Art Archives - Page 6 of 9

On Being Ill

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1930) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Not until 1930 did [Virginia and Leonard Woolf] hand print another of Virginia’s works, a small essay On Being Ill. To possible critics of the slightly botched printing of On Being Ill Virginia composed a tongue-in-cheek form letter which she never sent. Such a charming disclaimer could well serve as a summing up of the Woolf’s hand printing over the years. Beginning “Dear Madam,” Virginia agreed that “the colour is uneven, the letters not always clear, the spacing inaccurate, and the word ‘campion’ should read ‘companion””. Her defense was that she and Leonard were amateur printers without formal training, who fit in their hobby amid busy lives. But, she added, the volume was already worth more than it cost because of over-subscription, so that although “we have not satisfied your taste, we hope that we have not robbed your purse”.

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

One of the last books hand printed by the Woolfs, On Being Ill is a fairly short essay by Woolf that explores not only illness, but also solitude, sympathy, and reading. Woolf writes, for example, that in illness “It is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts” The words of On Being Ill are both written and printed by Woolf. The book shows a greater sophistication than some of the earlier books, though there are still some errors that remind one that humans rather than machines created the book.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Paul Nash

October 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

painter, engraver, war artist, and English modernist

Paul Nash (1889-1946) was a British painter and a war artist who was strongly associated with the development of Modernism in the visual arts in the early part of the twentieth century. Although he has always been associated with a bucolic vision of England, he was actually born in Kensington in the heart of London. But his relatives were all from the countryside and the family eventually moved to live in Buckinghamshire – largely because of his mother’s fragile mental health.

Wood on the Downs (1929)

Nash was generally a failure at formal schooling, but because he had a gift for sketching he enrolled at Chelsea Polytechnic, then went on to the London School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, off Fleet Street. He was advised by his friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley, and by the artist William Rothenstein, that he should attend the Slade School of Art at University College, London.

His early influences were the Pre-Raphaelites and William Blake, and his first paintings were visionary works. These were admired by William Rothenstein, who encouraged him to study formally. Unfortunately, his father had no money, having been ruined by medical expenses for his wife, who died in a mental asylum in 1910. But Nash earned enough that year from his work as an illustrator to pay for twelve months’ tuition.

He enrolled in October 1910, though he later recorded that on his first meeting with the Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, ‘It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, were likely to derive much benefit’. Nash’s fellow students included Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Dora Carrington, Richard Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Nash struggled with figure drawing, and spent only one year at the school. Like his contemporary Stanley Spencer he travelled in by train every day to attend classes.

Discouraged at first, he made rapid progress after the first few weeks. His main friendship during the year was with the young Ben Nicholson. He also fell in love (as did so many others) with one of the year’s intake – the raffishly attractive Dora Carrington.

Like a number of his contemporaries, he left the Slade early, feeling it had nothing more to offer him. Paradoxically, he moved away from his home in the home counties to live in London, yet simultaneously discovered his love of the English countryside. He produced a series of works celebrating Nature and had a critically acclaimed show at the Carfax Gallery, near Piccadilly.

The year 1913 was a significant step in Nash’s career. He had a two man show with his brother John at the Darien Leigh Gallery in South Kensington at which several collectors bought his work and he was praised by Roger Fry. Success also came at a personal level. He met Margaret Odeh, an Oxford graduate and a full time worker in the women’s movement. They became engaged almost immediately, although at first they didn’t have enough money between them to get married. By the summer of 1914 Nash was enjoying some success and during that year he worked briefly at the Omega Workshops under Roger Fry.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 he was the first of the Slade students to enlist for military service, albeit reluctantly, observing ‘Personally I am more in favour of mending men than killing them’. He was posted on guard duty at the Tower of London, which allowed him time to continue painting and drawing. Then in 1916 he began officer training. His company was eventually involved in the disastrous Big Push’ of 1917 which was supposed to bring a quick end to the war. He had the ‘good luck’ to break some ribs in a fall a few days before, and was sent back to London as an invalid. Most of the men in his company were slaughtered in the attack.

