Art Archives - Page 7 of 9

Romantic Moderns

October 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writers, artists, and the English sense of place

Romantic Moderns is a major piece of work by a young cultural historian with a free-ranging approach to her subject. It’s a study of a particular strain in English art that Alexandra Harris correctly describes as ‘romantic’, and illustrates as permeating every aspect of cultural life. The period she covers is the late 1930s through to the immediate post-war period. It would be interesting to know if the title of the PhD on which the book is based had a sub-title more specific than the one she provides here – because ‘from Virginia Woolf to John Piper’ is rather wide in scope. After all, Woolf was born in 1882, and Piper lived until 1992 – so that’s a span covering the late Victorian era, two world wars, and the digital age.

Her writing is certainly lively and entertaining. She throws off multiple references that explode like fireworks in almost every paragraph. A consideration of architecture leads to books on buildings, then pictures of buildings, and on to novels that feature them. This cultural enthusiasm is both a strength and a weakness, because whilst the names, titles, and references come thick and fast, it’s sometimes difficult to identify the main point of her argument.

She’s fizzing with information, but I was sometimes longing for an overview or a generalization. The nearest I spotted was that the people she discusses were all interested in the relationship between ‘art and place’.

She covers an astonishingly wide range of topics. Subjects include English country houses (of the Brideshead type) seascapes, Victorian revivalism, cuisine and gastronomy, the BBC, literary criticism, watercolour painting, music, travel writing, film, landscape gardening, and even the weather.

The artists whose work she discusses include John Betjemann, Eric Ravilious, Cecil Beaton, Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Benjamin Britten, and Graham Sutherland – and those are just some of the best known. She also deals with a whole host of lesser figures – architects, film-makers, milliners, and interior designers,

It’s a world of country gardens, southern seascapes, churches, and images of a bucolic past. There are no cities, motor cars, iron foundries, or telephones in the iconography of this view of the world. Almost all topographical references come from below a line drawn between the Severn and the Wash. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of English culture had been generated within the boundaries of Sussex.

The other worrying and recurrent problem in her approach is that modern English romantic art began much earlier than the late thirties in which she pitches most of her comment. The Georgian poets, water-colourists, and engravers all got under way in the second decade of the century, as a reaction to the brutality of the first world war and a sense that an idyllic past was being lost.

She makes a brave case for pastoral romanticism being an enduring feature in English culture, but it is based on selective (though widespread) evidence, and a nostalgic enthusiasm for a view of the world based on the village green. This can be seen as embarrassingly conservative at a time of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, Stalin’s show trials, and the onset of a fully mechanised second world war.

Her capacity for detail uncovers some interesting points – such as T.S. Eliot exchanging views on blood and soil with anti-Semitic and eugenics-supporting Viscount Lymington. It was but a small step from this to Eliot’s belief in religious notions of ‘continuity’ and nationhood. But the arguments on inherent (almost genetic) national feeling for pastoralism are somewhat dented when she cites the work of Bill Brandt, who was German, and Eliot himself, who came from St Louis, Missouri – not East Coker.

The latter part of the book deals with an unashamed celebration of the glamour and romance of the large English country house, focusing on its presence in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. This doesn’t add a lot more to what has gone before, except to intensify an overt nostalgia for disappearing aristocratic worlds.

It might seem churlish to dwell on the weaknesses of such an enthusiastic and beautifully written study, but I think it would be patronising to a work pitched at this level not to take its arguments seriously enough to question them. Anyway, the book is already a runaway success, and its rich cream pages and high quality colour illustrations are sure to delight anyone who buys it.

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Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.320, ISBN: 0500251711

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Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1927) The International Psycho-Analytic Library, No.12

“From 1922 to 1939 the International Psycho-Analytic Library offered nine of Freud’s books and two Epitomes. Joan Riviere translated two of the nine books, James Strachey two books (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922, and An Autobiographical Study, 1935), and Alix Strachey one book (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1936). Only four other translators were entrusted with translating Freud’s books in the series: C.M.J. Hubback (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922), W.D Robson-Scott (The Future of an Illusion, 1928). W.J.H. Sprott (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933), and Katherine Jones (Moses and Monotheism, 1939).”

