Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms: Churchill at a Touch of a Screen

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Museum Review | Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms: Churchill at a Touch of a Screen: "It may be that Winston Churchill's voice and visage have not been the objects of such concentrated homage since his state funeral, 40 years ago, when 300,000 people streamed past his coffin in a line that stretched for a mile. Or perhaps the focus of attention and affection was more urgent during the Blitz, when 200 of Hitler's bombers strafed London each night and Churchill's voice, with its promises of little else but blood, toil, tears and sweat, helped sustain the populace as almost 30,000 died in London alone.

Now the scale and setting are different, but in the Churchill Museum, which opens here on Friday, those models are not only invoked, but also aspired to. Churchill's presence is strenuously condensed into 9,000 square feet, an underground extension of the bunkerlike basement "war rooms" where, as prime minister during the Second World War, Churchill met with his cabinet whenever the risk aboveground was too great. This is the first museum in Britain devoted to Churchill, and on Thursday Queen Elizabeth II came to pay tribute to to her first prime minister (when he returned to office in the 1950's) and by all accounts her favorite.

This $12-million installation is a triumph for the director of the Cabinet War Rooms, Phil Reed, who guided the fund-raising and design of the exhibition, which the British design firm Casson Mann outfitted with the latest in museum technology. It is an aggressive exhibition: contemplation is less important than interaction, and sound and light compete for a reader's attention.

Images of Churchill range from the villainous buffoon of Nazi propaganda posters (Hitler called him "an utterly amoral repulsive creature") to a concave white mold of his face created for Madame Tussauds wax museum. Animations projected on the walls catalog his pets, his jobs, his residences, his wartime journeys.

There are also unusual biographical relics of his sad childhood as the barely loved child of a titled father and an American mother (including a meticulously detailed "punishment book" from the Harrow School, which records that on May 25, 1891, the 16-year-old Churchill received seven strokes of the cane for mischief). And there is plenty of kitsch: Churchill's baby rattle, sheet music for "The Man With the Big Cigar" (1941), a red velvet jumpsuit (Churchill's dubious contribution to British fashion), one of his chomped-on Havana cigar butts. "