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Bloomsbury Group

The Knitting Circle: History

Biography,bibliography,press cuttings.

Bloomsbury is a district of London, and for a period from before World War I to before World War II there was an ill-defined group of writers and artists who lived and hovered around the area.

The start of the era is defined by the death of Leslie Stephen in 1904 after which his four children, Virginia, Vanessa, Adrian, and Thoby moved into 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London.

Quentin Bell gives the following indication of the set-up in 1913.

______________
|E. M. Forster|
|                             David Garnett                            |
|                                                  Molly MacCarthy     |
|             Sydney Waterlow                    Desmond MacCarthy     |
|                              Roger Fry                               |
|                            Vanessa Bell                              |
|Duncan GrantVirginia Woolf|
|              Clive Bell           Saxon Sydney Turner                |
|                            Leonard Woolf                             |
|Lytton StracheyAdrian Stephen            |
|John Maynard Keynes|
|     Gerald Shove                                                     |
|          James Strachey                  H. T. J. Norton             |
|          Marjorie Strachey                                           |
|                                                   Francis Bell       |
|________________|

However, to its enemies the group stood for superficiality and self-indulgence, and represented a continuation of the aestheticism and decadence of the 1890s.

Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square in London in 1913 and artists who were associated with them believed that the creative joy of the artist and craftsman should go into the making of articles for everyday use. Examples of their work are in the Courtauld Institute Galleries and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The workshops closed in 1919.

One of the haunts of the Bloomsbury Group was the 1917 Club in Gerard Street, Soho. This had been founded in honour of the Russion Revolution, and it became a meeting place for left-wing politicians, intellectuals, and conscientious objectors. Leonard Woolf was on the management committee, and members of the Bloomsbury Group presented papers there on topics such as pacifism.

A black and white photograph ofVita Sackville-Westat Sissinghurst is reproduced inJivani (1997), pages 26 and 48, and with Harold Nicolson on page 47.

A. L. Rowse (1977), reproduces black and white photographs ofLytton Strachey, andJohn Maynard KeyneswithDuncan Grant, (Illustrations 27, 28, and 29).

The group faded away in in the mid-1930s.

Exhibition:The Art of Bloomsbury, Tate Gallery, 4th. November, 1999 to 30th. January, 2000.

• Isabelle Anscombe, (1981), "e;Omega and after: Bloomsbury and the decorative arts"e;, Thames and Hudson, 176 pages, ISBN 0500233373/0500273626.

• Isabelle AnscombeandHoward Grey, (1999), "e;Omega and after: Bloomsbury and the decorative arts"e;, Thames and Hudson, 176 pages, ISBN 0 500 27362 6.

• Tony Bradshaw, (1999), "e;The Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book Design"e;, Scolar, 96 pages, ISBN 1 85928 277 6.

• Quentin Bell, (1976), "e;Bloomsbury"e;, Futura Publications Limited, 94 pages, ISBN 0 8600 7701 2.

• Mary Ann CawsandSarah Bird Wright, (1999), "e;Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends"e;, Oxford.
  Who's Who of the splattering classesby Michèle Roberts inThe Independent on Sunday: Culture, 5th. December, 1999, page 13. "e;Where did the Bloomsberries go for their summer holidays? When the Charleston palled, they fled, like millions of us after them, first to Bloomsbury-sur-Seine, otherwise known as Paris, and subsequently to sunny Bloomsbury-sur-mer, Cassis, the little fishing-port on the Mediterranean coast. But they weren't mere tourists like us, of course. They were serious artists in pursuit of a fresh vision."e;

  "e;Bloomsbury and Franceis in fact ambitious in aim and scope. A collective biography cum photo album, it spins a web linking together just about everybody ever connected in any way with the Bloomsbury group, whether in England or France, quoting copiously from letters, journals and memoirs."e;

• J. K. Johnstone, (1954), "e;The Bloomsbury Group: A Study ofE. M. Forster,Lytton Strachey,Virginia Woolfand Their Circle"e;, New York: Noonday.

• Richard Shone, (editor), (1999), "e;The Art of Bloomsbury"e;, Tate Gallery Publications, 296 pages, ISBN 1 85437 296 3 (hardback)/1 85437 285 8 (paperback).