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

It was James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother, who arranged to have the Hogarth Press become the publisher for the books of the International Psycho-Analytic Library in 1924. The Press bought the rights to the previously published titles in the ILP series, inheriting the already printed volumes (bearing the International Psycho-Analytic Press imprint) along with the rights to Freud’s Collected Papers for £800. Thus the Hogarth Press became the publisher of Freud in English, making a major contribution to twentieth-century thought and increasing the international importance of the Press. Freud’s Collected Papers also became one of the Press’s most successful publications. Freud’s reputation grew tremendously in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ego and the Id, along with other works by Freud, were an important part of the Press list for decades.

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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Stanley Spencer

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

visionary English modernist painter

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter from the early modernist period. He was the youngest child of a large middle-class artistic family who lived in Cookham, a small village on the Thames. The cultural ambiance in the household was one of music and church-going. Spencer had very little formal education, since his father had snobbish doubts about the local council school, but could not afford the fees for a private education. He ran his own private school in a shed in next door’s garden.

Spencer’s talent for drawing was encouraged by the wife of the local landowner. She suggested the Slade School of Art (where she had studied herself) and he was admitted and at his father’s insistence that he should not be subjected to any examinations, was allowed to bypass the written entrance requirements. He studied under Wilson Steer and the formidable Henry Tonks, and he was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg.

self-portrait 1923

Being small, wearing glasses, and having the general appearance of a young boy, it was not surprising that he became something of a scapegoat and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow students, many of whom developed a life style that combined upper class raffishness with what we now think of as art school bohemianism. Nevinson called him ‘Cookham’, the village to which he travelled home by train every day. It was a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his days at the Slade.

By the end of his first year Spencer had won a scholarship prize – though it was initially withheld from him on the technical objection that he had not taken the initial written entrance examination. Although he received very little instruction in painting whilst at the Slade, around this time he began to produce his now famous paintings of everyday life in Cookham village that also included religious figures and scenes from the bible (Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem).

Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade, he was not touched by the fashionable influences of the post-Impressionists, but continued painting in the same style as he had always done – a combination of realistic depiction with visionary subject matter. He also steered clear of all the intellectualising and theorising about the nature of Art that was rife amongst his fellow artists.

By 1912 he had twice won Slade prizes despite the fact that sometimes he had to work on the kitchen table at home, surrounded by his parents and brothers and sisters. He left the Slade in the same year, but was included in the second Grafton Gallery exhibition of post-Impressionists, alongside works by Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne. Even though he behaved like a bucolic recluse, his work became sought after by collectors such as Eddie Marsh and Lady Ottoline Morrell, who bought his works both for her own collection and on behalf of the Contemporary Arts Society.

At the outset of war in 1914 he felt ambivalent about enlisting, but eventually joined the medical service and was posted to a recovery unit in an old lunatic asylum just outside Bristol. He hated the long hours, the drudgery, and the military discipline – but whilst there his painting The Centurion’s Servant caused a stir at the London Group exhibition in November 1915. He then volunteered for an overseas expeditionary posting, and was sent to Macedonia, which he found strangely exciting and exotic.

Swan Upping at Cookham (1915)

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 conflict 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.

In 1925 his life changed quite dramatically. First 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. He moved back to live in Cookham trying (unsuccessfully) to recapture some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, another former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer became obsessed with Patricia and eventually proposed a menage a trois with his wife Hilda, but she refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who as a lesbian equally refused to consummate their marriage or even live in the same house. However, since she controlled his finances, when he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his new wife forced him out, so he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. Perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown.

This period was also the source of one of his most controversial paintings – the Leg of Mutton Nude or to give the work its more correct title Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937). This is an overtly sexual (though not erotic) portrait of Spencer and Patricia, with a joint of lamb in the foreground. It was never exhibited in his lifetime. Later, the outgoing president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings initiated a police prosecution against Spencer for obscenity. The irony in all this is that the portrait shows the bespectacled Stanley looking down longingly on the naked body of Patricia, the wife with whom he never had sex.

