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A Crisis of Brilliance

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of five early English modernist painters

A Crisis of Brilliance is a study of five talented British painters in the early modernist period who were contemporaries at the Slade School of Art – Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Richard Nevinson, and Paul Nash – a generation which their Professor of Drawing Henry Tonks described in the phrase which gives the book its title.

A Crisis of Brilliance

Author David Boyd Haycock’s approach is to present the biographical sketches like a relay race. With one artist profile under way, he passes on to the next, until they are all at work simultaneously. This makes the book eminently readable and it also reinforces the fact that the members of this group, though from very different backgrounds, were all developing their talents in the same artistic environment, and at the same time.

Stanley Spencer was from a small village in Berkshire on the Thames. He had virtually no formal education, and was introduced to the world of art via the patronage of a local landowner’s wife. His drawing skills were so developed that he was allowed to skip the Slade’s formal entrance requirements of a written exam.

Mark (Max) Gertler was the youngest son of poor Jewish immigrants who settled in London’s East End. He left school early and worked in a stained glass studio to pay his tuition fees at Regent Street Polytechnic. Via social connections he was fortunate enough to meet fellow painter Isaac Rosenberg and the gallery owner William Rothenstein, through whose influence he was admitted to the Slade.

The students of this generation graduated from sketching plaster casts in the Antiques Room to the Life Class where they were allowed to draw nude models (women) for the first time. It is interesting to note that conversation between male and female students was frowned upon by the School, and any discussion with the models strictly forbidden.

Stanley Spenser missed out on these late afternoon life classes because he had to catch the train back home. His fellow student Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson satirised this provincialism by calling Spenser ‘Cookham’ – the name of his home village. It was a nickname which stuck with him throughout the rest of his time at the Slade.

Stanley Spencer - self portrait

Stanley Spencer – self-portrait 1923

The next arrivals in 1910 included Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington. Nash was another educational tragedy whose only talent was drawing. He paid his own fees for the one year he spent at the Slade, and made rapid progress despite the caustic tutorial method of Henry Tonks.

Carrington too was someone whose background almost inhibited any form of intellectual development, but her skill at portraiture gave her access to the premier art college in England and the bohemian life in Bloomsbury that she craved. She had her hair cropped, wore men’s clothes, and became quite avant garde in her behaviour if not in her style of painting.

One interesting feature (which might be worth further exploration) is that none of these people were particularly gifted in an academic sense. Spencer had almost no formal education, Nevinson went to a public school, from which he emerged with nothing but contempt for its values, Paul Nash was an educational duffer, Gertler left school at fourteen, and Carrington’s education didn’t begin until she arrived at the Slade.

Dora Carrington biography

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

Nineteen hundred and ten was a good year to be there, because as Virginia Woolf later observed ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’. The occasion to which she referred was the exhibition of post-Impressionist paintings organised at the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair by her friend Roger Fry, the newly appointed Professor of Art History at the Slade.

The exhibition was enormously controversial. Henry Tonks actually pleaded with students to stay away from the Galleries altogether lest they be ‘contaminated’. However, although the Slade group were enthusiastically modern in their behaviour, the post-Impressionists did not greatly affect their style of painting – with the exception of Carrington, who felt that her whole life had been changed at this point. Stanley Spencer carried on painting as before and was more enthusiastic about the early Italian masters than ever.

Nevinson and Gertler became involved in a triangular relationship with Carrington – one that continued long after they had all left the Slade. Paul Nash discovered his visionary appreciation of the English countryside, Spencer retired to Cookham to produce allegorical works such as John Donne Arriving in Heaven and Gertler was the envy of his colleagues, earning £1,000 a year painting society portraits.

In addition to the painters, Haycock also includes studies of the patrons who bought and collected their works. The most outstanding amongst these was Eddie Marsh, personal secretary to Winston Churchill (at that time First Lord of the Admiralty) who inherited money paid in compensation to the family of his relative Spencer Percival, the only British prime minister to be assassinated. Marsh called it ‘the murder money’ and used it to buy paintings.

When war broke out in 1914 the responses of the Slade group varied from Paul Nash immediately enlisting (for Home Guard duties) to Gertler’s absolute refusal to countenance the conflict in any way. Gertler escaped into the countryside with fellow refusenik D.H.Lawrence, later moving to Hampstead where he became friendly with Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Dora Carrington followed suit via a different route, and ended up falling in love with Lytton Strachey in a famous incident when she crept into his bedroom at night to cut off his long beard with a pair of scissors. Strachey was completely homosexual, but that did not prevent them going on to have a lifelong relationship, living together.

