August 29, 2005
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JINS 313: Bloomsbury
Pat Gately, English/Lang and Lit
pgately@truman.edu
Who and what was Bloomsbury?
“Bloomsbury” was the nickname given to a group of young friends who met in Britain around 1905 and named for the neighborhood in London where many of them lived and worked. As it happens, Bloomsbury included many men and women who would, in the next 20 years, distinguish themselves in their various fields. E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes would make some of the most important contributions to literature and economics in the twentieth century; Roger Fry and Clive Bell defined and defend modern art; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were among the leading modern painters in England between the wars; and Lytton Strachey would revolutionize the art of biography.
Why do they matter now?
Seemingly without effort, these friends rejected conventional thought and expectations about nearly everything: religion, politics, gender expectations, family relationships, art, etc., and invented a modern and culturally liberated way of thinking and living. Besides revolutionizing their professions and bringing Edwardian England into the twentieth century, these friends supported and influenced each other in their work, and shared very unconventional living arrangements, accepting bisexual and extramarital affairs as a matter of course and necessary for happiness. They also maintained journals, correspondance, and memoirs that chronicalled their personal and intellectual growth. Separately, their professional contributions were substantial; collectively, their lively collaboration in life and work provide us with models of life and work far more ‘radical’ and satisfying than most of us experience nearly a seventy-five years later. And whatever else they were, they were always clever, insightful, refreshing, and happy to debunk whatever notions had grown beyond their need.
The major disciplines addressed: visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy
The major works read are:
Forster’s Howard’s End
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Rosenberg’s The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary
Stansky’s On or About December 1910
also: selections from G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica
Roger Fry’s Vision and Design
Requirements: no pre-reqs; about twenty pages (total) of research and personal writing.
The following links, especially the first two, will give you a sense of who the Bloomsbury group was:
See links to:
Charleston Farmhouse http://www.charleston.org.uk/about.h/
Bloomsbury, Omega and Hogarth Press http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/Bloomsbury.html
Bloomsbury and Book Design
http://vicu.utoronto.ca/library/exhibitions/bloomsbury/index.html
Forster essay “What I Believe” http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9504438/believe.html
Bloomsbury Images
The following images and portraits are mostly the works of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. They were greatly influenced by the last or Post Impressionsts Gaugin, Manet, Cezanne and Van Gogh.
Bibliography
Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art. Ed.Christopher Green. Courtauld, 1999.
Isabelle Anscombe. Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts. Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Richard Shone. Bloomsbury Portraits. Phaidon, 1976, 1993.
Richard Shone. The Art of Bloomsbury. Princeton UPress, 1999.
Frances Spaulding. Roger Fry: Art & Life. UCalifornia, 1980.
Portraits of Clive Bell
Portraits of Roger Fry
Portraits of Vanessa Bell
Portraits of Virginia Woolf
Portraits of Duncan Grant
Portraits of Lytton Strachey
Portraits of Leonard Woolf
Portraits of John Maynard Keynes
Portraits of E.M.Forster
Portraits of Friends
1910 Exhibition
Design Pieces
Still Lifes
Bloomsbury Revisited 1990
Clive Bell by Roger Fry, 1925 
Clive Bell by Henry Lamb, 1909-10
Roger Fry by Vanessa Bell, 1912
Roger Fry self-portrait, 1928.
Roger Fry self-portrait,1930-2
Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1918
Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1942
Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry, 1916
Vanessa Bell self-portrait,1959
VirginiaWoolf by Vanessa Bell, 1911-12
VirginiaWoolf by Duncan Grant 1911
Virginia Woolf in a Deckchair by Vanessa Bell, 1912
Self-portrait by Duncan Grant, 1920
Duncan Grant self-portrait, 1926
Duncan Grant self-portrait, 1956
Lytton Strachey by Henry Lamb, 1914
Lytton Strachey by Roger Fry,1917
Lytton Strachey by Simon Bussy, 1904
Lytton Strachey by Vanessa Bell, 1912
Lytton Strachey by Vanessa Bell, 1913
Leonard Woolf by Henry Lamb,1912
J.M. Keynes by Duncan Grant, 1908
E.M. Forster by Dora Carrington,1924-25
E.M. Forster by Roger Fry, 1911
Edward Carpenter by Roger Fry, 1894
Edward Carpenter was an early twentieth century defender of gay and lesbian identity; his books and articles, especially the 1906 work “The Intermediate Sex” in which he separated gender identity from sexuality. His work was alternately banned and praised, but was most certainly an influence in Bloomsbury’s relative freedom about sexuality and gender roles.
