Huntington’s Drop-Dead, Must-See Show

The endearing Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens inaugurates a new exhibition pavilion with a show that is both a revelation and in present context, rather daring.

Everybody knows the San Marino institution’s central dedication is historic Anglo-American art, literature and botany. Its concern with the transitional Craftsman movement has been its closest approach to modernism. Now, however, with the 20th century barely cold, the Huntington leaps right in with “The Art of Bloomsbury.”

The exhibition is a drop-dead, must-see event on several counts. Most obviously it launches the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, a lovingly renovated Neoclassical structure that once served to garage Henry Huntington’s automobiles. The gallery consolidates and enlarges special exhibitions space to about 4,000 square feet. Not huge, it is enough to shift the Huntington’s center of gravity to accommodate traveling exhibitions with the heft of “Bloomsbury.”

The exhibition’s 120 objects supply a missing chapter in L.A.’s firsthand experience of 20th century art. Thanks to other local venues, the years have seen serious examination of everything from the Russian avant-garde to French Cubism and German Expressionism. The British role in this seminal circa-World War I period went begging partly because, like English art in general, it’s a little offbeat.

The exhibition focuses on three artists: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. Their work mirrors the sensibility of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal gaggle of brilliant, largely Cambridge-educated artists, writers and intellectuals in hot pursuit of socialist nonconformity. Around 1905 the gang coalesced at a little salon, hosted by Sir Leslie Stephen’s daughters, soon to be Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Their circle would at various times include biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and novelist E.M. Forster in addition to such occasional visitors as Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley.

Bloomsbury’s achievements were many and varied. Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published T.S. Eliot and the first English translation of Freud. Fry and Clive Bell became the most influential art critics of their generation. Paradoxically, they achieved this by firmly rejecting British art’s most distinctive trait, its narrative and literary qualities. Instead they favored what Bell called “significant form.”

In short, they were among the first English-speaking proponents of Europe’s long-standing commitment to art-for-art’s-sake. Their attempt to break through prevailing British provincialism put the artists in the unenviable position of appearing overly indebted to continental sources. Viewed entirely on their own terms, however, all three did solidly conceived work stamped with individual temperament. Fry, older, well-connected and more experienced, acted the guru for Bell and Grant without intimidating them. A painting like Fry’s “River With Poplars” shows marked influence from his hero, Cezanne, but replaces the Frenchman’s anxiety with a kind of robust pleasure in making things look solid and unpretentious.

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Vanessa Bell and Grant went further. Bell was the thoughtful, sensitive one, smiling at private jokes. Her “Conversation at Asheham House” shows an affinity for a Post-Impressionist like Edouard Vuillard. Grant was the precocious virtuoso; his portrait of David Garnett steps right up to Matisse’s then-radical Fauvism. Later Bell and Grant made forays into nonobjective abstraction.

Paradoxically, everybody did their purest work when they thought they were making crafts rather than art. In 1913, Fry led the partnership in opening the Omega Workshops. Echoing William Morris’ crafts movement and the German Bauhaus, the Omega produced furniture, wall decorations and textiles. Artists as distinguished as Wyndam Lewis pitched in even though everybody worked anonymously. Fry concocted a classic cane-backed red chair, Bell a wry Matisse-like screen and Grant an unruly nonobjective lily-pond table. The enterprise, which folded in 1920, had clients as interesting as George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. Picasso and Gertrude Stein dropped in.

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When it came to more traditionally arty formats like painted portraiture, the artists couldn’t quite break from the British love of character and psychology. To supply the unconventional note, catalog entries on such work seem to go out of their way to recount the freewheeling nature of the Bloomsbury crowds’ relations with one another.

We learn that Vanessa Bell had a brief affair with Fry before she married Clive and had two sons. Her deepest attachment, however, was a 50-odd-year liaison with Grant. Largely platonic and comradely, they did produce a daughter. None of this interfered with Grant’s homosexual affairs.

Catalog texts on Grant’s images make it almost humorously clear that portraits of male friends usually signal a lover. This peeping into artists’ bedrooms seems a little callow until we realize that the Bloomsbury bunch was out to apply their aesthetic standards to life.

Organized by London’s Tate Gallery, the show’s illustrated 300-page catalog is exceptionally informative and entertaining. After closing here, “Bloomsbury” will appear at the Yale Center for British Art.

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This story has been edited to reflect corrections to the original published text. Vanessa Bell’s child with Duncan Grant was a girl, not a boy; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell had two sons, not daughters. See letters to the editor published March 11 and 18.

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