On Or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury And Its Intimate World (review)

1910 has received a bit of attention recently, the subject of another fine book by Thomas Harrison, who focuses on developments on the Continent. One wonders if this trend will continue. Certainly other modernist years deserve to have their own books, and it is easy to imagine an entire series being devoted to 1922. Peter Stansky, of course, considers events both before and after 1910, and he limits himself wisely in this important book to the intimate crowd of early Bloomsbury and happenings occurring chiefly in England. For his book is as much a study of the insularity of the English and the gradual, class-inflected nature of change in British society, as it is about the Bloomsberries, most of whom in 1910 had only a fame to come. Stansky takes as his point of departure Virginia Woolf’s half-jocular remark of May 18, 1924: “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” An exaggeration, to be sure, and unprovable, but as Stansky shows, not to be dismissed entirely.

A third of his book is devoted to critic and painter Roger Fry, particularly to his assembling in London, between November 8, 1910 and January 15, 1911, the exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” Fry’s rather mischievous decision to hold the press preview on November 5 (Guy Fawkes Day) shows that the exhibition was his equivalent of the Gunpowder Plot, meant to blow up the established world of British art. Stansky’s meticulously documented press controversy about the show, which was seen by 25,000 people, replays the now-familiar drama of the public reception of avant-garde work in the modernist period. He records contemporary reaction ranging from the perceptive (Desmond MacCarthy’s “A good rocking-horse often ha[s] more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.”) to the pyromaniacal (Wilfred Blunt’s “Apart from the frames, some of which are good old ones, the whole collection should not be worth £ 5 and then only for the pleasure it wd. give to make a bonfire of them.”) to the patriotic (Robert Ross’s “None of them can draw as well as Augustus John, none of them can paint as well as Charles Shannon.”). Knowing that in an exhibit consisting of “159 paintings, 52 drawings, 13 sculptures, and 9 items of faience pottery” (194) there were among the paintings 8 Manets, 20 Cézannes, 36 Gauguins, 22 Van Goghs, 2 Picassos, and 3 Matisses, and among the drawings 10 Gauguins, 10 Matisses, and 7 Picassos, readers are able to feel the familiar postmodern frisson of superiority and embarrassment over British reaction to the show that leaves us paralyzed in our willingness to judge contemporary art. The realization to be had here is just how belated British painting was when compared to the French. But with history’s largest Empire to run, who could blame them?

Blunt’s suspicion that “the exhibition [wa]s either an extremely bad joke or a swindle” finds a parallel earlier in the year with the famous Dreadnought hoax perpetrated by Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen), Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace Cole. On February 7, 1910, the group of Bloomsbury friends disguised themselves as four members of the Abyssinian Royal Family (with darkened skin, fake beards, rented costume, and invented “bunga-bunga” speech) and two members of the British diplomatic corps accompanying them (one in a top hat, the other in a bowler), and were given a tour of the first battleship of the newest and most powerful eponymous class, the H.M.S. Dreadnought.

When Cole made the hoax public, The First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, had to answer questions in Parliament about the penetration of military security and the insult to the honor of the Royal Navy. The incident makes for a great story, and Stansky has uncovered new information about it that adds to our...