As the mass slaughter of the war continued unabated into 1916, more bodies were required to fill the trenches. The Conscription Acts meant that any male between eighteen and forty-one was obliged to enlist for service. This led to people registering as conscientious objectors, and their reactions to the war were summed up by Gertler in what was to become his most famous painting, Merry-Go-Round. Nevinson had a similar success with his painting La Mitrailleuse.

Richard Nevinson - La Mitrailleuse

Richard Nevinson – La Mitrailleuse (1915)

After leaving the war as invalids, both Nevinson and Nash were recalled to military service, and only with great difficulty managed to secure positions as war artists, but this helped them both to stay away from the slaughter in the front lines. Meanwhile Carrington finally gave in to Gertler’s sexual demands, yet at the same time established her curious sexless menage with Lytton Strachey. They moved into a large mill house at Tidmarsh in Berkshire.

Stanley Spencer was pinned down in the Balkans whilst suffering from the irony that he had been asked to contribute to a war memorial. When the war finally ended he was given rapid transit back home – only to find that plans for the memorial had meanwhile been scrapped. However, he threw himself into the completion of one of his masterpieces, Swan Upping at Cookham which had been left unfinished at his conscription.

After the war Carrington managed to complicate her life even further by marrying Ralph Partridge, with whom her partner Lytton Strachey was in love. It was her way of keeping them all together. She also went on to have an affair with her new husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan, then passed on to relationships with women. She continued painting but did not exhibit, and was generally depressed. Her suffering came to an end when Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and she shot herself, unwilling to go on living without him.

Gertler’s life after the war (or in his case, after Carrington) was a series of ups and downs. He was penniless one minute, successful the next. He married a former Slade student and they had a son, but the marriage was not a success. By the late nineteen-thirties, feeling that his personal and his professional life were failures, and learning that Hitler was persecuting Jews, he gassed himself in his studio.

Nevinson and Nash became ‘war artists without a war’. Nevinson’s post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated, and he died embittered in 1946. Nash on the other hand emerged from the war with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was unsure how to develop any further sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. There was a brief flirtation with the surrealists, but that came to nothing. Unlike Nevinson, he did become a war artist again during 1939-45, but his health gave out and he died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash - Wood on the Downs

Paul Nash – Wood on the Downs (1929)

Stanley Spencer was the longest-lived of this group. In 1925 he suddenly married a fellow Slade student Hilda Carline and he discovered a new subject for some of his later works – conjugal sex. The sudden change to his normally puritanical lifestyle presaged major disruptions. First he moved back to Cookham trying to recapture (unsuccessfully) some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, a former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer proposed a menage a trois with Patricia, but his wife refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who equally refused to cohabit or to have any sexual relations with him. So he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. When he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his wife forced him out, and perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Haycock’s elegant study quite rightly got rave reviews when it was first published. It is well structured and written, beautifully illustrated, and like all successful studies of this kind leaves you with a desire to know more about this cultural period and these quasi-tragic figures who contributed so much to English visual culture.

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© Roy Johnson 2015


David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance, London: Old Street Publishing, pp.386, ISBN: 1906964327


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Filed Under: Art, Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, English painting

Art of the Digital Age

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pictures, sculpture, installations, and web-art

Art of the Digital Age is a beautifully illustrated survey of the latest developments in art which has been generated digitally. Well, for ‘latest’ read ‘in the last ten or fifteen years’, because people were attempting to use IT for art even before the arrival of the Web. Bruce Wands very sensibly begins by defining ‘digital art’ – pointing out that many artists may use computers and digitisation in the preparation of works which are then executed by conventional means.

Art of the Digital Age His first section on digital imaging illustrates that perfectly. Many of the artists combine photography, painting, and scanned imagery – to produce data files which can then be projected into other media. He then moves on to show works which are categorised as ‘virtual sculpture’. In this genre, 3-D modelling software is used to produce wireframe shapes which can then be clad in a variety of skins or surfaces. The results can be sent as a file to a rendering studio which creates the object in a substances of the artist’s choice.