He undertook the enormous project of a decorated chapel at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, designing the chapel himself and modelling it on Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua. This work consisted of sixteen huge paintings depicting everyday scenes of shell-shocked troops in England and Macedonia, but with an emphasis on everyday events rather than the horrors of war. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde which are now in national collections. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died of cancer in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon US

Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon US

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T.S.Eliot – Poems

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

T.S. Eliot, Poems (1918)

This was the third publication of the Hogarth Press. It includes the poems ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Le spectateur’, ‘Mélange adultère de tout’, ‘Lune de miel’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, and ”Whispers of immortality’. All seven of the poems had appeared previously in the Little Review.

“In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Tom’s Poems we printed rather fewer than 250 copies. We published it in May 1919 price 2s. 6d. and it went out of print in the middle of 1920.

We took a good deal of trouble to find some rather unusual, gay Japanese paper for the covers. For many years we gave much time and care to find beautiful, uncommon, and sometimes cheerful paper for binding our books, and, as the first publishers to do this, I think we started a fashion which many of the regular, old established publishers followed. We got papers from all over the place, including some brilliantly patterned from Czechoslovakia, and we also had some marbled covers made for us by Roger Fry’s daughter in Paris. I bought a small quantity of Caslon Old Face Titling type and used it for printing the covers.

Caslon Old Style Titling Font

The publication of T.S.Eliot’s Poems must be marked as a red letter day for the Press and for us … Tom showed us some of the poems which he had just written and we printed seven of them and published them in the slim paper covered book. It included three remarkable poems which are still, I think, vintage Eliot: ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. and ”Whispers of immortality’.”

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

Hogarth Press studies

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T.S.Eliot – The Waste Land

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1923)

This was published three times in America before it appeared under the Hogarth Press imprint. First it had been published in Criterion (October 1922), the magazine of which Eliot himself was editor, which was funded by rich patroness Lady Rothermere. Then it was published in Dial the following month, still without the famous explanatory ‘notes’. Finally it was published in book form by Boni and Liveright in December 1922.

Eliot himself suggested that the explanatory notes were an addition of ‘bogus scholarship’ devised to bulk out the number of pages in an otherwise slim publication. Virginia Woolf set the entire poem in type herself. It was issued in an edition of 470 copies with blue marbled boards probably prepared by Vanessa Bell. T.S. Eliot earned £7 5s. in royalties.

The Waste Land went on to become one of the most famous texts of the modernist movement – along with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses – and an iconic publication for modern poetry.

Hogarth Press studies

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The Painted Word

August 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

from abstract expressionism to op art and minimalism

The Painted Word is a companion piece to Tom Wolfe’s other book-length critical essay on architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House. This time his target is the world of modern American painting, the way reputations are established, and how the world of art has been turned into a form of commodity investment. His arguments are based upon the observation that the world of contemporary art is based upon two very small elite groups. First the artists themselves, who make radical visual statements scorning bourgeois values. Second their very rich patrons, who court contemporary chic fashion with a similar purpose. There is in fact an even smaller third group – the critics and theorists – but they are counted along with the first.

He adds for good measure the fact that as artistic reputations are established by the interactions between these groups, the general public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The focus of his critique is on New York, but he argues that the same forces are at play in any of the world’s (few) centres for modern art – be they London, Paris, or Tokyo.

He sees modern art post second world war as an ever more rapid flight from the tradition of realistic painting towards the ultimate dead end of an art based upon nothing but theory. The first stage of this trajectory is the arrival of abstract expressionism with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, and Jackson Pollock.

They ditched figurative painting and were urged on by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who spoke of ‘”essences” and “purities” and “opticalities” and “formal factors” and “logics of readjustment” and God knows what else’. Wolfe reserves some of his most amusing yet scornful remarks for the wilful obscurity of such ‘criticism’.

