Bloomsbury Has Reconvened

Roger Fry is back and so is Bloomsbury. Britain’s impresario of Modern art and his creative milieu--the legendary group of artists and writers who plied their trades and led famously unconventional lives in the Bloomsbury district of central London during this century’s first three decades--are being dusted off, reconsidered and formally presented in two exhibitions that add up to a major event.

“Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art,” at the Courtauld Gallery (to Jan. 23), puts a spotlight on the painter, critic and connoisseur who introduced radically new art to his tradition-bound homeland and promoted a method of looking at art that dispensed with geographic, stylistic and historical boundaries. Presenting examples of Fry’s own painting with an eclectic array of works by other artists he admired, curator Christopher Green tells the complicated story of an influential cultural leader.

The second exhibition, “The Art of Bloomsbury,” at the Tate Gallery (to Jan. 30) and scheduled to appear at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino this spring (March 4 to April 30), features paintings by Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Placing the three painters in the context of a fertile artistic and social environment, curator Richard Shone includes portraits of their Bloomsbury colleagues, along with examples of their work, documentary photographs, books and archival materials.

The shows were organized independently--with substantial, separate catalogs--but the curators coordinated their efforts to present complementary points of view. “The Tate show focuses in on the Bloomsbury artists. Ours looks out,” Green said. “We are concerned with the way Bloomsbury artists looked at art.”

American tourists who wander into the exhibitions while visiting London, peruse stacks of related publications in the museums’ shops or sample their programs of lectures, gallery talks and classes might assume that two of the city’s most venerable art institutions are simply doing business as usual. And why not? With its fascinating mix of colorful characters who advanced unorthodox ideas, Bloomsbury is a lively chapter of British art history that would appear to be a popular subject for recycling.

But there’s more going on here than meets most outsiders’ eyes. In staging such extensive exhibitions, the Courtauld and the Tate are reviving and validating a group that has been discredited by the British as an elitist clique of privileged aesthetes. Writer Virginia Woolf, by far the best known member of the Bloomsbury group, has acquired a cult-like following during the last 30 years, but Fry and his fellow visual artists are only beginning to regain their former place in art history’s limelight.

“He became the most read and the most admired, if also the most abused of all living art critics,” Woolf wrote in her affectionate biography of Fry. The quotation is printed at the entrance to the Courtauld exhibition. On a nearby wall, a caricature by Max Beerbohm portrays Fry as a long-nosed, buck-toothed, persnickety fop, giving his seal of approval to an absurd little statue.

Any critic who challenges vested interests and attitudes in the cultural sphere is bound to be controversial, and one who looms as large as Fry is certain to be reevaluated over time and subjected to changing standards. As the exhibition makes clear, his “vision” is only one way of seeing art, but it’s an essential component of a fascinating chapter of British art history.

Born in 1866 to a Quaker family, Fry was educated in natural sciences at King’s College in Cambridge. To his parents’ dismay, he gravitated to art and became completely enamored with the field as he began to paint and study art history. His own artwork was never a great success, but he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of art through research and extensive travels, and was soon in demand as a critic and lecturer. He had “the power of making pictures real and art important,” as Woolf put it.

Perpetually open-minded, Fry considered every new idea and experience, enthusiastically accepting all possibilities but then submitting them to a test of reason. He was also famous for changing his mind and defending his right to do so. In his view, it was necessary to keep looking and rethinking to avoid becoming “a fossil or a figurehead.”

Fry is best known for promoting Modern art, particularly the work of Paul Cezanne, and for introducing the Postimpressionists to England in two exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London. The first show, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” held in 1910, included “Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” which has become one of Edouard Manet’s most loved paintings. Among the 228 works displayed were at least 26 pieces by Paul Gauguin, 24 by Vincent van Gogh, 21 by Cezanne and pieces by 20 other artists.

Although these works now occupy places of honor in major museums--many of them at the Courtauld--the exhibition produced such a storm of outraged protest that one commentator dubbed the show “the art quake of 1910.” Two years later, the “Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition” fared little better but furthered a cultural upheaval. Meanwhile, Fry was also busy advancing the careers of adventurous British artists, particularly those in the Bloomsbury group.

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While Fry is identified with Modernism in Britain, his interests were much broader. After establishing himself as a historian of Renaissance art, he developed a critical approach that cuts through a vast swath of history while ignoring geographical borders and hierarchies of “high” and “low” art.

The exhibition illuminates Fry’s “extraordinary attempt to make ‘modern’ the art of all times and all cultures,” Green said. To make the point, the curator has filled the exhibition’s galleries with an astonishing assortment of artworks that won Fry’s favor.

Along with the expected works by Bloomsbury artists, French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, there are paintings by Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds and early Italian Renaissance artists. Also on view are African and pre-Columbian sculptures, Chinese bronzes and ceramics, Persian earthenware and Byzantine medallions in gold, silver and enamel.