There is also 3-D printing, in which layer upon layer of a plastic coating can be applied to a surface until the result is a three dimensional shape. This can be the desired sculpture or a mould from which the finished work is cast. there are some slightly gruesome-looking organic forms here, but the constructivist work of sculptor Bruce Beasley (www.brucebeasley.com) stands out as possibly the most impressive work in the book.

On installation art I remained unconvinced. Much of it seemed like 3-D objects with light shows thrown in – though it is hard to judge an environment when it is only captured in a 2-D photograph. The problem here and elsewhere is that the term ‘art’ has been taken to mean ‘arty’. If the pages had been thrown open to the truly popular users of new technology, we could have had the work of those people whose works are viewed by up to ten million at a time on YouTube.

The same is even more true of digital music – though he ‘cheats’ by going back into performance and installation art which also happens to feature music. Video (which is now called ‘time-based media’) is another example where current commercial practice far outstrips the arty experimentalists

I followed up lots of the sources, and was amazed how few of the artists featured had their work available for view on their web sites – though the spectacular animations of Dennis H. Miller were an honourable and very worthwhile exception here (www.dennismiller.neu.edu). But when I arrived in the ‘Net Art’ section at work which allows you to connect interactively with snakes, I felt I could give that one a miss.

It’s a visually rich publication, marred only by the use of a sans-serif font for the body text which sits rather unsympathetically with the pictures; but this is offset by a richer-than-usual scholarly apparatus which includes a 1450—2006 IT timeline, a glossary, lists of further reading, a list of digital art resources, and a webliography of the artists featured.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Bruce Wands, Art of the Digital Age, London: Thames and Hudson, new edition 2007, pp.224, ISBN 0500286299


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Art Theory: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief critical guide to study of art and art theories

This introductory to art theory guide comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Cynthia Freeland takes a very lively and un-stuffy approach to explaining a wide variety of theories of art. She chooses topics – her first is the use of blood in art – then shows possible theoretical responses to it.

Art Theory Her range of examples is wide and impressive. She sweeps without pause from ancient and classical art to modern performance and digital arts, from Christian to Inca rituals, and on to Park Avenue auction prices. She is very well informed. En route she explains theories of art, from Kant, Hume, and Nietzsche, to Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Jean Baudrillard. Her prime intention seems to be to force us to think more flexibly about what constitutes a work of art. It’s an approach which consciously raises questions rather than delivering answers.

For instance there is an interesting chapter on art museums – who creates and owns them, what they exhibit, and what function they serve. Links with big business and even international politics are explored, but at the end we are no closer to knowing what makes good art. It is less an explanation of art theories and more an introduction to themes and topics in the study of art, with particular emphasis on contemporary art from a largely American perspective.

But finally she does get round to two theories for the interpretation of art – what she calls expressionist and cognitive theories. She argues, quite reasonably, that there can never be a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation of a work of art – only ones which are more insightful, well-informed, and ultimately more persuasive than others. This is more or less the same conclusion as Jonathan Culler’s in his very short introduction to Literary Theory.

One very good feature of her presentation is that whilst clearly rooted in visual arts (painting and sculpture) it ranges widely over others: architecture, music, performance and video art, and even Japanese Zen gardening get a mention.

Despite my reservations, I think this is a book which will encourage readers to think more widely about questions of what is or is not art; the possible relevance of an artist’s gender; and the changing social significance of an art work according to the context into which it is placed.

These are interesting as well as cheap and cheerful introductions – and they come complete with a full critical apparatus plus suggestions for further reading.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory : a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.158. ISBN: 0192804634


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Bauhaus 1919-1933

October 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

modernist design movement

Bauhaus was a design movement which sprang up in Germany in post 1914-1918 as a reaction to the efflorescent curlicues of la Belle Epoque. It emphasised (particularly in theory) rectilinear practicality, function over form, and a political element of art for the masses rather than a privileged few. Most of its designers were of course middle-class artists who were caught up in the revolutionary fervour of the Weimar Republic – but its greatest strength in terms of enduring design is that many of its creations are still in production today. Wallpapers are still in print, vintage retro table lamps are either being reproduced at exorbitant prices, or are trading on eBay for not much less.

Bauhaus 1919-1933This is an excellent presentation of the work done there – for a number of reasons. First, it shows a wide range of products – from paintings, furniture, and architecture, to photography and household effects. Second, the illustrations are fresh and well researched. There are illustrations here I have never seen before in books on the subject. And third, there is plenty of historical depth and context, including original photos of the Bauhaus studios and the people who taught there.