The influence of this group was quickly replaced by the arrival of Pop Art in the 1960s, fuelled by painters such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein

Pop Art was packed with literary associations … It was, from beginning to end an ironic, a camp, a literary-intellectual assertion of the banality, emptiness, silliness, vulgarity, et cetera of American culture, and if the artist said, as Warhol usually did, “But that’s what I like about it” – that only made the irony more profound, more cool.

And before you knew it, Pop was replaced by Op Art, which reduced the notion of art as nothing more than stripes of colour on a flat surface. This in its turn was displaced by Minimalist Art, which reduced the colours and the shapes.

You can see the direction and the end goal of this argument. The next stage was to remove any painterly skill altogether, and reduce the subject to nothing more than words on paper – which gave us Conceptual Art.

It’s an argument which still holds good today, even if the names have been changed to Jeff Koons, Tracy Emin, and Damien Hirst.

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Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Picador, 2008, pp.112, ISBN: 0312427581

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The Russian Experiment in Art

March 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the rise of Russian modernism 1863-1922

Camilla Gray was a young and pioneering scholar of Russian modernist art. She was a former ballet dancer, with no academic background. She married Oleg Prokoviev (the composer’s son) and died tragically young at the age of only thirty-five. And yet she established a body of work on Russian art in 1962 which was quickly appreciated in other European countries. Her original impulse, fuelled by admiration for the modernist work of Malevich and Tatlin, was to look into the tradition out of which such revolutionary art had grown. The Russian Experiment in Art was the culmination of her life’s work.

There was little information around in the 1960s when she began her research, which is what makes her achievement so remarkable. The first part of the cultural process she documents is the development of a Russian middle class in the late nineteenth century. Mamontov, who made his money builidng the railway from Archangel to Murmansk, established an artists’ colony based in Slavophile Moscow (not europhile St Petersburgh). From this many artistic themes were developed, including the connection between painting and the theatre, and a desire to make aesthetics socialy useful. The standout character she highlights from this period (of whom I had not heard before) is Mikhail Vrubel.

Meanwhile, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a group centred in St Petersburg focussed their desires for a new Russian art around the production of a magazine, called ‘World of Art’. Like most avant gard magazines it was short-lived, but it included work by Leon Bakst, Sergei Diaghilev, and Alexander Benois. They had allowed themselves to be influenced by the latest developments in France, Germany, and Italy and thus represented a cosmopolitanism which was common in much of modernist art.

Following the 1905 revolution there was a vigorous period of art collecting by wealthy patrons which resulted in Russian artists having direct contact with the work of post-impressionists – and Matisse and Picasso in particular made a big impression on the Russian avant garde.

Her study then moves on to two seminal figures who helped to bridge the gap between traditional Russian folk art and modernism – Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. They both went on to become stage designers, working for Sergei Diaghilev. It’s interesting to note as an aside that it was quite common for artists to design scale model sets and costumes for stage productions which had not taken place, and often never would.

Natalia Goncharova 1910

Many of the individual movements in Russian art were taking place at the same time, and being developed at a dizzying pace. Larionov’s experiments in Rayonnism (the Russian equivalent of Italian Futurism) were painted alongside his neo-primitivist pictures of peasant life. When Larionov and Goncharova left to tour Europe with The Ballets Russe, the baton of further developments seemed to be taken up by the next two major figures to emerge – Malevich and Tatlin.

Malevich went from paintings in a Cubo-Futurist style in 1912-1913 to his totally abstract compositions in Suprematism only two years later. And in roughly the same period Vladimir Tatlin progressed from stylised but conventional paintings to the abstract three-dimensional constructions, of which his Monument to the Third International is the most famous. (It should be remembered that this was only ever a model for a building intended to be twice the height of the Empire State building.)

The artistic dynamics which created these many styles didn’t prevent factional disputes between rival tendencies, and at the ‘Last Futurist Painting Exhibition’ Malevich and Tatlin actually held up the opening by having a fist-fight brawl until they were separated by Alexandra Exter.

In 1917 the Revolution gave artists both a political impetus and an opportunity to link their art to socially useful purposes, which many of them did with great enthusiasm – particularly leftists such as Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky.

