design as “the hard stuff ”; one angry Guardianista letter writer talked of “outdated paternalistic middle-class notions of design”. And then, of course, there was class. Bayley himself wrote in The Independent on Sunday (Oct 3 2004) that Spry represented to Conran “the artless bourgeois mediocrity he made it his life’s purpose to eradicate”.
In Spry’s day, floristry and decoration were two of the professions that offered careers to a woman born in a terraced house in Derby, and married young and lonely. But her success was no protection against intellectual snobbery: when Historic England awarded Spry a blue plaque at her showroom at No64 South Audley Street, it called her “Designer in Flowers”. That makes no sense, as grammar, or as a job. Spry called herself “floral decorator”. Why not put that on the plaque? Too “mimsy” for a blue plaque?
When James Fenton joined the fray in The Guardian (Oct 16 2004) he accepted that Spry’s idea of design was not – as to Dyson – about solving problems. Spry simply took from nature. When in June 1926 she decorated the windows of Atkinsons, a perfumer on Old Bond Street, with kale, dahlias and grapes, a crowd pressed their faces against the glass: to one observer it was Keats’s ode “To Autumn” made sculptural flesh. That young journalist, Elizabeth Coxhead, became Spry’s first biographer.
To Fenton, Spry’s significance was in how she taught others to be original: in her words – to reject “anything which sets unnecessary bounds to one’s imagination or limits one’s train of thought.”
I now understand how an innocent excursion into 1930s domestic style detonated an explosive cocktail of gender, status, class and power.
What would Spry have thought of it all? She would have admired Dyson as the type of engineer she watched help win the Second World War, Conran for uncluttering modern life, and Rawsthorn as a woman who broke maleshaped professional moulds. But deep down, she knew that flowers would have the last smile: in the war, Spry toured factories to teach women how to make bouquets from the wild flowers springing up on bomb sites.
As Connolly says, the beauty of nature is the greatest life-improver of all.
‘Spry was an educator… she realised that the beauty of nature is a life improver to us all’