The staff list is like a roll call of modernism at its highest – architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, designer Herbert Bayer, painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, and Lionel Feininger, artists El Lizitsky and Moholy-Nagy, plus the constructivists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. I was also glad to see that the book included work by the wonderful and much under-rated product designer Marianne Brandt.

marianne brandt

The format of the book is simple and effective. Double page spreads are arranged with explanatory text on the left and colour illustrations on the right. Just the right sort of proportion for this type of book. Full details of each item are provided, and there are links to further information in the appendices.

The range of items is quite astonishing. There are buildings (the Bauhaus workshops themselves) designs and photos of completed architectural projects, furniture, wall hangings, paintings, advertising posters, household objects such as electric lamps and tea sets, rugs, children’s toys, and photographs.

However, form and function were not always harmonised as successfully as they might have been. It has to be said that even a design ‘classic’ such as Gerrit Ritvelt’s armchair (1918) looked as modern as modern could be in 1918 – but as design critic Victor Papanek observes

These square abstractions painted in shrill primaries were almost impossible to sit in; they were extremely uncomfortable. Sharp corners ripped clothing, and the entire zany construction bore no relation to the human body

But the overwhelming impression one takes from a collection like this is of design inventiveness working at all levels – from architecture, interior and furniture design, through fabrics and furnishings, down to graphics and typography.

In fact much of today’s architectural design is directly attributable to the influence of the Bauhaus designers. Rectilinear buildings, minimalist interiors, walls made from glass bricks, bentwood furniture, ceiling to floor windows, uncarpeted hard surface floors. Moreover, the spirit of Bauhaus functionality lives on in the products and styles of stores such as Habitat and IKEA.

I got an email only the other day offering copies of the famous Barcelona chair (Mies van der Rohe 1929) for a mere $3000 – only they called it the ‘Madrid’ chair just to cover themselves. So the spirit of the Bauhaus is definitely alive and doing commercially well today thank you very much.

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© Roy Johnson 2009


Andrew Kennedy, Bauhaus, London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2005, pp.384, ISBN 184451336X


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Filed Under: Architecture, Design history, Graphic design, Product design Tagged With: Architecture, Art, Bauhaus, Cultural history, Design, Graphic design, Interior design

Blood, Sweat and Tears

June 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

comic book illustrations and dark-souled graphics

Die Gestalten Verlag are curious publishers. They produce books of high-spec contemporary graphics and computer animations such as 72dpi and Anime – yet at the same time they come up with this curiously disembodied publication of assorted illustrations and sketch book entries. It’s quite difficult to understand its purpose, except as a sample portfolio of one designer’s work.

Blood, Sweat and Tears Benjamin Guedel is I suppose an illustrator. He draws pictures of a kind which seem to evoke a comic book retro feel of the 1970s and 1980s. The pictures are largely close-ups of people shown in reaction to dramatic situations. You will have to imagine scenes from pulp fiction or ‘adult’ comics. It’s the sort of work you would expect to find in something called Raw Comix or Naked Truth.

The images are largely nightmarish, with lots of the violence, anguish, and suffering to produce the blood, sweat, and tears of the title. The book is bizarre in that it has not a single printed word except its title – so as you flick through the pages there’s a very strong urge to construct a narrative from the sequence of images. Whether you can make a logic or narrative is up to you. I gave up after a couple of attempts.

In fact the illustrations are extracted from dark, violent, and surreal comic books to which he has contributed. And yet I was driven on to make the attempt for an oblique reason. It’s because this guy has got such an interesting web site. It features some of the same images, but there’s much more in his digital presence.

All of which is a shame – because the book could be a great advert for the site if the images were put into some sort of context, and if his web site was listed. But at the moment it’s the wrong way round.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Benjamin Guedel, Blood Sweat & Tears, Die Gestalten Verlag, 2005, no page numbers, ISBN: 3899550749


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Bloomsbury Art and Design

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painting, illustration, ceramics, interior design

The Bloomsbury Group included a number of painters and designers who had an important influence on the visual and decorative arts during the period of English modernism (1905—1930). The group included artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic (and Vanessa Bell’s lover) Roger Fry; the artist (and Vanessa Bell’s lifetime companion) Duncan Grant, plus painters Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler. Bloomsbury art and design was never a coherent movement with an agreed set of theories: it was a close-knit group of friends who shared an interest in aesthetics.