It is with their pioneering work in typography and photo-montage that the book ends. Too soon, I felt – but perhaps mercifully so, because within a few years of their fresh and optimistic work of the early 1920s, the whole of the heroic phase of Soviet communism was crushed under the stifling diktats of centralist ideology, and all ‘art’ was reduced to the drab banalities of Socialist Realism.

Camilla Gray does her best to persuade us that the Russian versions of Cubism and Futurism were quite different than their French and Italian counterparts. The visual evidence in this richly illustrated volume suggest otherwise. She also has the naive critical habit of taking what artists say about themselves and their work at face value.

However, it’s easy to see why this pioneering study The Russian Experiment in Art is so highly regarded. She gives specific names and dates to artists, individual works of art, and exhibitions almost as if she was present whilst they were taking place. There is a full critical apparatus attached to the work, and this has been updated and expanded by Marion Burleigh-Motley, a specialist in Russian art at New York University. In short, this is a serious update of a major work of art history – available for the price of a couple of drinks.

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Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, pp.324, ISBN 0500202079

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Vanessa Bell a biography

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa’s early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father’s death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.

When their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him – yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.

As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:

Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive

She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell’s painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.

Despite Frances Spalding’s efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist – quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit – which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?

When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell’s for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell’s family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.

Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It’s is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.

In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d’Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.

It’s often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding’s pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant’s gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).

Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia’s suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.

But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.

Despite my reservations about the picture created here, this is a thorough and a scholarly biography, with all its sources fully documented. It’s simultaneously the complete account of a life, a rich documentary on the Bloomsbury Group, and a historical account which begins in the Victorian era and ends in modern post-war Britain.

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Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.399, ISBN 0333372255

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Vanessa Bell biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

artist, lover, matriarch

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf – but in fact she was a talented artist in her own right. She was born in May 1879 at Hyde Park Gate, in central London, the eldest of four children of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian scholar and writer, and his second wife Julia Duckworth. Vanessa like her sister was largely educated at home, but they were both encouraged to develop their individual talents. Vanessa started having drawing lessons, and in 1899 she entered the Royal Academy.

Following her mother’s death in 1895, Vanessa took on the role of housekeeper for the family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was rather demanding, and Vanessa struggled to balance this domestic role with trying to develop her artistic interests. However, her father died in 1904, so she was released from this responsibility. The family home was sold and she moved with her sister and two brothers, Adrian and Thoby, to a start a new and emotionally more liberated life at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

The move to their new home enabled Vanessa and her sister and brothers to entertain their own friends. On Thursday nights Thoby invited his literary friends from Trinity College, Cambridge University to the house, and Vanessa started the ‘Friday Club’, a meeting for artists. The Bloomsbury Group grew out of these meetings of artists and writers.

Vanessa Bell, Frances Spalding’s excellent biography, records the effects of this liberating move. One of Thoby Stephen’s friends at university was Clive Bell. In 1905 he asked Vanessa to marry him, but she declined. She also rejected a second proposal from him a year later. (Virginia did the same with Leonard Woolf.) Her reasons were that although she valued his friendship, she did not want to be married.

However, after the sudden death of her brother Thoby from typhoid fever in 1907, she changed her mind and accepted him. They had two sons – Julian and Quentin – both of whom went on to become writers. Vanessa continued to paint, but her time was increasingly taken up with looking after the children. In 1910 they met Roger Fry when he came to speak at the ‘Friday Club’, and the following year they went on holiday with him to Greece and Turkey.

When she became ill on holiday, Fry nursed her through the illness, and they started an affair. She and Clive nevertheless remained friends, and Clive continued to support her financially, but he resumed a relationship with a previous mistress. Such is Bloomsbury, and there is more to come.

Another artist who joined the Bloomsbury Group was Duncan Grant. Vanessa admired his work and bought one of his paintings. The Art of Bloomsbury shows via beautiful colour reproductions how Bell, Fry, and Grant influenced each other. In time she became close to Grant, and despite the fact that he was a promiscuous homosexual, she started an affair with him. This displaced Roger Fry, who was miffed but remained friends and part of the Bloomsbury Group.

