Carol Hogben, who has died aged 90, was one of the most remarkable museum curators of modern times. Based at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he was particularly prescient and influential in the fields of design, photography and prints, and was an early and important champion of Kenneth Grange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Hockney. His exhibitions and acquisitions were on a grand scale. If one phrase could sum him up, it is Keats’s “a fine excess”.
Carol’s greatest contribution was as deputy keeper of the V&A’s circulation department (the travelling exhibition service) in the 1960s and early 70s. Carol ran the “college” side of the operation, which served educational institutions and university galleries. He bought contemporary works, because that is what college students wanted to see.
Carol was on friendly terms with most of the best artists, architects, designers, design writers and craft workers of the time, including Richard Hamilton, RB Kitaj, Eduardo Paolozzi, Man Ray, Reyner Banham, Bill Brandt and Don McCullin.
Born in Barnard Castle, County Durham, Carol was the son of Alma (nee Ault), a violin teacher, and Eric Hogben, a maths teacher. The family moved south for work, and Carol attended St Paul’s school, London. In 1942 he went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to study classics, but this was interrupted by the war and service in the Royal Navy, and on his return he read English.
After a brief spell as a personal assistant to the opera company director Bridget D’Oyly Carte, Carol joined the V&A as an assistant keeper in 1950.
I began working with Carol in 1970 and was impressed by his mile-long sentences, his wife, Gool (nee Chotia), a dancer, whom he married in 1950, the poems he published in Poetry (Chicago) magazine and the wonderful prose he wrote for the museum’s exhibition catalogues.
These lines from 1969 for the catalogue Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson are characteristic: “It is precisely one of the things that distinguishes a practitioner of [Cartier-Bresson’s] rank that from looking at a body of his work one is able, without any difficulty at all, to apprehend the broad qualities of his mind – in this case, his compassion, his hatred of pretence, his sense of irony, his care of innocence. It is a mind far nearer to Turgenev, shall we say, than to a Toulouse-Lautrec.” That exhibition changed the climate of opinion about a medium of which the establishment had hitherto taken a dim view.
On the closure of the circulation department in 1977, Carol joined the National Art Library, sat on the V&A’s contemporary art archives and 20th-century steering committees, and acted as the V&A’s liaison officer with the Design Council. He retired from the museum in 1986.
In retirement Carol became a seller of second-hand books and filled many gaps in the National Art Library holdings.
Gool died in 2003. Carol is survived by their sons, Gavin, Hugh and Allan, his grandchildren, William, Tristram and Emily, and brother, Neil.
