A Bloomsbury Canvas: Reflections on the Bloomsbury Group (review)

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group, or "Bloomsberries," as they were called, frequently gathered at the homes of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in Bloomsbury, England. Most known for their unconventional lifestyles and eccentric behavior, this group of writers and artists successfully cultivated a deep resentment for the academic and sterile styles associated with Victorian England. In the past few decades, Bloomsbury luminaries have become dominant subjects for biographers, historians, and filmmakers.

The most recent text devoted to the group is Tony Bradshaw's edited volume, A Bloomsbury Canvas, a selection of essays on the artists by surviving members of the Bloomsbury Group, their children, grandchildren, and historians. Arranged by individual artist, each recollection provides insight into the Bloomsbury Group with particular attention to artists who frequently gathered at the Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, home of painter Vanessa Bell, her husband, art critic Clive Bell, and her lover, the painter Duncan Grant. To accompany the essays, Bradshaw includes an extraordinary body of unpublished artworks produced by the group's most vital visual artists, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, and Roger Fry. The essayists include Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf; art historians Richard Shone and Frances Spalding; Nigel Nicolson; and the last survivors of those closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group—Frances Partridge, Quentin Bell, and Angelica Garnett.

This richly illustrated volume succeeds in Bradshaw's goal to reveal for the first time "a number of important and delightful images" (13). Indeed, the artworks presented in A Bloomsbury Canvas provide a visual feast of modern art. Informed by post-Impressionism and the propensity toward abstraction in early twentieth-century art styles, the vibrantly colored paintings and drawings embody the liberating joie de vivre characteristic of the Bloomsbury Group. From Richard Shone's commentary about the role of design and decoration in Bloomsbury art to Angelica Garnett's reminiscences of travels with her parents Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, words and images work together to recreate the avant-garde artistic atmosphere of early twentieth-century Europe. The inclusion of numerous unpublished paintings and drawings by the prolific Vanessa Bell is not to be ignored. Thirty of the 88 illustrations in A Bloomsbury Canvas are by Bell, one of the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group.

From Bell's 1911 Turkish Scene to The Garden at Charleston (1945), her images in A Bloomsbury Canvas reverberate with the originality and spontaneity of early twentieth-century modernism. Art critic Whitney Chadwick has compared Bell's paintings to the early works of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Few scholarly studies have broached the topic of modernist women artists in Britain and their contribution to modernism. The reasons for this blind spot in the art historical vision have to do with the fact that the Bloomsbury Group individuals have become such eccentric figures of mythic proportions that art historians have focused on simply penetrating the myth to understand the dynamic of their career in relation to their equally mythic male counterparts in Paris, such as Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. A Bloomsbury Canvas illustrates how visual images project certain shared themes, expressive structures, and feminine identities—especially in the experience of Bloomsbury women—as different from those of the men and how this might have influenced art and ideas.

A self-proclaimed Bloomsbury Group enthusiast, Bradshaw owns and operates the Bloomsbury Workshop, an internationally renowned art gallery and bookshop specializing in the art and literature of the Bloomsbury Group. He has mounted many exhibitions on the paintings and graphic work of the artists associated with Bloomsbury Group as well as documented their careers. Bradshaw's most recent contribution, A Bloomsbury Canvas,is a perfect addendum to his 2000 publication, The Bloomsbury Artists, acatalog of the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant.Interest about the Bloomsbury Group seems to...