Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections

This is a beautiful book and, unlike many exhibition catalogues, this catalogue of an exhibition, organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell and which has been touring the United States since December 2008, is easy to hold and move about in, and is a great pleasure to leaf through. The catalogue it immediately invites comparison to (and, for a full picture of Bloomsbury art, is best consulted alongside of ) is Richard Shone's The Art of Bloomsbury of the 1999 Tate exhibit. The present volume, however, has a very specific focus: the collections of American collectors, collections that are particularly strong in portraits and the decorative arts, people in rooms of their (and each other's) own. As a result, much of the accompanying text is concerned with what is specific to the American response to Bloomsbury, to its writing and its larger cultural presence, as well as to its artistic production. The collection is thus less comprehensive than that on view in the Tate catalogue but nonetheless representative and often startling as familiar images are juxtaposed with ones not seen before. There are wonderful paintings, sketches, objects, and assorted other images by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry as well as by Dora Carrington; an important aspect of both exhibition and catalogue is that Carrington has a considerable presence, both in the objects on display and in the catalogue commentary.

The accompanying essays make this volume an important source for our ever-evolving understanding of Bloomsbury. Benjamin Harvey's "Lightness Visible: An Appreciation of Bloomsbury's Books and Blocks," although dealing with only a small portion of the exhibit (36 of the 200 items on display) and not, like several of the other essays, concerned with the American connection, is striking. Its main emphasis is on Bell's additions (book jackets, images, page decoration) to Woolf's text, arguing that "from the perspective of the history of the book these elements, far from being secondary elements of a text, literally constitute it." The essay follows from and sometimes argues with Diane Gillespie's 1988 The Sister Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in its examination of the physical text, the balance between word and image, the placing of image and what it does to our understanding of the words, the ways in which word and figure work together on the page. Harvey uses Bell's painting Conversation in relation to her illustrations for Kew Gardens, showing what happens to conversation in that text as images enter and move among the words, picking up Woolf's "theme of communication and non-communication." There is also a detailed discussion of Bell's prints for Monday or Tuesday, which "reiterate major divisions in the text, and encapsulate the mood and themes of the upcoming story." Carrington figures here as well in her illustrations for the first Hogarth publication, the Leonard and Virginia 1917 Two Stories. Harvey also discusses the importance of the modernist woodcut for Bloomsbury art and book production, focusing both on the Hogarth Press and the Omega Workshop, particularly the Omega 1919 Original Woodcuts by Various Artists and Fry's 1926 essay, "Book Illustration and a Modern Example." The essay concludes with an interesting discussion of a nonillustrated text (save for its dust jacket), To the Lighthouse. There we are asked to think about how the reader is made to "visualize images that have no existence outside of Woolf's language," to "see" Lily Briscoe's painting.

Christopher Reed's "Only Collect: Bloomsbury Art in North America" is another splendid contribution. It obviously provides the necessary context for the exhibition in its careful and fascinating charting of who collected what, when, and where: for example, the difference between Philip Reiff's interest in the art but not in Bloomsbury as a group, and Carolyn Heilbrun's collecting which followed from her dissertation and first book on the Garnett family and...