Bloomsbury Group Archives - Page 7 of 11

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

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.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

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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Rupert Brooke biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

national icon of the young ‘doomed’ poet

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915) was only ever on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group – but he was well acquainted with its central figures, such as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. He was born in Rugby in Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at the famous public school. He himself attended the school, along with Duncan Grant. The boy soon grew into a man whose handsome figure transfixed admirers of both sexes. He was almost six foot tall, academically clever, and good at sports – representing the school in cricket and rugby. He was also highly creative: he wrote verse throughout his childhood, having gained a love of poetry from reading Browning.

In 1906 he won a scholarship to King’s College at Cambridge University, and whilst there he became a member of the Apostles, a semi-secret debating society whose other members included Bertrand Russell, E.M.Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. He helped to found the Marlowe Society drama club, acted in plays, and wrote poetry.

In 1910 his father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy housemaster. Thereafter he lived on an allowance from his mother. His first intimate relationship is thought to have been with Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of one of his close friends at Rugby.

In 1911 Brooke published his first collection of verse, Poems, and his work was featured in the periodical Georgian Poetry, edited by his friend, Sir Edward Marsh. Over the next twenty years, the book sold almost 100 000 copies. He became famous and popular in both literary and political circles.

He was a leader of a group of young ‘Neo-pagans’, who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and took up vegetarianism. Astonishing though it might seem, at one time Virginia Woolf joined them in Grantchester to swim naked at midnight in Byron’s Pool where Lord Byron used to bathe whilst a student at Cambridge. Other Neo-Pagan hangers-on included Augustus John, then in his heyday of wandering gypsy-Bohemian. Virginia Woolf wrote of this phase in a memoir:

Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows.

In 1911 Brooke was secretly engaged to Noel Olivier, five years his junior. The affair was for all participants frustrating and subsequently Brooke had an affair with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Overworked and emotionally empty, Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown.

In the spring of 1912, Brooke and Ka Cox went to Germany, where in a mood of homesickness he wrote a poem about his home ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which is among his most admired poems.

Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

It is interesting to note that Brooke’s method of poetic composition was to first of all assemble a list of pairs of rhyming words, and then fill in the lines which preceded them. The Old Vicarage is now occupied by the Cambridge physicist Mary Archer and her husband Jeffrey, the ‘novelist’, former politician, and ex-jailbird.

The group of five sonnets called 1914 that Rupert Brooke wrote in December 1914 and finished in January 1915 became, within a few months, some of the most praised and widely read poems of their day. They glorified England and the idea of dying for England.

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

In fact, he never saw active service.

His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.