Why Bloomsbury Still Frightens Its British Critics

No one visiting “The Art of Bloomsbury,” at the Huntington Gallery until April 30, will hear the jeers of critics or the shocked gasps that greeted many of these paintings when they were first exhibited. In this elegant San Marino setting, most of the works will seem typical of English painting in the last two centuries: thoughtful, skillful, unassertive. Even the more daring pieces recall their better-known Spanish and French antecedents--Picasso, Derain, Matisse--in ways that make Bloomsbury art seem familiar and nonthreatening. You could cause more uproar in these galleries by snapping a piece of bubble gum.

Yet when these paintings first appeared before World War I, they were considered radical to the point of lunacy. In the excellent catalog that accompanies “The Art of Bloomsbury,” Richard Shone and his contributing writers explain the ways in which the art that came out of the Bloomsbury circle from 1910 to 1918 introduced a dazzling new formal vocabulary to British art. The abandonment of naturalism, the use of un-English pinks and yellows, the giddy incompletion and distortion of the figure: All struck critics and the public as direct affronts to civilization and good manners. That English critics responded with similar hostility to “The Art of Bloomsbury” when it opened at London’s Tate Gallery last December is a rich irony.

Broadly defined, “Bloomsbury” is the circle around the novelist Virginia Woolf: an informal group of friends--artists and intellectuals--which originated at Cambridge at the turn of the century and flourished in London from about 1905 through the 1920s. Their philosophical cornerstone was personal liberty, especially sexual liberty and freedom of expression, coupled with an emphasis on friendship and an appreciation for the arts. Young, gifted and self-conscious, they made enemies on every side.

Although Woolf is now the most celebrated member of the Group, her sister Vanessa was the pivot on which every important development turned. In 1904, after the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, Vanessa moved her sister and brothers from the somber Victorian home of their childhood to a light-filled house at 46 Gordon Square, near the British Museum in the then-seedy district of Bloomsbury. She welcomed her brother Thoby’s unpolished Cambridge friends--Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and others--and set the tone for the years that followed, shunning her respectable relations, devoting her days to painting and her nights to the increasingly frank discussions of art, sex and morality that now characterize the Group.

To the young people meeting in these spare, white-washed rooms, so different from the plush, respectable interiors of their parents’ houses, and holding conversations their parents would have blushed to overhear, it began to seem possible to break through convention, to find a way to conduct human relations--between friends, lovers, parents and children--on a more rational and honest basis. It was a great step forward when they began to call each other by their first names; consider the leap when Strachey entered a room at Gordon Square and pointed his bony finger at a stain on Vanessa’s dress: “Semen?” he asked.

Before the watershed year of 1910, Roger Fry was a reactionary art historian and painter, producing earnest brown landscapes in the manner of Philip Steer and bemoaning both the “photographic vision of the nineteenth century” and the pervasive influence of the French Impressionists, with their disregard for “structural design.” His belated discovery of Cezanne in 1906 changed all this and over the next three years, he began to develop a vigorous formalist aesthetic that encompassed Byzantine mosaics, Italian primitives, Post-Impressionists and, later, African masks and the unaffected art of children. In January of 1910, he met two younger acquaintances, Clive and Vanessa Bell, by chance on the platform at the Cambridge station and, on the journey back to London, discovered their shared enthusiasm for modern French art. Vanessa was an academically trained painter who admired the works of the New English Art Club, then the forum for reaction against the Royal Academy. Clive was a dilettante and bon vivant--well-read, well-dressed, well-spoken--who, like his wife and their friend, the painter Duncan Grant, seemed to be waiting for something.

“Fry galvanized Bloomsbury,” Shone writes. Woolf recalled Fry’s appearance “in a large ulster coat, every pocket of which was stuffed with a book, a paint box or something intriguing; special tips which he had bought from a little man in a back street; he had canvases under his arms; his hair flew; his eyes glowed. He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together.” Soon he had enlisted the help of almost every member of the nascent coterie in assembling, promoting and hanging the show “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which opened December, 1910, at the Grafton Galleries. Within a few months of meeting Fry, this assortment of unknown artists and intellectuals found itself in the vanguard of British modernism.

The two post-Impressionist exhibitions that Fry staged in 1910 and 1912--England’s versions of New York’s Armory Show--were greeted with rage and derision. Here Londoners saw for the first time the art of Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin. The shows were denounced as the work of “bunglers” and frauds, as hoaxes perpetrated on a trusting English public. Robert Ross, one of the old guard “Aestheticist” critics, suspected “a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting.”

Fry’s own paintings were a restless attempt to put his own theories into practice, working through various formal effects and pursing the nebuous qualities of “mass” and “volume.” The siren call of Cezanne led him away from his own more graphic gifts (the late self portrait, included in “The Art of Bloomsbury,” is one of his best paintings, recalling Thomas Hart Benton). Eager to apply the headline

lessons of Andre Derain and Pierre Bonnard, he undertook suitably distorted portrait of Forster, which Forster described to a friend: “Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip which is reduced thus . . . and to my chin on which soup has apparently dribbled. For the rest you have a bright, healthy young man, without one hand it is true, and very queer legs, perhaps the result of an aeroplane accident, as he seems to have fallen from an immense height onto a sofa.”