Another gallery is dedicated to decorative arts--furniture, textiles, ceramics and marquetry--made at the Omega Workshops. Fry established the workshops in 1913 to provide a practical means of applying Postimpressionist ideas to domestic decorations and furnishings, and to create part-time employment for artists. Offering a wild profusion of patterns and colors--and little concern for fine craftsmanship--the works on view embody Fry’s dream of creating joyously decorated functional art.

Attempting to fulfill his dream in a communal setting was “a noble and unique experiment,” and “only someone with Fry’s energy, passion and sense of social commitment would have dared to attempt it,” as historian Judith Collins writes in the catalog. But the project died after six years, largely because of economic difficulties imposed by World War I.

Despite the expansiveness and inclusiveness of Fry’s “vision,” he has been denigrated as an elitist partly because of “the self-protective exclusivity” of the Bloomsbury group, but also because he was so successful that his views became a new orthodoxy, Green said. Fry was also a man of his time. While he warned against cultural snobbism, a strain of social superiority in his writing has obscured the essential, liberating role he played in a hidebound society.

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In recent years, with the fall of formalist criticism, Fry has been viewed as a rigid formalist who separated art from life. Although he emphasized “aesthetic emotion” over “life emotion,” he continually wrestled with the relationship between pure form and psychologically charged content. In the end, he was far more interested in advancing the lively art of being a spectator than in cultivating devotees to his principles.

Nonetheless, Fry was eulogized as “the father of British painting” and the artistic arbiter of his day. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,” art historian Sir Kenneth Clark wrote at Fry’s death, in 1934.

If Fry’s reputation has fluctuated over the years, Bloomsbury’s is even more conflicted. “Bloomsbury is the best-documented literary and artistic coterie in twentieth-century Britain,” but it “remains a dirty word,” according to “Bloomsbury Pie: The Story of the Bloomsbury Revival,” a recent book by Regina Marler. “No other catch phrase so neatly contains the anxieties of Modernism: social guilt, sexual anarchy, uppity women, emasculated men,” she concluded after detailing a resurgence of interest in the group since 1960.

The two exhibitions don’t track all the gender-bending love affairs of Bloomsbury friends and relatives. And you really don’t need to know, for example, that Roger Fry fell in love with Virginia Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, who married the unfaithful art critic Clive Bell but loved--and had a child with--Duncan Grant, who had homosexual liaisons with writer Lytton Strachey, among other men.

But the Tate’s press release begins with this statement: “The lives of the various artists, writers and intellectuals associated with Bloomsbury have been the subject of almost obsessive biographical attention in recent decades, but there has never been a comprehensive exhibition in Britain of the art of Bloomsbury. This celebratory new show seeks to redress the balance.” Aiming to “provide a fresh look at the visual side of Bloomsbury and its contribution to British cultural life,” curator Shone has selected both early, ground-breaking abstractions by Fry, Grant and Bell, and later works that are more lyrical and sensuous.

Edward J. Nygren, director of art collections at the Huntington, is looking forward to presenting “The Art of Bloomsbury” in Southern California, as the inaugural exhibition of the new MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. “Given the interdisciplinary nature of the Huntington, it is particularly appropriate to bring the exhibition here,” he said, noting that the artists were closely associated with the literary side of Bloomsbury.

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Although the show might appear to be too modern for the Huntington, where the collections of painting and sculpture don’t go beyond the 1840s, Nygren said the institution has acquired prints and drawings from later periods, and he finds early 20th century British art particularly interesting.

“It seems to me that the Bloomsbury group really revolutionized the nature of contemporary art in Britain. I think the strong compositions and vibrant use of color in the work of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant will be startling to people who think of Bloomsbury in terms of a genteel life style,” he said.

Although the Fry show will not travel, it has a Southern California connection as well. The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Foundation, which is based in London, has underwritten the exhibition in conjunction with the foundation’s establishment of a professorial chair in contemporary European studies at Scripps College in Claremont.

In turn, the college will present “A Press of Their Own: The Hand-printed Books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,” an exhibition curated by Scripps reference librarian Carrie Marsh, at Scripps’ Clark Humanities Museum, March 4 to May 14.

And even at this early date, three local lectures are planned. Virginia Nicholson, granddaughter of Clive and Vanessa Bell, will talk about “Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden,” a book she co-authored with her father, Quentin Bell, at the Huntington, March 5 at 2:30 p.m. Green is scheduled to give two lectures: “The Aesthetics and Politics of Relationships: Dreaming of Civilization with Roger Fry,” at Scripps’ Humanities Auditorium, March 28 at 4:30 p.m.; and “Roger Fry, Connoisseurship and Modernism,” at the Huntington, March 30 at 7:30 p.m.