Nash managed to organise a successful one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1917, but as the war ground on towards its horrendous climax, he was recalled to service. Fortunately he managed to secure a commission as a war artist – complete with batman and a chauffeur driven car. However, he was horrified by the spectacle of the war-ravaged battlefields in which Nature had almost been extinguished. He captured what he saw in a series of pen and ink drawings which were later used as the basis for an exhibition of masterful oil paintings he showed at the Leicester Galleries in 1918. They were also used as the basis for his most important work – The Menin Road.

The Menin Road (1919)

After the war he emerged with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder and became ‘a war artist without a war’. He was unsure how to develop his sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. He also began producing wood engravings and was for a while a teacher at the Royal College of Art, where his students included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. There was also a brief period in the nineteen-thirties when he produced abstract and surrealist works.

At the onset of World War Two, Nash was appointed to a full-time salaried post as war artist, attached to the Royal Air Force. But the works he produced did not meet with the approval of the Air Ministry, because they wanted heroic portraits of pilots and their air crew. In fact the works he painted managed to combine successfully his interests in landscape, realism, abstraction, and a form of visionary allegorical painting which is now generally recognised as the finest art work to come out of 1939-45.

After the war he suffered from a number of periods of bad health – most notably from asthma – he had difficulties painting, and he turned increasingly to photography, producing some collages. He spent the remaining eighteen months of his life encased in what he himself described as ‘reclusive melancholy’, and he finally died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash paintings and watercolours – Amazon UK
Paul Nash paintings and watercolours – Amazon US

Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon US

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Peggy Guggenheim

October 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

The first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

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Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609

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R.C.Trevelyan – Beelzebub

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

R.C. Trevelyan, Beelzebub and other poems, Hogarth Living Poets, second series, Number 3.

“R.C. Trevelyan, member of a distinguished Victorian family and brother of the Cambridge historian G.M. Trelyan, had been an Apostle at Trinity College, friend of the Woolfs for years, and by the 1920s was a classical scholar, a translator (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Theocritus), and a poet. He would eventually publish over twenty volumes of poetry.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

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Rebecca West – A Letter to a Grandfather

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Rebecca West, A Letter to a Grandfather (1933) Hogarth Letters, Number 7. Cover design by John Banting.

“In spite of his financially cautious recruitment of Margaret West for Hogarth manager in February 1933 and his by-now-familiar claim that he did not want to publish books merely because they might be profitable, Leonard Woolf did not neglect to pump up the press income when he could. In that very month he tried to rescue the Hogarth Letters series after twelve titles by binding together eleven of the letters into a single volume with a new title page as The Hogarth Letters. The effort was not successful, and he terminated the series after publishing the last one in March, Rebecca West’s Letter to a Grandfather.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

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Richard Nevinson

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

English modernist painter and war artist

Richard Nevinson – (1899-1946) was an English artist of the early modernist period, the second child of Suffragette-supporters and Christian Socialists who lived in Hampstead. His mother was a teacher and his father (an Oxford classics graduate) was a war correspondent with the Daily Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. Nevinson was generally unhappy and often ill as a child, and was particularly undistinguished at school. When he was thirteen his father made the disastrous decision to send him to a low-ranking public school, where he endured three pointless years of learning virtually nothing and which left him emotionally scarred, with an enduring hatred of ‘the national code of snobbery and sport’.

La Mitrailleuse (1915)

The only thing for which he had any aptitude was art, so in 1907 he was sent to St John’s Wood School of Art. This opened up the world of bohemian culture to him, and although his painting and drawing were still undeveloped he spent time drinking in the Cafe Royal in Regent Street with Arthur Symonds who was a friend of his father.

He was supposed to be preparing for entry into the Royal Academy Schools, but when he saw a publication of drawings by artists at the Slade, he knew that this was where he wanted to be. The Slade School of Art was part of University College, London and his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington.