In the tradition of English critics, Shone has no affection for Fry’s paintings. Even the large recent exhibition in London at Courtauld Galleries on Fry’s contribution to British Modernism included very few of his own efforts, which often have a bloodless, overworked quality and can look far more conservative than the modernist paintings he championed. Yet, in a disservice to Fry’s talent, Shone has managed to unearth some of the worst examples of his work. His late paintings, the polished yet pedestrian “Spring in Provence” (1931) and “Excavations at St. Remy” (circa 1931-’33), would go unnoticed among the seascapes and dog portraits at any summer exhibition at the Royal Academy. They do not repay a second glance.

It was Fry’s writings and conversation, his boyish enthusiasm, that most encouraged the younger artists around him, from the hard-edged modernists like David Bomberg and Wyndham Lewis, who eventually broke with Fry, to Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Fry tirelessly promoted Grant, praising his fluency and panache. Surveying the early works included in “The Art of Bloomsbury,” from Grant’s fantastic pointillist “The Queen of Sheba” (1912), to the Lilypond table he painted for the Omega Workshops, to his astonishing “Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound” (1914)--included in the Tate show, but not at the Huntington--it is easy to see why Grant looked like a genius, darting from style to style with enviable facility. During his lifetime, Grant was by far the best-regarded of the Bloomsbury painters. But it was Vanessa Bell who made the most inventive use of Fry’s theories, especially his emphasis on formal innovation and his disregard of subject matter, which led directly to abstraction. In about 1914, Bell’s fragmentary, Fauve-inspired portraits--her witty, pouting treatment of her husband’s mistress, Mary Hutchinson (1913) and her unfinished but fully realized portrait of Strachey with acid yellow beard and spectacles (1915)--yielded to irregular squares and rectangles in brilliant, balanced tones, sometimes employing collage. Although Grant also produced abstract work in this period, Bell was the first artist in England, and among the earliest anywhere, to make nonobjective paintings. Even the most vituperative of the critics of Shone’s exhibition in London recognize that the show revives Bell’s reputation as an avant-garde artist.

By 1920, however, the Bloomsbury painters were no longer among the avant-garde. They had become establishment figures. And like many artists on the Continent, they retreated to gentler and more faithful representations after the war, as if the Modernist impulse had been an invigorating but unsustainable moment of pre-war joie de vivre. Vanessa Bell’s work suffered severely by this turn inward. In later years, especially after the death of her son Julian in 1937, her painting became, according to Shone, “a slow-burning reflection of her immediate world.” As he writes elsewhere, “Her touch became soft and hesitant, a tendency to idealize her sitters--invariably her family--led to a sentimentality of interpretation that comes as a surprise from the ironic and amused painter of Iris Tree or Mary Hutchinson.” Shone has included very few examples of Bell’s late paintings in “The Art of Bloomsbury,” which may explain the critics’ enthusiastic response to her art. Her early abstract work was forgotten until the mid-1960s, when new friends like the young Shone and a revival of interest in the Group encouraged Grant to go through the stacks of canvases gathering mold in Bell’s attic studio at Charleston.

Even Shone, who anticipated a mixed response to “The Art of Bloomsbury,” must have been surprised at the savage reaction of the London art critics. The show is among the best-attended (95,000 visitors) and worst-reviewed Tate Gallery exhibitions in the last 15 years. The three essays in the exhibition catalog all strike a defensive note, as if the writers know so well the tired attacks on Bloomsbury and its art that they can see the ax on the upswing. Much of the antagonism to the present show can be attributing to lingering bias against the Group, to the familiar objections to their pacifism during World War I, their feminism, their promotion of one another’s work, their championship of French art and literature, their small private incomes and the homosexuality of many members of the Group. Rancor against Bloomsbury is woven into the fabric of English cultural life. It is hard to imagine another artist or group of artists whom a major critic like Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times would today feel free to dismiss as snobs and sexual miscreants who “had the morals of a chimpanzee” and “painted like chimpanzees.” The difficulty of defining the Group and its beliefs--almost none of which was shared by every member--only confounds the problem, as Clive Bell remarked in the 1950s, noting that the term “Bloomsbury” lacks any concrete definition beyond “the sort of thing we all dislike.”

Paradoxically, English critics also demand a great deal of the Bloomsbury painters. Many reviewers of the present show complained, for instance, that they weren’t as good as Matisse, Picasso or Cezanne and that their private lives were too messy. If genius were a prerequisite for inclusion in Tate Gallery exhibitions--it goes without saying--the rooms would be largely empty. If curators also required unimpeachable morals on the part of artists, there wouldn’t be a single painting left.

In his admirable catalog notes and essay, Shone strives to establish how thrillingly new Bloomsbury art was in the critical period of 1910 to 1918. But the fate of the Bloomsbury artists depends not so much on the earlier painters they supplanted, as on later developments in art. The Bloomsbury painters retreated from formal innovation just a few years before abstraction took hold in Britain. As a result, compared with the work of their more daring younger contemporaries like Stanley Spencer or Bomberg, or with later figurative artists such as Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, Bloomsbury art seems conceptually thin. Not only is it difficult to view a painting like Bell’s lovely “Interior with a Table, St. Tropez”(1921) in its historical context; it has become difficult to see it at all. The jarring images of the later avant-garde obscure its merits. Beautiful painting--especially of flowers, fruit, drapery--is now hardly considered art. The critics want what Bloomsbury can never deliver: a more prophetic vision. *