Bloomsbury Group

writers, artists, bohemians – literature and the arts 1900-1950

writers, artists, bohemians - literature and the arts 1900-1950

Omega and After

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury and the decorative arts

The Bloomsbury Group was largely composed of writers and intellectuals, but there were lots of artists and designers within their ranks too. This well illustrated guide focuses on the highpoint of their endeavours – the Omega Workshops which flourished in the period 1913—1919. This venture was the brainchild of Roger Fry, who recruited Vanessa Bell (his lover at the time) and Duncan Grant as co-directors for an opening in Fitzroy Square in 1913, deep in the heart of Bloomsbury.

That was not an auspicious date for the debut of an enterprise which sought to bring Post-Impressionist design to the general public. But in fact it survived throughout the whole of the first world war, even though it was never commercially successful. Fry organised painters, designers, and ceramicists to supply goods which were colourfully and playfully made to bring Modern Art into the home – of those who could afford it. Although the works were produced by people we now see as influential members of the modernist movement in the arts, individual productions were made anonymously, signed only with the letter omega.

A number of famous names were associated with the workshop: at one time or another Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, William Roberts, and Mark Gertler all had connections with the Omega.

At the launch of the project, artist and writer Wyndham Lewis was also a member; but he quickly split away from the group in a dispute over Omega’s contribution to the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Lewis circulated a letter to all shareholders, making accusations against the company and Roger Fry in particular, and pouring scorn on the products of Omega and its ideology. This subsequently led to his establishing the rival Vorticist movement and the publication in 1916 of its two-issue house magazine, BLAST.

The Omega workshops produced everything, from furniture and paintings to rugs, wallpaper, and children’s toys. All of these are wonderfully illustrated in this collection of photographs which are rarely seen anywhere else.

The text recounts the story of the enterprise and its shaky beginnings. A somewhat amateurish co-operative; the introduction of modernist clothes via Nina Hamnet (the Queen of Bohemia); and the tortured love triangle which existed between its directors.

Isabelle Anscombe devotes an entire chapter to Vanessa Bell, studiously avoiding for as long as she can the fact that she was Roger Fry’s lover; but she is forced to eventually concede that Fry was replaced by Duncan Grant. Her husband Clive Bell, who was friendly with all three of them, is kept out of the picture altogether.

The latter part of the book (the ‘After’ of her title) follows the fortunes of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant as they continued their work in decorative arts, at the same time as tracing developments in contemporary design taste in Britain. Both of them continued to put all their decorative efforts into their house at Charleston – which is now a museum to Bloomsbury and its visual culture.

But ultimately, it is the wonderful illustrations which are the centre of interest here: interiors, ceramics, fabrics, book jackets, and portrait photographs of the principal artists. This book is well worth tracking down for anybody with an interest in the decorative arts and the visually creative side of Bloomsbury.

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Isobelle Anscombe, Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts, London: Thames and Hudson, 1984, pp.176, ISBN 0500273626

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Ottoline Morrell biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

society hostess and patron of the arts

Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938) features in the history of the Bloomsbury Group largely as a hostess and patron of the arts. From 1908 onwards, she entertained a wide circle of political and literary celebrities at her Thursday evening gatherings in Bedford Square, and at her country retreat at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. She was born Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck in 1873, acquiring the title of ‘Lady’ when her half-brother inherited the duchy of Portland in 1879, and the family moved into Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Ottoline was a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later to become queen to George VI. She was educated at home and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied politics and history.

She married Philip Morrell in 1902 and the marriage lasted for the rest of her life, even though like many members of the Bloomsbury Group, their relationship was far from conventional. They had one child, a daughter, Julian. She had affairs with Bertrand Russell and the painter Augustus John, as well as with Aldous Huxley’s wife, Maria Nijs.

Her husband became a Liberal MP (for Blackburn) following the general election in 1906. He was critical of the government’s position on the First World War. They sheltered a number of conscientious objectors on their farm estate at Garsington near Oxford, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Mark Gertler. It was there that Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating after a period of sick leave, was encouraged to go absent without leave in a protest against the war.

Her friends and guests included Henry James, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell (who was her lover for a number of years), D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry, and Aldous Huxley. Not all of these guests were appreciative, and some of them made fun of her behind her back. There are satirical portraits of her as Hermione Roddice in in Lawrence’s Women in Love (1916) and Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921). She was also the inspiration for Lady Caroline Bury in Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield, and for Lady Sybilline Quarrell in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On (1968).

Despite all the scoffing about the luxury and extravagance of Garsington – the truth is that the Morrells were sailing close to the financial edge, and eventually they had to sell the entire Garsington estate. This was because Philip Morrell had two illegitimate sons by his previous mistresses, and the boys needed to be educated – privately of course. Because Ottoline Morrell had a brief relationship with one of her members of staff, it’s assumed by some critics that this provided the creative spark for D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Portrait of a Marriage

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother’s study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn’t cover.