• Bloomsbury comes in from the coldby Maev Kennedy inThe Guardian, 25th. June, 1999, page 12. A preview of the exhibitionThe Art of Bloomsburyat the Tate Gallery from 4th. November 1999 to 30th. January 2000. "e;An ambitious attempt was launched yesterday to rescue the word Bloomsbury from a century derision. Members of the Bloomsbury Set are to be rehabilitated as serious artists, pioneering liberal thinkers and fanatically hard workers, rather than people who 'lived in squares but loved in triangles'. An exhibition at the Tate gallery in London this winter will concentrate on the painters in the group - Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell andDuncan Grant- but will take in the life of novelistVirginia Woolfand the set's circle of friends and lovers, including essayistLytton Stracheyand economistJohn Maynard Keynes."e;

  "e;Derision of the set's characters began in their lifetimes, but has long outlived them. A contemporary, the wealthy collector Bernard Berenson, called them 'the Gloomsbury Set-up'. A book review in the Guardian last year - every year produces another shelf of biographies and coffee table books - called them 'a precious coterie of back-stabbing creeps'. News that the Tate is unleashing another wave of Bloomsburiana has caused a further outpouring of vitriol. 'Elitist, mendacious, malicious ... a wholly malign influence on British art and politics,' wrote Paul Johnson in the Sunday Telegraph. 'It is quite startling, the hatred they provoke,' said Richard Shone, the exhibition curator."e;

  "e;Mr Shone hopes his Art of Bloomsbury exhibition - set to include many works from private collections never seen in public before - will force a change in public opinion. He would like Bloomsbury to become a watchword for honest speech and thought, a distrust of jingoism, a commitment to sexual freedom and equality, to penal reform and freedom of information, and to friendship."e;

• Has the bloom worn off?by Bryan Appleyard inThe Sunday Times Culture, 17th. October, 1999, pages 6-7. "e;These were not great artists, but they were interesting figures at a decisive moment. If their characters have not survived the tide of revelation intact, then all one can reasonably say is: whose would? Indeed, the scandal-laden anecdotes that have befogged their critical reception says more about the British than it does about the Bloomsberries. Equally, the feminist mythology surrounding Woolf says more about American academia than it does about her books."e;

  "e;The Bloomsbury output does not amount to much when set against the prodigious achievements of the great modernists. And, in time, their rather wild amours and their rather cosy works will be all but forgotten."e;

• Bloomsbury revisitedby Laura Cumming inThe Observer Review, 31st. October, 1999, page 6. "e;The Bloomsbury Group: a handy label for a hated world, as one critic sniped more than 40 years ago. Revulsion at the name of Bloomsbury is not a new reflex, it is as old as the group itself. Wyndham Lewis had them pegged as a junta of aesthetes by 1913, some time before Max Beerbohm's caricature of an elite in wilting cardigans or D. H. Lawrence's vile remark that the gay Bloomsberries made him 'dream of black beetles'. Snobs, egotists, neurotic bisexuals, Oxbridge toffs giggling over a private joke - no modern disparagement can rival the ancient parodies of Bloomsbury. By 1956, one member of the group, Clive Bell, complained that the label had been so abused that 'few people understand by it anything more precise than "e;that sort of thing we all dislike"e; '."e;

  "e;Fry was the middleman of English modernism. The crucial Post-Impressionist show he mounted in 1910 and 1913, which introduced Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and Gauguin into Britain, generated a school of English painters whose emasculated imitations can still be seen in the Royal Academy Summer Show.Duncan Grantis chief among them. His weak pastiches of Cézanne and Matisse have been hung next to the real thing at the Courtauld - a gesture of needless cruelty."e;

• Paintings by the Bloomsbury group, crowd scenes by Merchant Ivoryby David Lister inThe Independent, 5th. November, 1999, page 5. The article is accompanied by a colour photograph ofBathingby Duncan Grant. "e;The retrospective of the work of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry runs until the end of January. The many portraits on display include those of Aldous Huxley,John Maynard Keynes,Lytton StracheyandVirginiaand Leonard Woolf, alongside abstracts and landscapes, photographs, furniture and artefacts decorated by the artists."e;

