Craving for Design review

Like every other Montreal resident I know, I had never heard of the Stewart Museum. But as both a lover of small museums and an avid at-home chef, I was quite excited to see the widely posted ads for their temporary exhibition, “Craving for Design: Kitchen Design from the 18th Century to Tomorrow.” And indeed the museum has all the makings of a hidden gem: located in a 19th-century British fort constructed on Île Ste- Hélène (now just south of the Jacques Cartier bridge), the museum reopened about a year ago, following a two-year, $4.5 million-dollar renovation. The display space itself is quite small, housing an exhibition of its permanent collection materials in one two-floor wing, and the temporary exhibit in the other.

What they have been able to fit in the small temporary exhibition space is, however, quite a wide selection of kitchen utensils, appliances, and advertisements for them that demonstrate how kitchen design changed over the course of the 20th century. For, despite the subtitle, the exhibit is primarily about the recent history of design of and for kitchens: objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are displayed together, and make up only about a quarter of the overall show. This is a shame because the most interesting portion of the exhibition, and indeed what seemed to lie at its heart, was the display of earlier kitchen objects alongside their 20th-century versions. The electric toaster is such a seemingly natural part of any contemporary kitchen that it was only upon seeing its pre-electric, cast iron version that I even considered that people made toast before electric toasters.

However, this made up but one cabinet in the entire exhibit, and the juxtaposition was not highlighted. Instead, most of the show focused on the different trends and big names in twentieth-century design, from the streamlined chrome of the 1930s to the rise of plastics in the 1940s and the high design Alessi products of today. Many of the objects on display are kitchen classics, and there are a lot of beautiful things for a kitchen inhabitant like me to covet (there is a particularly beautiful waffle iron that I wanted).

Beyond showcasing the objects’ physical beauty, the exhibit does little to explain how and when kitchen design changed over the last 300 years. Any discussion of what drove these changes (other than the rise of electricity and running water) and what their consequences have been are oddly absent. Perhaps most glaringly and oddly missing is any discussion of either class or gender anywhere. So the question of who was occupying what kinds of kitchens, who could afford to purchase what kinds of objects—and thus the very question of who was being designed for—is not ever discussed. This is odd, because many of the objects on display are out of reach for the majority of people (or, at least, I don’t have $150 to spend on the Michael Graves-designed kettle from Alessi). By the end of the exhibit, I was left craving more: more beautiful things for my own kitchen, and a deeper exploration of the stories behind them. ■

“Craving for Design” runs at Stewart Museum through to April 14, 2013.