The following publications deal with the amazingly wide range of their art in its pure and applied manifestations. These range from easel paintings, public commissions, interior designs, book illustrations, furniture and tapestries, plus the celebrated wall decorations at Charleston.

Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Bloomsbury features the paintings and drawings of artists Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant – three of the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group. There are entries on two hundred works of art, all illustrated in colour, which bring out the chief characteristics of Bloomsbury painting – domestic, contemplative, sensuous, and essentially pacific. These are seen in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes set in London, Sussex, and the South of France. The volume also features the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. There are portraits of family and friends – from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignBloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity is a scholarly study which traces the development of Bloomsbury’s domestic aesthetic from the group’s influential Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through to the 1930s. Christopher Reed makes detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, and he puts them into the context of aesthetic debates of the period. His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. Whatever you think of the book’s theoretical arguments, it’s a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Dora Carrington At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern British painting. She hardly exhibited at all during her own lifetime, and didn’t even bother signing her own works. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work. She produced portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work – all illustrated here in full colour. It also acts as an introduction to the artist herself, with rare photographs helping form a fuller picture of this fascinating woman.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book Designs This volume catalogues the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant – with various colour and black and white reproductions. Of particular interest are the many book jackets designed for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company established by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Also included are ephemera such as social invitations, trade cards, catalogue covers, and bookplates. Many of these were produced as part of the movement for modern design established by the Omega Workshops.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignVision and Design is a collection of Roger Fry’s best articles and writings. It had a significant impact on the art world in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike many critics and scholars of the time, Fry expanded his discussion on art outside of the Western world, even to the degree of contending that primitive sculpture surpasses that of the West. As well as Western art, the book examines the use of form and aesthetics in ethnic art from Africa, America and Asia. It reinforced his position as a critic and it is still recognised as an extremely influential work in the development of modernist theory.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignCharleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden by Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicolson encapsulates the artistic sensibility of the Bloomsbury Group. It is an illustrated record of the farmhouse at Charleston in Sussex which Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant treated as a blank canvas in interior design. In doing so, they created a treasury of Bloomsbury art. The book provides family memories and anecdotes drawn from a lifetime’s experience. Each room links the interiors with some of the leading cultural figures of the 20th century, plus guests such as Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Specially commissioned photographs portray the essence of the Bloomsbury style both throughout the house, with its painted furniture and walls, plus decorative items, paintings, and objects in the garden.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Duncan Grant In addition to being a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, Duncan Grant played a leading role in the establishment of modernist art in Britain. His principal works were easel paintings, but he also produced murals, fabric designs, theatre and ballet work, illustration and print-making, and commercial interior decoration. Throughout a long life Duncan Grant continued to experiment with and adapt to new styles and techniques, and this book offers an opportunity to grasp the extent of his achievement. It examines the influence that people and places had on him and demonstrates, with more than a hundred illustrations of his work, the range of his talent. It’s been said that he was as polymorphous in his work as he was in his much-discussed private life.
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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’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Bloomsbury Group portraits

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

excellent illustrated exhibition catalogue

This is a short but very charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, as well as how they shaped the development of British modernism. But most of all it is a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with accompanying biographical notes. It’s an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

Bloomsbury Group portraits The paintings are supplemented by some quite rare photographs – most of which I suspect came from the National Portrait Gallery for which this publication was once an exhibition catalogue. The characters portrayed are what might be called the usual suspects: Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Ottoline Morrell, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Dora Carrington, for instance.

It was amusing to note that throughout the pages, Lytton Strachey seems to be in a state of permanent horizontal recline, lounging in a succession of deckchairs and armchairs, which the accompanying text maintains was ‘conducive to a life of intense mental activity’ – forgetting that Virginia Woolf, a far more productive author, often wrote standing up.

The biographical sketches themselves are an entertaining mixture of historical fact, contextualisation, and discreetly gossipy personal details. They also comment on the painted portraits too – so we get an element of psychological interpretation as well.

I was fascinated by some of the small details – such as Lytton Strachey re-naming Reginald Partridge Ralph; E.M.Forster setting fire to his trousers when visiting Virginia Woolf; Frances Partridge modelling creations by Issey Miyake; and an aged Gerald Brenan being kidnapped from an old people’s home in Pinner and taken back to die in his spiritual home in southern Spain.