Adrian Stephen by Duncan Grant, 1910
Pamela Fry by Duncan Grant, 1911
“On the Roof, 38 Brunswick Square” (Virginia,Adrian,Leonard) 1912, by Duncan Grant
In 1910 and again in 1912, Roger Fry organized exhibits in London of mostly French Impressionist works; in both exhibits, he was challenging the very conservative middle class art market in Britain that valued representational art and classical and mythological subject matter. He was trying to persuade the public that the composition or form in a work was the essence of great art. Both shows received great oppostion, though slowly British fears were eased and tastes changed. The following are just a few of the approximately 200 paintings and sculptures exhibited.
Exhibition Poster
The Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet, 1881-82
Still Life with Bananas by Jean Marchand, 1912
Three Tahitians, by Paul Gauguin
Paul Gaugin, Spirit of the Dead,1893
Paul Cezane, Mont SainteVictoire vu des Lauves, 1902-06
Van Gogh, Dr. Gachet, 1890
Van Gogh. The Iris, 1889
For a few brief years, Fry also ran the Omega Workshop, a sort of artist’s cooperative that created and sold decorative and useful objects such as painted chairs, tables, screens, rugs, and pottery. This gave the Bloomsbury and other artists a broader market for their work. Within this group of images you can also see Grant and Bell’s experiments in formal properties, such as the highly influential primitive style, as well as merging classical interest in form with fantastic subjects.
Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, Duncan Grant 1914
Bathing, Duncan Grant 1911
Dancing Couple, Vanessa Bell 1914
Design for Rug, Roger Fry1916
Chair with Bowl and Towl, Roger1918
Iceland Poppies,Vanessa Bell 1909
Oranges and Lemons, Vanessa Bell 1914
Painted Omega Screen, Vanessa Bell1913
Still Life with Omega Flowers, Roger Fry 1919
The Coffee Pot, Duncan Grant 1918
TheModellingStand, DuncanGrant 1914
Triple Alliance, Vanessa Bell 1914
Berwick Church pulpit, painted by Duncan Grant
Berwick Church, painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Clive Bell’s study
The Garden Room
Bloomsbury Reflections
In 1990, shortly after Charleston Farmhouse was opened for viewing to the public, time-Life photographer Alen Mcweeney visited Charleston and photographed the descendents of Bloomsbury, including the Bell family, MacCarthy family, and relatives of Leonard Woolf, Sackville-West, Adrian Stephen, and others. Also in the book are selections of their memoirs, in which they offer unique and often critical perspectives on their famous parents. Given that these memoirs were written relatively recently and thus share our more contemporary views, they offer a more familiar voice and at times a much more rounded view of Bloomsbury than Bloomsbury had of itself. As the book is no longer in print, some of the photographs (and eventually, text) are offered here to bring Bloomsbury into moreless current focus. (I have a photocopy of the book, if anyone has an interest.)
Angelica Garnett, 1986. Angelica, though born Angelica Bell, is the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and married David “Bunny” Grant, her father’s one-time lover 25 years her senior. She is a sculptor and author of the memoir, Deceived with Kindness. The title is in reference to her family’s neglecting to tell her till she was 17 that Grant was her father, though everyone else had always known.
Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell; children Julian, Miranda and Virginia; and grandchildren, 1986. Quentin’s biography of Virginia Woolf remains not only the standard biography of VW, but a model for literary biography. He also had a long and quite succesful career as a potter, art historian and teacher, and Bloomsbury memoirist. He died in the late 1990s.
Julain and Sophie Bell, 1986.
Julian, named for his uncle who died in the Spanish Civil War, continues the ‘family business’
as an artist and art critic/historian.