  "e;The exhibition, curated by art historian Richard Shone concentrates on the period 1910-1925. It begins by showing how the artists formed an important grouping within the intense and vibrant avante-garde in London before the First World War, when they produced some of the earliest pure abstract art. After the war, the lyrical and sensuous aspects of their work, came more strangely to the fore. The exhibition also includes examples of works by Bloomsbury contemporaries including Dora Carrington and Walter Sickert."e;

• Does anyone actually like any of this Bloomsbury Group rubbish?by Philip Hensher inThe Independent: The Friday Review, 5th. November, 1999, page 4. "e;People still believe Virginia Woolf when she tells us that she is a great novelist, and Arnold Bennett, who, in reality, was a genius, was a nothing. If we listen to Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant was a greater artist than Sargent. And there are figures who are still, falsely, perceived as living in the foothills of Bloomsbury, because that is how Bloomsbury chose to see them; masters like Matthew Smith or Henry Green. Let's stop fooling ourselves, and admit that, as FR Leavis said, these people belong not to the history of culture, but to the history of publicity."e;

• Not an inkling of vision or designby Charles Derwent inThe Independent on Sunday, 7th. November, 1999, page 5. The article includes colour reproductions of Duncan Grant'sOmega Flowers on the Mantelpiece, 46 Gordon Square, (1912), and Vanessa Bell'sStudland Beach, (1912). "e;Above all, the personalities that counted as far as the inhabitants of Gordon Square and Charleston were concerned were their own: what Virginia had to say about Lytton, whether Duncan was sleeping with Vanessa or Maynard, and whether Roger and Clive knew or cared. The more incestuous (occasionally literally) the Bloomsburys become, the less there is any sense of intimacy in their work. Walk through the Tate's massive show 'The Art of Bloomsbury' and you will see endless evidence of the physical relationship of the three main characters, Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. What you will also sense, though, is a curious lack of engagement in their pictures, not simply on a human level but on a painterly one."e;

• A lot of fuss about nothingby Waldemar Januszczak inThe Sunday Times Culture, 7th. November, 1999, page 8. The article includes a colour reproduction of Roger Fry's portrait of Edith Sitwell, (1915). "e; . . . it is appropriate to recap briefly the reasons why we abhor the Bloomsbury bunch. Yes, they were snobs. Yes, they had the morals of a chimpanzee. Yes, they painted like chaimpanzees. What I detest most about them is that they poisoned the good name of modernism for the entire century. With their selfish and spoilt example, they made British modernism synonymous with a lack of rigour, a lack of perseverence, a lack of originality, and going on bonking holidays in the South of France with somebody else's husband or wife. And yes, they were pseuds."e;

• Do the write thingby Frances Spalding inThe Observer Magazine, 7th. November, 1999, pages 52-54. The article includes colour photographs of interiors of Charleston House. "e;You may have had to have been bold to furnish your home with Omega objects during the First World War, but their abstract patterns still look remarkably modern today. While the English market eschewed the vibrant Omega cloth printed in Manchester, Fry sold it for export to the African market. When Virginia Woolf first saw the clothes her sister, Vanessa Bell, was designing, she was horrified, and vowed she would 'retire into dove colour and old lavender, with a lace colour and lawn wristlets'. But, six months later, she took the plunge. 'I'm coming to the Omega on Thursday, to be slightly altered,' she announced."e;

• Jack of all styles, master of noneby Tom Lubbock inThe Independent: The Tuesday Review, 9th. November, 1999, page 10. The article includes back and white reproductions ofThe Queen of Sheba, (1912) by Duncan Grant, andMrs St John Hutchinson, (1915) by Vanessa Bell. "e;The Art of Bloomsbury is the end-of-year show at the Tate Gallery. Its likely audience, I guess, won't mainly be going to look at good painting - which is fine, for there is practically none to see. They'll be going for the Bloomsbury thing, and they'll be pleased at least with the couple of rooms of Bloomsburyana it offers, with portraits, photos, books and other momentos. And if the whole show were like that - well, personally I wouldn't bother going, but it would be a perfectly rathional exercise. A show devoted mostly to Bloomsbury's art, on the other hand, probably won't please any constituency. Certainly not a show that focuses, as this does, exclusively on the careers of just three artists - three painters, and those nearest the centre of the Bloomsbury circle: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Because they really are not good painters."e;

