Duncan Grant Archives

Bloomsbury Art and Design

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painting, illustration, ceramics, interior design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Charleston Saved 1979-1989

May 25, 2010 by Roy Johnson

restoring a Bloomsbury decorated house

Charleston is a farmhouse near Lewes, Sussex which was once the home of Clive Bell, his wife Vanessa, and her lover Duncan Grant. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were frequent visitors from their own country property at Monk’s House in nearby Rodmell. Other members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, and Maynard Keynes were regular visitors.

It is most famous for the fact that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant covered the entire surface of the house – walls, fireplace, cupboards, tables, chairs – with their decorations and paintings, an impulse that was also part of the Omega Workshops movement initiated by Roger Fry around the same time during the first world war. [A subsidiary purpose of the house was to act as a refuge for conscientious objectors to the war.]

The house was famously damp and rather uncomfortable, but Duncan Grant went on living there until his death in 1978 – at which point it was in a state of neglect and dilapidation. This book is an account of the restoration project made to bring the hopuse back to life – ‘from the Broncoo toilet paper to the Bakelight electrical fittings’. Indeed throughout the whole project there was a constant debate over the relative merits of re-creating the original or saving what was left, which was a very expensive option.

There’s a great deal of fund-raising by the great and the good, but the real interest of Anthea Arnold’s account is in how a decaying over-decorated farmhouse can be pulled back from the brink of disintegration whilst preserving its spirit and integrity. There was much to be done against death watch beetles, mold, dry rot, and general decay.

At some points the narrative becomes a somewhat bizaare mixture of raffle prizewinners at fundraising events sandwiched between detailed technical accounts of replastering walls using goat’s hair bonding agents.

Chapters are ordered by the objects and materials being restored – furniture, ceramics, fabrics, stained glass, pictures, the garden – and most problematic of all, the original wallpaper. Yet desite all the nit-picking over minor details of wallpaper pattern repeats and curtain fabrics, the house was re-opened to the public without the fundamental problem of rising damp having been solved. Plaster had to be cut back to the bare wall more than once.

There was quite a lot of disagreement over the wisdom and accuracy of the restoration. Why spend tens of thousands of pounds preserving rotting wallpaper when the original designs could easily be reproduced? In the end, the argument for authenticity prevailed – so long as there were sufficient US-funded endowments to sustain it.

Anyway, the project finally succeeded, and Charleston is now a thriving visitors’ centre, and the location of an annual arts festival. So – Bloomsbury fans apart, this is a book that could appeal to public relations buffs and fundraisers, or to fans of Grand Designs or property restoration specialists.

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Anthea Arnold, Charleston Saved 1979-1989, London: Robert Hale, 2010, pp. 144, ISBN: 0709090188

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Twentieth century literature

Duncan Grant & the Bloomsbury Group

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

richly illustrated biography and social study

Duncan Grant came from a privileged upper class family in Scotland where he spent childhood holidays with his cousins the Stracheys (including Lytton Strachey who later became his lover) amidst a family whose eccentric behaviour reads like the events of a PG Wodehouse story. He went to Rugby School with Rupert Brooke and then lived with Lytton Strachey at Lancaster Gate. Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group concentrates on his life and work amidst this illustrious collection of aesthetes.

Douglas Turnbaugh’s narrative weaves in an out of his many affaires as a young man – Strachey, Arthur Hobhouse, John Maynard Keynes – but also emphasises his hard work in trying to become a successful artist, studying the old masters, copying them, and attending art schools in London and Paris. Grant’s life merged with that of the Bloomsbury set when he took up residence with the Stephens in Gordon Square. He and Keynes lived on the ground floor; Adrian Stephen on the first floor; Virginia Woolf on the second; and Leonard Woolf on the top floor.

He joined the Omega workshop which was organised by Roger Fry, subsequently replacing him as Vanessa Bell’s lover – despite the fact that he was her brother’s lover at the time. Then during the war he was like most of the Bloomsberries a conscientious objector. He became the father of Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica, who was passed off as the daughter of Clive Bell – to whom Vanessa was still married.

In the 1920s Vanessa learned to tolerate his affairs with a succession of younger men. In fact the whole family became involved in this sexual ambiguity when Julian Bell, Vanessa’s son, studying at Cambridge, began sleeping with Anthony Blunt – who later turned out to be simultaneously Keeper of the Queen’s pictures and a Soviet spy.

The cruelty of concealing the true identity of Angelica Bell’s father came home to roost in the late 1930s when she discovered the truth, and reacted to it by marrying another of her father’s ex-lover, David Garnett – which caused a rift in the family. [She gives her own account of these events, plus a picture of her Bloomsbury childhood, in Deceived with Kindness.]

In 1946, at the age of 60, he met the young Paul Roche, who was to be the main love of his late life and a serious threat to Vanessa. His work in the immediate post war period was considered unfashionable, but he continued working, mainly on decorative projects and private commissions. In the 1960s and 70s however, his reputation revived and he continued painting and pursuing young men with a remarkable degree of success until his death at the age of ninety-three.