However, when he got there he felt lonely and isolated, but became close friends with Mark Gertler – both of them ‘outsiders’ and both fond of the music halls. But whilst Gertler progressed rapidly and had some remarkable early success, Nevinson had yet to find his own n distinctive style. He painted scenes of railway sidings, factories, and gasometers in the north London suburbs.

Nevinson and Gertler began exhibiting with some degree of success in 1911. They discussed art together all the time, but their friendship was ended not by theories of art but by Dora Carrington. Both of them were paying court to her at the same time, and she (terrified of any possible sexual contact at that stage of her life) was playing one off against the other. Nevinson was older and more experienced, Gertler was better looking and more successful. In the end she chose Gertler – not that it brought him much satisfaction.

After Nevinson’s first year, and following the Dora Carrington problem, he felt that the Slade had nothing more to offer him, and he moved north to Bradford where he felt better painting pictures of mills, factories, and coal mines. But the triangular struggle with Gertler and Carrington continued nevertheless. He then moved to Paris and studied for a while at the Academie Julien. He copied paintings in the Louvre, shared a studio with Modigliani for a while, and met Lenin who at that time was living in exile.

Returning to London in 1913, Nevinson was plunged back into despair by his jealous obsession with Carrington, and eventually had a complete breakdown. He recovered in a health spa in Buxton, after which he was something of a changed man. He threw in his lot with Wyndham Lewis and the other English futurists who set themselves up as an alternative to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops.

Unfortunately, this move only cut him off even further from the artistic success he sought. The Vorticists (as they called themselves) became mired in factional disputes, they lost their patron, and disappeared rapidly into obscurity, despite issuing Manifestos and calling for revolutions. Their timing couldn’t have been worse or more ironic, because just across the English Channel real wars and revolutions were going on.

Paths of Glory (1917)

Nevinson joined the Ambulance Brigade and worked with his father in the makeshift field hospitals of northern France. The scenes of horror he encountered there were so bad that he returned to England in January 1915 and never went back into combat. He transformed these experiences into what was to become his greatest work, La Mitrailleuse, and the success of this work alone led to a one man show at the Leicester Galleries which was a sell out.

However, his shattered nerves were not bad enough to prevent his being re-conscripted. Various wires were pulled and people of influence contacted, and he was returned to the conflict as a war artist – but with no status and no salary. However, many of the paintings which came out of these experiences were criticised and even censored because they were not considered sufficiently patriotic.

After the war Nevinson (like Paul Nash) became ‘a war artist without a war’. His post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated. He reverted to painting in a realistic style, and produced some dramatic cityscapes of New York, Paris, and London which were well received. During the Second World War he worked as a stretcher-bearer in London throughout the Blitz, in which time his own studio and the family home in Hampstead were hit by bombs. He suffered a stroke which paralysed his right hand, and even though he taught himself to paint with his left hand he died somewhat embittered in 1946.

Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon UK
Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon US

A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon UK
A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon US

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Robert Graves – The Feather Bed

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Robert Graves, The Feather Bed (1923)

Cover design by William Nicholson. Number 210 of 250 copies signed by the author.

“As the books and pamphlets on political subjects grew in number and importance, the Woolfs continued to publish more volumes of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism in 1926 than in any other areas. A significant event was the publication of another book in 1926 by Robert Graves. He published a pamphlet on poetry and brought with him Laura Riding. Graves met Laura Riding Gottschalk in 1926 after he had published his first Hogarth Press essay on modern poetry.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

The Hogarth Press published a total of seven works by Graves, the first of which was The Feather Bed. This book consists of an “Introductory Letter” to John Crowe Ransom (his name misspelled “Ransome”) and an unconventional poem: a young man’s monologue that focussed on “internal debate about the nature of love, sexuality, and the religious calling of nuns and priests”. The book generated interest and sold quite well, though no subsequent edition of the poem was issued. The painter William Nicholson, Graves’s father-in-law, provided the cover for the book.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

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Roger Fry – Twelve Original Woodcuts

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

150 copies were printed. Squarish octavo, unpaginated, title page + 12 original woodcuts, each printed on a separate sheet.

