Charlotte Benton 1944 – 2024

Charlotte Benton, who died in Cambridge earlier this year aged 79, was an indefatigable and widely acknowledged British researcher, writer, curator, educator, and advocate for high quality history of architecture and design for more than fifty years (Figure 1). She is also recognised nationally and internationally for her involvement in a wide variety of major projects. These included the pioneering Arts Council exhibition devoted to The Thirties: British Art and Design before the War at the Hayward Gallery, London (1979-80), for which she served on the multi-layered Exhibition Committee with her husband Tim Benton and others, co-authoring a lead essay in the accompanying book.1 For many, including myself as a youngish would-be design historian at the time, this exhibition and the linked symposium at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) stimulated fresh approaches to understanding the complexities and diversity of design in Britain at the end of a decade in which design history had been emerging as a recognised field of study and research. Almost a quarter of a century later Charlotte co-authored and co-edited the weighty Art Deco, 1910-1939 (2003) volume that accompanied the high-profile V&A exhibition of the same name.2 In a less obviously spectacular but typically sharply focused way her research and curatorial skills were embodied in an earlier project entitled A Different World: Emigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958, an exhibition held in 1995 at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Heinz Gallery, London. This was complemented by a quietly influential publication that presented a more inclusive perspective than customary of the make-up of architectural practice in Britain at the time.3 The progressive outlook and values that this embraced led to a collaborative project with Penelope Curtis and the Henry Moore Foundation4 which culminated in a symposium and substantial book of proceedings and documents entitled Figuration-Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe 1945-1968 (2004), edited by Charlotte.5 Her work on French design of the interwar years was another rich vein that ran through her oeuvre, from the authorship of individual course texts and radiovision programmes for the agenda-setting Open University A305 History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939 course (1975) through to Art Deco 1910-1939 (2003) and beyond.6 Additionally, from the mid 1970s onwards Charlotte foregrounded women’s contributions to design, thereby encouraging, with others, a generation of design historians to develop and promote pioneering research in the field. She herself contributed influential articles in the field7 as well as her 1996-7 exhibition on Charlotte Perriand: Modernist Pioneer at the Design Museum, London, the first significant show of Perriand’s work in Britain.8 Such initiatives, informed by a series of personal interviews, clearly situated Perriand as an independent woman designer of note, no longer overshadowed by celebrated male contemporaries. Such was the perceived significance of this exhibition that its 25th anniversary was celebrated in a subsequent Design Museum exhibition, “Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life,” mounted in 2021.