London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) was awarded the Art Fund's £100,000 prize and named the UK's Museum of the Year last night (6 July). The award was presented by the Duchess of Cambridge at a ceremony held in the Natural History Museum's great central hall.
Martin Roth, the director of the V&A, sounded suprised when the national museum was declared the winner—in the past smaller institutions outside London have typically been chosen. He used the opportunity to announce that the V&A would revive its Circulation department, its national loan service that pioneered contemporary collecting and education, which it controversially closed in 1977 as a cost-cutting measure after a reduction in government funding.
The V&A has had an outstanding year, staging the record-breaking fashion exhbition, Savage Beauty, a successful adaptation of the Alexander McQueen show organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011. Other high-profile temporary exhibitions included Fabric of India. The year was capped by the opening of its Europe 1600-1815 galleries, a £12.5m project designed in partnership with the London-based architectural practice ZMMA.
The judges, which included the artist Cornelia Parker, and the broadcaster and former head of Tate Media, Will Gompertz, praised the four runners-up for their excellence and spirit of innovation. These are: Bristol's Arnolfini, a leading contemporary art space in the west of England, and York Art Gallery, which reopened last year after a £8m expansion and modernisation project, one of the last projects of the architect Kathryn Findlay of London firm Ushida Findlay before her untimely death.
The other nominees on the strong shortlist included Jupiter Artland, a private sculpture park near Edinburgh, which features works by the architect Charles Jencks, among others, and the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in south London, which tells the history of treating mental health in the once infamous asylum. Its art collection includes works by Richard Dadd, as well as many Outsider artists.
