December 18, 2008 – April 5, 2009 [later elsewhere]
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC
“What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?”
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (25)
The visual artists of the Bloomsbury Group were not “great” by the standards dictated by the mainstream narrative of genius of early 20th century modernity. Their ranks did not contain an equivalent to Picasso or Dalí. But on their own terms, and as a kind of adjunct to their literary practice, the Bloomsbury visual artists were admirable, historically interesting, and an important part of 20th century British culture.
The “Bloomsbury Group” was a loose cluster of mainly upper-middle class writers, critics, and painters bound together by mutual interests, deeply-felt relationships, and a good deal of internal squabble. The “core” members included Virginia Woolf (born Virginia Stephen, to eminent Dictionary of National Biography editor Sir Leslie Stephen: she was the de-facto standard bearer and the best writer of the bunch), writer Lytton Strachey, and economist John Maynard Keynes. Other associates included: visual artists Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry; society mavens Vita Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell; poets T.S. Eliot and Rupert Brooke; thinkers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell; fellow bohemian Augustus John; and numerous other renaissance men and women (Green). Bloomsbury germinated in the early 1900s, as several of the male participants attended Cambridge and formed bonds via an intellectual group—and semi-secret society—called the Apostles. Andrew McNeillie writes: “Bloomsbury began to come into being in 1904 following the death of Leslie Stephen, when the Stephen siblings [i.e. Virginia and Vanessa] moved to 46 Gordon Square [in the Bloomsbury section of London]. There, on Thursday nights, the younger generation of recent Cambridge graduates began to foregather” (15). Stratchey, Brooke, and Keynes were Apostles and their friendships spilled over to include women and men not a part of their organization, soon to include a number of major players of Modern British cultural life.
Until the 1970s or so, the Bloomsbury Group was most renowned for its literary contributions (especially those of Woolf, E.M. Forster, and loosely affiliated friends like Eliot and D.H. Lawrence). In fact, many of the canonized works of pre-World War II British Literature have some association to Bloomsbury. Beyond writing, the Group has been endlessly studied, written about, and romanticized because of the personal lives of its members. Despite marriages and long-term partners, most of the people in Bloomsbury were known for affairs, bi-sexuality, and high levels of personal drama. Cattiness about these liaisons has been easy for literary historians, since most of the Bloomsbury Group were prodigious letter writers, diarists, and gossips.
However, it has only been in the last 30 years that collectors, historians, and the public at large have paid much mind to the visual legacy of Bloomsbury. At the center of Bloomsbury’s visual imagination was painter, art historian, critic, and taste-maker Roger Fry, whose enthusiasm for post-impressionism (in 1910 he staged the first post-impressionist show on British soil) were to influence Bell, Grant and Carrington’s work. “A Room of Their Own,” currently at the Nasher Museum of Art until April 2009, mainly focuses on Fry’s ideas and their relation to the visual sensibilities of the movement writ large.
The exhibition—which will travel to other museums across the country after its stint in North Carolina—presents the work in loose genre groupings. One of the real stand-out sections features a series of individual portraits. Conceptually, this is the specialty territory of Bloomsbury: idiosyncratic and contemplative re-presentations of close friends, lovers, or colleagues. Favorite poses include the reclined reader (Lytton Strachey in particular is often shown laying about) and the slightly forlorn gaze of outward regard. One gets the sense from these portraits that the painter, be it Carrington or Duncan Grant, was attempting to capture the nuance of the familiar.
Much of Bloomsbury visual art could also easily be classified as “craft.” Omega Workshops—founded in 1913 by Roger Fry—was an attempt at providing friendly artists with a commercially viable way to do their own work. Participants worked on anonymous designs that were sold to support the group. Artists would only work for Omega three days a week, thus freeing them to spend the rest of their time and energy on individual projects. The exhibition contains several fabric patterns and ceramic tile designs that were sold through the group. Grant’s Pamela (1913), for example, is a playfully abstract textile pattern that would at once seem at home on curtains or a large napkin.
One of the show highlights are the impossible-to-miss, monumental canvases that Duncan Grant complete for the Queen Mary ship in the 1930s. His ‘Seguidilla’ for the Queen Mary (1937) combated my preconceived notion of Bloomsbury art. From what I had read and seen previous—in Cambridge, at former haunts like Sissinghurst Castle or the Woolf’s Monk House—was that Bloomsbury art was scaled for a quiet “cottage” sensibility. It all seemed so understated, small, like a digression and not so much as serious production. This work of Grant’s, though, is monumental and is clearly predicated on emotionally overwhelming art, especially El Greco and other highly gestural Baroque artists. I would not call these works masterpieces by any stretch, but they help show how Bloomsbury artists could create impressive work, even with explicitly commercial goals in mind.
If you are familiar with Bloomsbury literature, this exhibition helps flesh-out and contextualize the fame, scandal, and occasional genius of the movement. For me, it is all summed up in Vanessa Bell’s Study for the Portrait of Leonard Woolf (1938). Bell’s painting shows Woolf at his desk in an evocative, though thoroughly figural way, sadly staring down at the page. Work, writing, and creative production seem to be of utmost importance, yet the sense by the late 1930s is one of exhaustion. The portrait is sad and gloomy, yet presents a typically boring episode with some vitality and mystery. Bloomsbury seems somewhat clichéd today, but the sense of the works in this exhibition is of discovery and a commitment to emerging avant-garde principles.
Exhibition Schedule:
Nasher Museum of Art @ Duke University - 12/18/2008-04/05/2009
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art @ Cornell University - 07/18/2009-10/18/2009
Mills College Art Museum - 11/07/2009-12/13/2009
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art @ Northwestern University - 01/15/2010-03/14/2010
Smith College Museum of Art - 04/03/2010-06/15/2010
Palmer Museum of Art @ Penn State - 07/06/2010-09/26/2010
Works Cited
- Nancy E. Green. Program note for “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections,” 2008.
- Andrew McNeillie, “Bloomsbury,” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000)
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957 [1928])
