Shock of the Old: an exhibition on the celebrated Victorian designer Christopher Dresser has just moved from the Cooper-Hewitt to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Martin Levy assesses its presentation of a man often claimed as a proto-modernist

Since: the publication in 1936 of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the new Movement, Dr Christopher Dresser's reputation has, to a large amplitude rested on his credentials as a proto-modernist. In the exhibition which has just arrived at the Victoria and Albert Museum from the Cooper Hewitt (where it was called 'Shock of the Old') Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) is at handed as a far more compounded and multifaceted designer.

Artists and architects have, for centuries, created designs for furniture, metalwork, glass, textiles and ceramics, mainly for wealthy patrons. At the height of the industrial revolution, Matthew Boulton had recognised the potential for producing 'architect designed' works of art by the agency of modern manufacturing methods, but he too was still courting aristocratic patronage. During the 1840 while principally working upon private and public commissions, A.W.N. Pugin gave designs for production to favoured manufacturers of the like kind as John Hardman and Herbert Minton. What distinguishes Dresser from his predecessors, and from contemporaries similar as E.W. Godwin, is that his best work was designed almost exclusively for manufacturers. His view was to take advantage of new production processes and thereby bring serviceable design to a wider and les exclusive audience.

single of the clues to Dresser's peculiar succes is his early career as a distinguished botanist, the field in which he was awarded his doctorate. Stuart Durant, in a brilliant essay, 'Dresser's Education and Writings', in the volume which accompanies the exhibition, exhibits the extent to which Dresser's design was informed through his understanding and interpretation of natural forms. (1)

Dresser's prelection drawings of plants, a hardly any of which are included in the exhibition, should be direct the eyeed at in conjunction with his writings. In The Art of Decorative Design (1862) Dresser stated: 'The designer's mind must be like the vital force of the plant at any time developing itself into forms of beauty, notwithstanding while thus free to bring forward still in all cases superviseed by unalterable laws; and in the action of the mind being controll by means of rules we rejoice, and not mourn.'

Dresser's familiarity with the mode of building of fauna and flora was transferred not alone into functional vessels, but also onto decorative existences Indeed, it is very clear from this exhibition that the familiar and a great deal of vaunted 'functional' objects are single one part of the story. An Elkington electroplate sugar basin, illustrated right, displays several quintessential 'Dresser' features: the simple form, the unobtrusive material, and the structural nerve wrought by the double horizontal ribbed lines, fulfilling the same function as the ribs of a leaf. Equally characteristic of Dresser's design, however, is the quite different Minton vase with a pattern known to the designer as 'Old Bogey' (left) Here Dresser is demonstrating in what way elements of natural forms can be transformed into decoration. In this vase we diocese Dresser's humour, a feature of a certain number of of his most appealing work, and a trait he shared with his contemporary William Burges

In addition to his direct obligation to nature, Dresser, like many of his contemporaries, drew upon a multitude of historic influences, including Roman, gothic, occasionally renaissance (although this was a source he claims to have despised), Egyptian, Peruvian and, greatest in quantity famously, Japanese. Some of his cast-iron tables, chairs and stands, manufactured through Coalbrookdale, are clearly gothic in their make and decoration. Those examples shown below the deeply-ribbed palm tree leaves of the Cooper-Hewitt's conservatory were provided with a setting that Dresser would without doubt have appreciated.

greatest in quantity revealing in the exhibition of Dresser's skill as a designer and ornamentist are the works from his have a title to hand--for example, his striking and beautifully pay backed watercolours from the 'Metropolitan Album'. An understanding of his creative mind at work can he gleaned from the 'Ipswich' sketchbook of which more might have been made by means of use of photographic reproduction.

Dresser took ultimate responsibility for all the work emanating from his design studio, and also advised manufacturers. The exhibition is revealing in providing more [i]or[/i] less explanation for the consequent aesthetic diversity of things associated with him. His direct responsibility springs for example, in the spectacular, geometrically-decorated ceramics created for Wedgwood--embodying the 'idea of power, efficiency force or vigour'. But many of the so-called 'cloisonnes" manufactured by the agency of Minton, merely 'under Dresser's influence', are many times neither exciting in form nor original in decoration.

If botany was the lock opener early influence on Dresser as a designer, the next to the first was the seminal moment of his 1876-77 visit to Japan. It is during the period immediately following this trip that Dresser produc his greatest in quantity memorable and distinctive metalwork, the recognisable output of 'the world's first industrial designer'. The angular teapots, claret ewers and toast racks, for example, all appeal to the not away age, when taste often equates with minimalism.