A copy of the third impression, printed in 1922 is currently described as: “Internally the pages are bright and clean, and the woodcuts are good impressions. The original wrapper has a small closed tear along the front top edge, and a bit of light soiling, otherwise in very good condition. Very scarce in any of the impressions. Price $3,000.00”

See digital slide show of this publication at Duke University Library

Hogarth Press studies

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Roger Fry a biography

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

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Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Roger Fry biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

artist, critic, designer

Roger Fry was an influential art historian and a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group. He was born in 1866 in Highgate, London, into a wealthy Quaker family. He studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he took a first in the Natural Science ‘tripos’. Much to his family’s regret, he decided after university to pursue an artistic career rather than continue his scientific studies. In 1891 Fry went to Italy and then Paris, to study painting. He began to lecture on art, and became a critic and author. He made his debut in art criticism in 1893 with a review of George Moore’s book Modern Art for the Cambridge Review. Then in 1894 he began lecturing on Italian art for the Cambridge Extension Movement (classes for working people).

He married the artist Helen Coombe in 1896, but although his career as an artist and critic was a success, his personal life was troubled. His wife suffered from mental illness and had to be committed to an institution, where she stayed until her death in 1937. Fry was left to look after their children Pamela and Julian.

His first book on Giovanni Bellini, was published in 1899. He regularly contributed articles and criticism to the magazines Monthly Review and The Athenaeum, and in 1903 he was involved in the founding of Burlington Magazine, acting as joint editor between 1909-18, and making it into one of the most important art magazines in Britain. From 1905 to 1910, he was the Curator of Paintings for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

He first met the artists Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell in 1910, when they invited him to lecture at Vanessa’s Friday Club. This was the artistic equivalent of her brother Thoby’s literary soirees held on Thursday evenings. He subsequently became a regular member of the Bloomsbury Group, and Virginia Woolf later wrote his biography. His affair with her sister Vanessa Bell began in 1911 when he accompanied the Bells on a holiday to Turkey. It ended when she transferred her affections to Duncan Grant in 1913.

In 1910, Fry organized the first Post-Impressionist exhibition (and indeed, coined the phrase) for the Grafton Galleries in London, and later published books on Cézanne (1927), and Matisse (1930). In 1913, he organized the Omega Workshops, a collective that encouraged the involvement of young artists in the design and decoration of everyday functional objects. This remained active until 1919.

Fry re-edited and updated a collection of his best articles and writings to produce his best known book, Vision and Design which was published in 1920. As well as Western art, the book examined the use of form and aesthetics in ethnic art from Africa, America and Asia. It was a great success, reinforcing his position as England’s leading critic and it is still recognised as an extremely influential work in the development of modernist theory.

In his ideas, Fry emphasised the importance of ‘form’ over ‘content’: that is, how a work looks, rather than what it is about. He thought that artists should use colour and arrangement of forms rather than the subject to express their ideas and feelings, and that works of art should not be judged by how accurately they represent reality.

In his personal life, it was not until 1924 after several short lived relationships (including affairs with Nina Hamnett, one of the Omega artists; and Josette Coatmellec, which ended tragically with her suicide), that he found happiness with Helen Anrep. Twenty years his junior, she left her husband and became a great support to Fry in his career, and lived with him until his death.

In 1933 Fry was offered the post of Slade Professor at Cambridge and began a series of lectures on the nature of art history that he was never to complete. The text for the lectures was published after his death in 1939 as Last Lectures. Fry died on 9 September 1934 following a fall at his London home. His ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, in a casket decorated by Vanessa Bell.

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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Twentieth century literature

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

painter, engraver, war artist, and English modernist

poor little rich girl

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

English modernist painter and war artist

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

artist, critic, designer

Bloomsbury Group – web links

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