Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary is the new exhibition at Kelvingrove, the grand art gallery and museum in Glasgow. Glasgow is one of my favorite places for art, rousing Victorian architecture, raw Scottish spirit, and indecipherable but melodic English. It’s easy to think of it as the supreme flower of industrial, Victorian Britain, but it’s an ancient place the Romans never managed to grab, Christianized by St. Mungo in the sixth century, and home to one of Europe’s oldest universities.
It’s a great art city, too. Charles Rennie Mackintosh lived and worked there, pioneering the distinctive Scottish Arts & Crafts Movement. Art lovers paid for impressive private collections that landed at Kelvingrove or the Hunterian, the University of Glasgow’s museum. The just-renovated and expanded Burrell Collection is in Glasgow, too. This unique accumulation of medieval stained glass, extraordinary Degas pastels, armor, Chinese ceramics, and much else is essential seeing, though the renovators and expanders have come close to wrecking the place. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions. I’ll write about the Burrell in a couple of weeks.
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