The art of Bloomsbury
Subtitle: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant
By: Richard Shone with essays by James Beechey and Richard Morphet.
Contributors: Beechey, James, 1969-; Morphet, Richard.; Tate Gallery.; Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.; Yale Center for British Art.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 293
Subjects: Fry, Roger Eliot, 1866-1934 -- Exhibitions; Bell, Vanessa, 1879-1961 -- Exhibitions; Grant, Duncan, 1885-1978 -- Exhibitions; Bloomsbury group -- Exhibitions; Art, British -- 20th century -- Exhibitions
Genres: Exhibitions.; Exhibitions
Description: The word Bloomsbury most often summons the novels of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster or images of artists and intellectuals debating the hot parlor topics of 1910s and 1920s London: literary aesthetics, agnosticism, defining truth and goodness, and the ideas of Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead, and G.E. Moore. But the Bloomsbury Group also played a prominent role in the development of modernist painting in Britain. The work of artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and their colleagues was often audacious and experimental, and proved to be one of the key influences on twentieth-century British art and design. This catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition of the Bloomsbury painters originating at the Tate Gallery in London and traveling to the Yale Center for British Art and the Huntington Art Gallery, provides a new look at the visual side of a movement that is more generally known for its literary production. It traces the artists' development over several decades and assesses their contribution to modernism. Catalogue entries on two hundred works, all illustrated in color, 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, as well as in the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. Portraits of family and friends--from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell--highlight the cultural and social setting of the group. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them, exploring friendships and relationships both within and outside of Bloomsbury, as well as the movement's wider social, economic, and political background.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-288) and index.
"This catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, 4 November 1999-30 January 2000 and touring to The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, 4 March-20 April 2000; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Connecticut, 20 May-2 September 2000"--T.p. verso.