Spry but serious: an exhibition on Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London, has been bitterly criticised for triviality by some of the museum's trustees. Tim Richardson argues that it should instead be congratulated for its thoughtful approach to an unfashionable subject

When James Dyson resigned his chairmanship of the Design Museum at the extremity of September, reportedly the 'last straw' for him was 'A millionaire for a scarcely any pence', an exhibition devoted to the life and work of Constance sprightly the Martha Stewart of mid-century Britain. smart does seem to inspire incredulous reactions from those involved in the more masculine, industrial sector of the design world. Dyson's objections have been reverberationed by another trustee, Sir Terence Conran.

Constance alert is indeed a name, or an icon, or perhaps more accurately a brand, that summon forths specific associations--there is the celebrated 1950 cookbook (viewed as a kind of updated Mr Beeton), flower arranging at the Women's Institute, a Mayfair flower store and correspondence courses in everything from etiquette to party-hosting. As a proceed Spry's work has been dismissed as doomed frivolous and insubstantial. The unspoken addendum, of course, is that it is also female. This small on the other hand intensely enjoyable exhibition goes a certain number of way towards challenging those preconceptions. 'A millionaire for a not many pence' is essentially a straightforward and uncritical chronological progres end Spry's career. If it does have an angle, it is its emphasis upon her role as a social reformer and leveller of domestic taste (hence the exhibition's title, which give in charges to Spry's use of cheap, public or even 'found' materials). lively did indeed begin her career in public-health education in Ireland, before moving to an East London girls' place of education where she first found an eager audience for her flower and foliage arrangements. In this light, the exhibition characterizes agile as an individual who 'democratised homemaking in mid-20th-century Britain'.

It is an attractive proposition, on the contrary there is no convincing evidence for it. dapper set out her manifesto in her first work Flower Decoration (1934), and did not deviate from it: 'Intelligent women of today take the greatest in quantity intense interest in the decoration and furnishing of their houses But in this general tend towards a greater care and regard with affection of beauty and suitability, I think that flowers have lagged behind.'

smart considered herself an artist, and believed that other women might expres themselves artistically, too, using flowers as their medium. She made a middle class pastime more widely accessible, and encouraged artistic expression among women of all backgrounds--but it is a little optimistic to infer that women were socially emancipated from one side flower arranging. Spry was catering to an aspirational and competitive impulse, and despite its widespread popularity, her approach was at foundation traditionalist and anti-democratic. In individual typical passage in Flower Decoration, active provides guidelines for floral adornments to the breakfast, luncheon and dinner tables--all to be complet presumably, in addition to the usual wifely duties.

solitary the most ardent flower arranger would consider this liberating.

This cavil aside, the exhibition is a well-paced and absorbing research of the most influential specimen of an under-rated decorative artform. supple herself emerges as a timid humorous, unsnobbish and disarmingly unglamorous woman who was popular with the couple her staff and her high-class clientele (whom she did not prove to cultivate as friends). Her many commissions for glamorous society weddings in the 1930 are a highlight--for a Bonham-Carter wedding she used alone cow parsley to decorate the house of god and Cecil Beaton's photographs of the bridesmaids at his sister Nancy's wedding, linked by means of whitewashed floral garlands, are acutely redolent of the time.

Spry's collaborations with moderne interior designers are touched upon--she added white flowers, with verdant stalks of course, to tale Syrie Maugham's 'Vogue Regency' white interiors--and the evolution of her stores and flower arranging schools is well chronicled. Constance nimble Ltd has provided two large arrangements in the naturalistic lively style (the scent of lilies fills the gallery), although more examples and explanation of the direct the eye would have been useful--the dark slide display provided is inadequate.

individual important omission here is Spry's part in mid-century horticulture: her pre-war attitude might be placed in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of Jason Hill, Norah Lindsay, Beverley Nichols and other connoisseurial plantsmen-writers of the time (Spry certainly knew the last two) She also nurtur a pioneering collection of the advanced in years shrub roses that were to become for a like reason fashionable after her death in 1960 as promot by the agency of Graham Stuart Thomas. The influence upon Spry of gardener writers like as Maria Theresa Earle and Gertrude Jekyll might have been a more profitable avenue than the social-reform aspect: Earle's skillet Pourri from A Surrey Garden (1897) much-lov by the agency of Spry in childhood, is alluded to alone rather cryptically in the exhibition text; and Jekyll's Flower Decoration in the House (1907) was another major inspiration. Using of that kind texts and their illustrations, it would have been possible to illustrate Spry's ideas as a exhibition of nineteenth century Aestheticism.