It’s not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending’ on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope’ to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn’t have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn’t love or desire.

It’s an amazing story, and most instructive in class terms. Husbands colluding with their wives’ lovers for the sake of money to keep estates solvent, whilst paternity suits raged to the tune of £40,000 (this in the 1900s).

I was also very struck by how much of Sackville-West’s literary style is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. She is a great fan of the stream of immediate memory, and a narrative couched in extended metaphors and rhapsodic interludes. There are lots of schooners breasting silvery waves with the wind full in their sails, and that sort of thing.

There’s nothing here that will be remotely shocking in the sexual sense to modern readers. ‘I had her’ is about as explicit as it gets. But the behaviour – duplicitous, self-seeking, naive, and hypocritical – is breathtaking. Vita Sackville West finally broke off the relationship with Trefusis because she thought she might have had some sexual connection with Denys Trefusis – the man she had recently married – whilst West had two children with Harold Nicolson. Actually, Violet Trefusis hadn’t had any such connection, having made it a condition of her marriage contract.

There’s a lot of utterly snobbish ancestor-worship to get through and Nicolson’s chapters are written in a creakingly old-fashioned manner: ‘She permitted him liberties but not licence’. In fact Nicolson fils seems as wrapped up in snobbery as his mother:

her real friends were souls, but real souls who had some breeding and a gun, who could make a fourth at bridge, and who knew the difference between claret and burgundy

I found it quite hard to keep my rage down when reading of the almost unbelievable concern for money, status, and class. The events are only just over a hundred years ago, and this account of them was written in the 1970s, but it was like reading about social dinosaurs.

The latter part of the book outlines West’s affairs with Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf – both of which she recounted in detail to her husband. Their son makes the case that the bond between them was strong enough to outlast these affairs – which it did, though on the basis that they had no sexual relationship with each other.

Of course you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise why a child would want to portray his bisexual and adulterous parents in the best possible light, but I must say all this is sometimes difficult to accept calmly.

As time went on the affairs petered out and the Nicolsons settled down to a quieter life, the major part of which they spent separately – he in London, she in their house at Sissinghurst – which might account for the longevity of the union.

These were people who seemed to have separated out sex from marriage, who obviously cared for each other, and yet spent most of their time apart, writing endless letters saying how much they missed each other. They also made sure their children were kept out of the way at all times. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere?

However, there is one very good thing to say for this memoir-cum-history. Anyone who wants a vivid, living example of the social values and the bohemian behaviour of the Bloomsbury Group need look no further. It’s all here.

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Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Orion Books, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 1857990609

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Princess Bibesco

August 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Princess Bibesco (1897-1945) was a marginal but interesting figure of the modernist period – a rich socialite and writer. She was born in 1897 as Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Asquith by his second wife. The family lived in Cavendish Square, but when Asquith became liberal Prime Minister in 1908, Elizabeth was raised in the PM’s official residence at 10 Downing Street. (Nancy Cunard and her mother moved into the Cavendish Square house.) Elizabeth was a spirited and gifted child who during the First World War organised fund-raising events to support servicemen.

Elizabeth Bibesco in 1919

At the age of nineteen she appeared on stage at the Palace Theatre in a sketch she wrote herself, and she organised an exhibition of portraits by the American artist John Singer Sargent at the Grafton Galleries. In 1918 she played small roles in two silent movies by D.W. Griffith, Hearts of the World and The Great Love.

At nineteen she fell in love with an American diplomat, which caused a scandal in her family. Sister-in-law Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary: ‘This really is too much. To marry an American is bad enough – but a poor American …’. Shortly afterwards in 1919 Elizabeth married Prince Antoine Bibesco, a Romanian diplomat who had been posted to London as first secretary to the embassy. He was twenty-two years older than her.

After the marriage she lived in Paris in a house on the Ile St Louis, overlooking Notre Dame. Her husband was a great friend of the French writer Marcel Proust, who used the Prince as a model for his character Saint-Loup in Remembrance of Things Past. The Princess (as she now was) became part of his circle, and Proust was eventually godfather to her daughter Priscilla.

In the early 1920s she met members of the Bloomsbury Group and began an affair with John Middleton Murry. He was married at the time to Katherine Mansfield, who rapidly put a stop to the relationship. She wrote to the Princess: ‘I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of those things which is not done in our world’. This was completely untrue, but it had the intended effect.