• Bloomsbury: a warning from historyby Adrian Searle inThe Guardian: G2, 9th. November, 1999, pages 12-13. The article includes a colour reproduction ofVenus and Adonis, (c1919) by Duncan Grant. "e;The claustrophobia of Bloomsbury gets into the paintings: the light's wrong, the air too stifling. There was no one to tell them where they were going wrong, except the painter, critic and art historian Roger Fry, and he was too much part of the group, too much of a control freak and too much of an amateur painter afflicted with his own artistic failings to blow the whistle on Grant and Bell."e;

• Eclectics in the kitchenby Christopher Reid inThe Times Literary Supplement, 12th. November, 1999, pages 20-21. A review of the two exhibitionsArt Made Modern: Roger Fry's vision of artat the Courtauld Gallery, London, 1999/2000, andThe Art of Bloomsburyat the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London, 1999/2000. The article includes a colour reproduction ofSelf-Portrait, (1958) by Vanessa Bell. "e;Bloomsbury is sometimes accused of being indulgent to amateurism and the complacently second-rate, but this is unjust. Better to say, as these two exhibitions illustrate, that it gave a small number of distinctive painters the space in which to be modern, after their own understanding of the word; to do so it must be agreed with only intermittent success; but at least to display, in the attempt, a commitment to freedom of spirit in artistic matters, at a time when other minds, artistic and political, were beginning to contemplate that attractions of different kinds of despotism."e;

• Group discussioninThe Independent on Sunday: The Sunday Review, 14th. November, 1999, pages 80-81. Quotes from a discussion on the BBC Radio 3 programmeNight Waveswith Sarah Dunant (presenter), Richard Shone (curator of the exhibition on theArt of Bloomsbury), Hermione Lee (academic and biographer of Virginia Woolf), Nigel Jones (journalist, critic, and biographer of Rupert Brooke), and Reginer Marler (author ofBloomsbury Pie). The article includes colour reproductions of the paintingsVirginia Woolf, (1911),The Kitchen, (1914),The Mantelpiece, (1914), andSelf-Portrait, (1956) by Duncan Grant,Sainte Agnes, South of France, (1915) by Roger Fry, andOranges and Lemons, (1914) andIris Tree, (1915) by Vanessa Bell.
  Richard Shone"e;"e;I've always thought of the Bloomsbury Group as modest artists who made a definite but perhaps rather limited contribution to British culture in the great unbuttoning moment before the First World War. And I hope that the Tate Gallery's show 'Art of Bloomsbury' demonstrates that. I don't think of them as Picasso."e;

• Blooming of a square setby Tom Rosenthal inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 26th. November, 1999, pages 22-23. "e;Bloomsbury, thedernier criof academe and publishing in the 1960s. 1970s and 1980s, particularly in America, seems to have become less popular."e;

  "e;In fact, it is difficult, particularly with the current artistic and literary hive of activity, to see how anyone can see Bloomsbury whole and plain and not be impressed. Certainly there should be no sneers as one takes stock of what they left us:Virginia WoolfandForster, author of perhaps the best English novel of this century,A Passage to India; Leonard Woolf himself as publisher and diarist; not only the savagely iconoclasticLytton Stracheybut his more stolid brother James (with James's wife Alix), without whose translations we would not have the readily accessible entire corpus of Sigmund Freud, which some of us persist in regarding as probably the most profoundly influential body of intellectual work produced by one man in our century. Where would our academic economists and our Treasury mandarins be withoutJohn Maynard Keynes'sThe Economic Consequences of the Peaceand the books that followed? Where indeed would so many impecunious artists, musicians and writers be, had Keynes not invented and set up the Arts Council? And then we have the artists whose work we can now examine so fully at the Tate Gallery: Vanessa Bell,Duncan Grantand Roger Fry. And, a mile or so closer into the centre of London, there is the Courtauld Gallery exhibition devoted to Fry as polymath. A few of his paintings are there, but we are able to see and read about his rather more significant work as the great catalytic figure in British art in the first half of the century."e;

Biography,bibliography,press cuttings.

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The Knitting Circle

First uploaded 21st. February, 1996

Last altered 10th. September, 2006