This is a rather uncritical biography, but it captures the spirit of the ages in which Duncan Grant lived quite well, and it is rich in anecdote. The book is generously illustrated with Grant’s work and portraits of the Bloomsberries, and it has a good bibliography. I bought my copy second hand on Amazon to flesh out my collection of Bloomsbury materials, and although it is a little dated it turned out to be really good value.

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Douglas Turnbaugh, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury group, London: Bloomsbury, 1987, pp.192, ISBN 0747501033

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Duncan Grant biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter and interior designer

Duncan Grant (full name Duncan James Corrowr Grant) was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1885. He was brought up until the age of nine in India and Burma where his father was posted as an army officer. He returned to England in 1894 to attend school. While at St Paul’s school, London, he was brought up by his uncle and aunt Sir Richard and Lady Strachey (the parents of Lytton Strachey. He was encouraged by his art teacher and also his aunt, who organised private drawing lessons for him. Eventually, he was allowed to follow his desire to become an artist, rather than joining the army as his father wished, and he attended Westminster School of Art in 1902.

Grant’s cousins the Stracheys, with whom he had spent summer holidays as a schoolboy, played an important part in his life during this period. He spent the summer of 1905 with Lytton Strachey, and around the same time Pippa Strachey took Duncan to a meeting of the Friday Club where he first met the artists in the Bloomsbury Group.

At the beginning of 1906 he went to Paris, taking with him a letter of introduction from the French artist Simon Bussy and £100 from an aunt sympathetic to Grant’s artistic interests. He rented an attic room in a cheap hotel and enrolled at Jacques Emile Blanche’s new art school, La Palette. While in Paris he copied paintings in the Louvre.

The Art of Duncan Grant is a visual record of Grant’s easel painting and murals. He also did fabric design, theatre and ballet work, illustration and print-making, and commercial interior decoration. Throughout a long life Duncan Grant continued to experiment with new styles and techniques. This book offers an opportunity to grasp the extent of his achievement.

During his year in Paris, Grant developed a number of other important connections. He met the British artists Wyndham Lewis, Henry Lamb and Augustus John, and made friends with the American writer Gertrude Stein. He was also visited by the newly married Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, along with Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf, and their brother Adrian

Returning to London, Duncan Grant formed relationships over the next few years that were to affect the course of his life and work. In 1908, he became the lover of John Maynard Keynes, a university friend of his cousin Lytton Strachey. They travelled to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, seeing much that would influence Grant’s artistic style.

In 1909 he moved to 21 Fitzroy Square and became a regular visitor at Virginia and Adrian Stephen’s Thursday evening gatherings which formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. He also became a co-director of the Omega Workshops in 1913, along with Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. All of them shared an interest in the decorative arts as well painting on canvas.

In 1911 he worked on his first major commission, collaborating with other artists on a series of murals for the refectory of what is now South Bank University. The art critic of The Times thought that his murals Bathing and Football could have a “degenerative influence on the children of the working classes” – though both panels are now in the Tate Gallery.

From 1914 Duncan lived and worked with Vanessa Bell, moving to Charleston with her and his lover David Garnett. Vanessa was married to Clive Bell, but he had moved on to an affair with someone else and only visited at weekends. Despite Grant’s homosexuality, he and Vanessa remained together for fifty years, and they had a daughter Angelica who was born in 1918. Angelica was led to believe that her father was Clive Bell, and she only discovered the truth as an adult. She gives her version of all this in her memoir, Deceived with Kindness where she describes her reaction of marrying her father’s former lover, David Garnett, who was twenty-six years older than her, much to the disapproval of her mother.

Like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, Grant was a pacifist. In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and David Garnett moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

He had his first one-man exhibition in 1920 and his work was exhibited regularly until the end of his life. Grant and Bell were in great demand to paint murals and decorations. Duncan Grant enjoyed a reputation as one of the most important British Artists until the late 1930s, after which period the influence of pre-war Bloomsbury was eclipsed by the second world war.

Vanessa and Grant also travelled widely in Europe and spent much of their time living in Cassis in the South of France. After Vanessa Bell’s death he continued painting, dividing his time between Charleston and London and also travelling to Turkey, Morocco and France. The last great love of his life was the poet Paul Roche, whose daughter the actress and artist Mitey Roche he taught to paint. He died of pneumonia at Aldermaston in 1978 at the age of ninety-three.

Francis Spalding’s Duncan Grant: A Biography is the standard account of his life, which stretched from the Victorian age well into the modern era. It is based on his unpublished memoirs, letters and diaries, and it meticulously documents Grant’s daily life, his travels from Seville to Cyprus, and his encounters with everyone from E.M. Forster to Andre Gide and D.H. Lawrence.

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