This is an excellent introduction for newcomers, and there is enough novelty to keep regular Bloomsbury fans interested too. All the paintings and photographs are beautifully reproduced, and the book is well designed and printed. It’s become a best-seller on this site.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Frances Spalding, The Bloomsbury Group, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005, pp.108, ISBN 1855143518


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Bloomsbury Rooms

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity

Bloomsbury Rooms is a beautifully illustrated book which explores the relationship between Bloomsbury notions of aesthetics and the actual interior designs of the homes in which its members lived. Christopher Reed takes their various houses as starting points – 46 Gordon Square, Asheham, Brunswick Square, Charleston, 52 Tavistock Square – for meditations on their socio-psychological development and the notions of art practised by Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant.

Bloomsbury RoomsIt should be said from the outset that although this has the size and has the high production values of a coffee table book, it is not a casual or an easy read. Christopher Reed situates Bloomsbury within theoretical concepts of art that were competing with each other in the early phase of European modernism in a serious and heavyweight fashion. And these theories themselves are analysed in a political and ideological manner. In fact his study is not only about Bloomsbury’s domestic interiors. He is profoundly well-read in the whole Bloomsbury oeuvre, and right from the start he emphasises the political radicalism out of which much of its artistic practices sprung.

He engages quite passionately with art theory, social criticism, and the philosophic relationship between politics and human relations to which they gave expression in their domestic lives. He sees this as an early version of an idea we now express as ‘the personal is political’.

His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. He argues that their aesthetics were formed by fully conscious choices, made by people who were often more politically radical than was generally acknowledged – both then and now.

Whatever you think of the book’s theoretical arguments, it’s a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics. It’s meticulously researched, fully annotated with extensive notes, an enormous bibliography, and a full index.

And Bloomsbury was a world of graphic and interior design, as well as literary culture. Vanessa Bell was a painter and book illustrator, Duncan Grant was a painter and interior designer, and Roger Fry was a painter, art critic, and at one time advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Many of their designs for the Omega workshops are in evidence here, as well as the decoration of their own homes in both London and the countryside. Artistic theory aside, for most readers it will be the photographs, illustrations, the paintings, ceramics, and textile designs which will be the main attraction here. There simply aren’t any other books in print offering such a rich glimpse into the visual world that Bloomsbury represents.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, New York: Yale University Press, 2004, pp.314, ISBN: 0300102488


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Bloomsbury Women

January 7, 2018 by Roy Johnson

illustrated guide to female artists and writers

Bloomsbury Women is a beautifully illustrated and well-designed book. It features paintings, photographs, woodcuts, and biographical sketches of all the principal female characters in the Bloomsbury Group. Jan Marsh starts with an account of how the phenomenon that is ‘Bloomsbury’ came into being – a story that is now quite well known. But she puts more than usual emphasis on the female members of the group.

Bloomsbury Women

Virginia Woolf in a deckchair

There are any number of outstanding characters discussed – Dora Carrington, Nina Hamnett, Ottoline Morrell, and Katherine Mansfield – but the figure dominating her entire account is Vanessa Bell. Perhaps rightly so in the sense that she was both a reasonably successful artist, a powerful matriarchal figure, and someone who was connected to so many other members of the group.

She was the elder sister of Virginia Woolf, and was artistically successful as a painter in her own right. She was married to the critic Clive Bell; and she lived most of her adult life with fellow artist Duncan Grant. The painter and art theorist Roger Fry was also briefly one of her lovers. And she managed to keep them all friendly with each other.

There’s very little here that isn’t already well known to experienced Bloomsbury followers, but the biographical sketches are well woven together. There are also some excellent anecdotal gems which illustrate the culture of a bygone age, such as the advice Molly MacCarthy was given by her mother for facing life:

In all disagreeable circumstances, remember three things. I am an Englishwoman. I was born in wedlock. I am on dry land.

It was not surprising that following her engagement, Molly (daughter of the Eton Provost) suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by her fear of the ‘unknown’ (sex) – something she more or less shared with Virginia Woolf.

Jan Marsh is particularly good at explaining the new painting techniques being explored. She uses as illustrative examples pictures that are actually reproduced in the book – which creates a successful merging of visual presentation and textual analysis that is often absent in studies of this kind.