She and Duncan Grant were devoted to each other and lived together for the rest of her life. They had a daughter, Angelica, who they pretended was the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell. This deceit was maintained until the girl was nineteen years old. She records her own account of this dubious episode in her memoir Deceived with Kindness.

During the First World War, Vanessa and Duncan Grant moved to the Sussex countryside, so he could avoid conscription. They rented Charleston Farmhouse, and moved there in October 1916 with Vanessa’s children and also the writer David Garnett, who was Duncan’s current lover.

Duncan and Vanessa chose rooms for their studios at Charleston and immediately started to decorate the house. The walls, fireplaces, door panels, and furniture were all decorated to harmonise with their paintings, and Omega fabrics and ceramics were incorporated into the overall décor.

Clive Bell came to visit his sons, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived only four miles away. Other guests included Maynard Keynes and his wife the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova and Lytton Strachey and his sisters. Amateur dramatics were a popular form of entertainment at Charleston. There were a number of pageants and drama shows put on between the wars – what came to be called ‘The Long Weekend’. Virginia Woolf satirises a country house pageant in her last novel Between the Acts.

The thirties were a time of personal difficulty for Vanessa. Roger Fry, with whom Vanessa had remained close, died after a fall in 1934, and in 1937 her son Julian was killed while serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. More unhappiness followed with the suicide of her sister Virginia in 1941, and estrangement from her daughter Angelica in 1942. This was caused by a twist which illustrates the complex personal relationships amongst the Bloomsbury Group.

Angelica discovered the truth about the identity of her real father only when she was nineteen, and then much against her mother’s wishes, and in a manoeuvre which you do not need a brass plaque on your front door to understand, she married David Garnett, her father’s former lover, who was twenty-six years older than her.

Charleston became a full-time home again during the Second World War as it was safely out of reach of the bombs falling on London, and Vanessa continued to live there for part of each year until her death in 1961. Duncan kept the house on for a few years longer but it was too large for him and he eventually moved out. The house is now maintained by The Charleston Trust who have renovated and opened it to the public.

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’.

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This has become one of the cornerstone’s of feminist theory in relation to literature. It’s a sparkling, critical, and wide-ranging expose of male privilege and the way in which women have been excluded from cultural life. However, as John Willis argues in his study of the text, Woolf omitted to mention the work of other women writers on the same subject which had appeared prior to her own.

“There was more fiction than fact in Woolf’s most famous and beloved feminist polemic. The occasion was an address to the young women of Newham and Girton colleges on the subject of women and fiction, which she subsequently rewrote into the expanded form of the published book. Woolf’s form followed function. She created clever and pointed fictions before their eyes, inventing, among others, Shakespeare’s thwarted sister Judith and the young modern novelist Mary Carmichael. There were few facts partly because she presumed to dislike them and partly because the works on women containing the facts (all erroneous) had been written by men. Woolf chose not to recognise the existence of useful, accurate, and understanding accounts of women by women. Nor did she mention directly the achievements of women such as [Millicent Garrett] Fawcett, [Ray] Strachey, or [Margaret Llewellyn] Davis. Strachey’s The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s movement in Great Britain (1928) was a year old when Woolf created her story of her own room and an inheritance of £500 per year, yet there is only a brief quotation from it, identified in a footnote. Facts aside, the wit and irony of her writing, her satirical exposure of patriarchal attitudes, her leaps of intuitive understanding, [and] her subjective experience made the book memorable and influential.”

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

The first one hundred copies of [the first, limited edition] were for sale by the Hogarth Press, and the price was substantial. The Hogarth Press’s trade edition, issued at the same time, was priced at 5s; the print run was 3,040 copies. The press published a number of books that come at the same question of women’s lives and positions in different ways. One of particular interest is Life As We Have Known It (1931), a collection of autobiographical sketches of guildswomen, for which Woolf wrote an introductory letter.

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

Hogarth Press studies

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writers, artists, and the English sense of place

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

visionary English modernist painter

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

from abstract expressionism to op art and minimalism

the rise of Russian modernism 1863-1922

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

artist, lover, matriarch

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

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