FREE THE SPIRIT
Liberty, as a department store, has always had a special place in the hearts of Londoners. They love its quirkiness, the fact that it isn’t like anywhere else. This is partly due to its eccentric architecture - I can’t imagine any architect, charged with providing a blueprint for a department store,
coming up with what is the Liberty of today, (slightly more user-friendly), let alone the Liberty of yesteryear. But mostly its appeal is due to the individual personality of its founder - Arthur Lasenby Liberty.
It has been no secret that, in recent years, Liberty has had a tough time. One owner after another, each with different ideas, none of whom stayed around long enough to implement a focused plan. There were the usual boardroom rows, plots and sub-plots. But these days it looks as if Liberty is on the road to recovery. Those who have always loved the brand and hated to see it faltering should be much encouraged by an exhibition opening next Thursday and running until March 31.
It’s to be called The Spirit of Liberty, and the notion behind it is to reinvigorate Liberty’s historic connection with vibrant, beautifully made arts and crafts. Arthur Lasenby Liberty could be said to be the pioneer of the currently fashionable “eclectic” mood. He bought wherever he found lovely things - metalwork from Japan, enamels from India, rugs from the Middle East, furniture from the continent, and, crucially, he was perhaps the first to commission special, one-off pieces to sell in his shop. He didn’t reveal the names of the designers but, looking back, many of them turned out to be leading lights in the Arts and Crafts movement - Archibald Knox, William Morris, Christopher Dresser. One has only to think back to the ideals of the movement, founded on an antagonism towards the cheap machine-made goods proliferating at the time, to realise why an exhibition of specially commissioned arts and crafts is utterly true to the original aspirations of its founder.
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As if to link the modern with the historic, anybody going to Liberty’s fourth floor from Thursday onwards will find beautiful, mostly one-off pieces that are both old and new. Patch Rogers, Liberty’s Arts and Crafts buyer, has been scouring the country for antiques by the great designers of the Arts and Crafts movement - and most, but not all, will have been old Liberty stock. Besides being able to buy what you see, which will range in price from £500 to £35,000 (remember, they are all “collectibles”), customers will also be able to commission work from craftsmen.
Side by side, as if to show that beauty is timeless, will be a wide selection of contemporary crafts, all commissioned and curated by Janice Blackburn. There will be rugs by textile artist Kate Blee, cerebral ceramics by Rupert Spira, as well as the more eccentric ceramics of Committee (Harry Richardson and Clare Page). There will be jewellery by Jessica Rose (wonderfully intricate bullet-like bits of metal linked to form bracelets and necklaces), furniture by Fred Baier (“the most original furniture maker of them all”, according to Blackburn) and Richard La Trobe Bateman and Jim Partridge’s elegant wooden benches. Look out for some amazing beaded fruit by Fiona Graham (at the V&A Collect, the famous New York retailer, Murray Moss, bought up her entire offering), as well as a table by Barnaby Barford. Star of the show may be the etched metal piece that Tord Boontje is designing (plans are afoot for Moroso to produce it once the show is over).
Part of the motivation behind the exhibition is to illustrate that fine old lives happily with the best of the new. And all are in the grand old Liberty tradition. As Blackburn puts it: “What I’ve tried to do is to commission the sort of work that I think Arthur Liberty, if he were alive today, would have loved. In other words, the collectibles of tomorrow.”