There’s a fascinating comparison of representation via written narrative and graphic illustration – writing and painting. She argues (persuasively) that Virginia Woolf’s experimental fictions were a form of post-Impressionism in prose

He discussion of the Omega Workshops reminds us how talented (if capricious) the younger Nina Hamnett was at this period, and there are excellent illustrations of her work to prove it.

The narrative is also structured around places – Garsington Manor, Charleston, Tidmarsh, Ham Spray, as well as the many Squares in the Bloomsbury district of London where many of them had town houses.

She ends on rather a downbeat note with a roll call of deaths. First there is Lytton Strachey, followed immediately by the suicide of Dora Carrington. Then comes Julian Bell, killed in the Spanish Civil War, Roger Fry, and finally, seemingly bringing this epoch to an end, Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941.

But the overall message of the study is far from pessimistic. It is a celebration of writers and artists exploring new possibilities in their work and the personal relationships they formed with each other.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Jan Marsh, Bloomsbury Women: Distinct Figures in Life and Art, London: Pavilion Books, 1995, pp.160, ISBN: 1857933249


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Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Art, love, and Bohemian life in Bloomsbury

Dora Carrington was a painter, an early feminist, and a figure who flits in and out of the lives of several members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which she was a significant member. This is the (so far) definitive biography of her troubled existence, which covers her day-to-day life in great detail – much of it based upon her voluminous correspondence. She grew up in a stiflingly conventional home in Bedford, loving her father and hating her mother.

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington With a talent for art, she was glad to get away from home at seventeen and spread her wings at the Slade, living in Gordon Square, right in the heart of Bloomsbury. Her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade.

She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry’s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. She cut her hair short in a style which became famous (‘crop head’) and two of her fellow students, ‘Chips’ Nevinson and Mark Gertler, promptly fell in love with her. This resulted in the first of her many love triangles, plus a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.

In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, joined Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, and was moderately successful in her decorative art work. Then in 1915 she spent a weekend amongst the Bloomsbury Group at Asheham which was to change her life. Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler) made a sexual pass at her, and she immediately fell in love with him.

Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset – then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. [Remember – this is Bloomsbury.] Eventually she set up home with Strachey at Tidmarch Mill House and found her first sustained period of happiness.

Dora Carrington nude

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

However, with a twist which typifies relationships in the Bloomsbury Group, they moved Ralph Partridge in to live with them. Carrington shared his bed, and Strachey fell in love with him. She then moved to live with Partridge in Gordon Square when he was given a job at the Hogarth Press, and then married him in 1921, even though she claimed she was still in love with Strachey – who with characteristic generosity paid for their honeymoon, and even joined them on it.

Not long afterwards she started an affair with her husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan – around the same time that Partridge moved his new lover Valentine (actually Gladys) Dobree into their family home at Tidmarsh.

It is commonly assumed that Carrington sacrificed her artistic possibilities to the effort of looking after Strachey and Partridge, but Gretchen Gerzina argues that on the contrary, she was at her most productive when her domestic and personal life were settled and untroubled by romantic entanglements.

But the level of emotional masochism in her life is remarkable. Whilst her husband took his new lover Frances Marshall on holiday to Paris, he forbade her to even write to Gerald Brenan. She distracted herself from this humiliating position by starting an affair with Henrietta Bingham, the daughter of the American ambassador, a foray into Sapphism which made her regret she hadn’t started earlier. And this didn’t stop her sleeping with Gerald Brenan as well – so by this time she had certainly got rid of her earlier sexual reluctance.

Almost all the evidence for this personal narrative comes from letters. These people were super-communicative on paper. But the correspondence needs to be carefully interpreted – because they often wrote knowing that third parties might read what they said. Partridge not only banned Carrington from writing to Brenan, but insisted on reading all her correspondence. So she developed the strategy of inserting personal messages into secret addenda – which were nevertheless sometimes intercepted. And she was much given to reading other people’s private mail too.

As the menage she helped to create with Strachey and Partridge began to fall apart, she consoled herself with Bernard (Beakus) Penrose [brother of Sir Roland] in one last romance. But it was Strachey who remained her most lasting affection, and when he died (of undiagnosed stomach cancer) in 1932 she felt that she could not live without him. So she shot herself – aged just thirty-nine.

© Roy Johnnson 2012

Dora Carrington Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Gretchen Gerzina, Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932, London: Pimlico, 1995, pp.342, ISBN 0712674209


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