John Middleton Murry

Between 1921 and 1940 Elizabeth published three collections of short stories, four novels, and a book of poetry. Her literary style is lyrical and allusive, with a lightness of touch that skims across her narratives (and it has to be said, is quite like that of her ‘rivals’ Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf):

Poor Miss Wilcox! She had tried brightness and common-sense, Milton and lawn-tennis, the arch and the aloof. She would have liked to have been seductive and a little wicked, but she had found it easier to be dignified and very good. Easier but no more satisfactory. Evidently charm was a strange, mysterious thing, for which there was no recipe. A dangerous force governing many things and subject to no law.

As an adult she struggled with alcoholism, but travelled with her husband in his capacity as a diplomat to Washington and Madrid. Whilst in the Spanish capital she met and befriended Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the fascist Falange and eldest son of the military dictator. There is some evidence of an affair between them. He was executed by the Republicans during the Civil War, but Princess Bibesco dedicated her last novel The Romantic to him in 1940.

She lived in Romania during the Second World War, dying there from pneumonia in 1945 at the age of forty-eight. She was buried in the Bibesco family vault in Bucharest.

Balloons – Gutenberg.org

I Have Only Myself to Blame (1921)
Balloons (1922)
The Fir and the Palm (1924)
The Whole Story (1925)
There Is No Return (1927)
The Romantic (1940)
Haven (1951)

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Ralph Partridge

February 10, 2013 by Roy Johnson

a ‘major’ in the heart of the Bloomsbury Group

Ralph Partridge (real name Reginald Sherring Partridge) was born in 1894. His father was in the Indian civil service. Ralph was educated at Christ Church college, Oxford University. On the outbreak of the first world war he joined the British Army, and served throughout until 1918, reaching the rank of major. During that time he met and befriended Gerald Brenan, who was also serving in the army as a captain.

Ralph Partridge and Frances Marshall

At the end of the war he returned to Oxford to finish his education. There he met the book designer Noel Carrington, who in 1918 introduced him to his sister, the painter Dora Carrington. At that time Dora (who was known simply as ‘Carrington’) was living in Tidmarch, Berkshire with the writer Lytton Strachey, who had just had a big success with his study Eminent Victorians. Strachey was a homosexual, but Carrington had fallen in love with him and devoted herself to his wellbeing. It was Strachey who christened Partridge with the nickname ‘Ralph’. These connections gave Partridge the entree to the Bloomsbury Group and its members.

Partridge moved into the farmhouse at Mill House, and Carrington began an affair with him. She was attracted to a man who was tall, physically robust, and very handsome. He was known amongst the Bloomsbury Group people as ‘the major’. Rather conveniently, Lytton Strachey also fell in love with him, and they developed a curious three-sided relationship – although biographical evidence suggests that Partridge was entirely heterosexual.

In the summer of 1920 Partridge began work for Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. This gave him just enough money to marry Carrington in 1921. Strachey very generously paid for their wedding, and all three of them even went on honeymoon together to Venice. They were also friendly with Partridge’s old wartime colleague Gerald Brenan, and in 1922 travelled to visit him at his retreat in the mountains of Andalusia.

An affair between Carrinton and Brenan developed on this visit, and caused a temporary rift between the two wartime comrades. Partridge felt deeply wounded by this act of betrayal by his friend, but Lytton Strachey persuaded him not to sacrifice the friendship, and after two years Partridge eventually got over it. However, the marriage was never the same again.

In 1924 Partridge and Strachey jointly purchased Ham Spray House near Hungerford in the Wiltshire Downs. The menage a trois continued, but through his work for the Hogarth Press Partridge met Frances Marshall whilst she was working in David Garnett‘s bookshop in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury. A relationship developed between them, and in 1925 they went on holiday to Spain together. They planned to live together in London, but Lytton Strachey argued that this would cause a break up of the three-pillared unity at Ham Spray.

However, Carrington eventually agreed to ‘share’ her husband with Frances and in 1926 Partridge and Francis moved to live in the house of psycho-analysts James and Alix Strachey in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Ralph went back to see his wife and Lytton Strachey at weekends. But in early 1932 Lytton Strachey died very suddenly from stomach cancer, after which Carrington committed suicide. Since Partridge was still legal owner of Ham Spray House, he moved back there with Frances, and they were married the following year.

According to The Times: “For the next thirty years, the marriage was extraordinarily close. Ralph, very good-looking, was highly intelligent and loyal, but not always easy. He had a formidable presence and loved arguing. Frances was his equal in debate, and never lost her head; and she could soothe him. More important were their intense interest in people and their highly developed senses of humour. They talked about everything together, and for the last twenty-eight years were never apart for more than a day. Few marriages can have been so enjoyable, not just for the lucky (and skilful) couple, but for their friends.” Ralph Partridge died of a heart-attack in 1960.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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