Criticism
A Life Less Ordinary
The Bloomsbury Group and the Painting of 'Everyday' Life
Bloomsbury-gruppen. Kunsten at leve / The Bloomsbury Group: The Art of Life
6 March - 10 August 2025
Nivaagaards Malerisamling / The Nivaagaard Collection, Nivå
Back when I was studying art history in London in the very first years of the new millennium, and we now and again wandered in one direction or another between halls of residence, university buildings, and the British Museum (as well as making pit stops at The Plough on the corner of Museum and Little Russell Streets on sunny spring afternoons) one or two of my fellow students who were solidly middle class and very English, would occasionally make a brief but approving remark about ‘the Bloomsbury set’. Such remarks often had an air of reverence about them, but nobody ever really articulated why. Perhaps one was simply supposed to know.
I wouldn’t say that I was one who didn’t know: during the summer between school and university I had among other things read Mrs Dalloway with great enthusiasm and appreciation; on the other hand I didn’t share in those knowing, slightly whispered allusions to, say, a Lytton Strachey. During our art history courses we were only in passing made acquainted with the art critical writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and no special emphasis was placed on them. None of the artists figured at all. One of my fellow students, who was solidly upper middle class, and I agreed that historically Britain had been better at producing writers and great works of literature than artists and great works of art. The usual headstrong insouciance of youth made us very pleased with the finality of this opinion-mongering, and we returned to flipping Aphex Twin records on the turntable.
The two most highly regarded members of the Bloomsbury group today are almost certainly author Virginia Woolf and economist John Maynard Keynes. The exhibition Bloomsbury-gruppen. Kunsten at leve (The Bloomsbury Group: The Art of Life) at Nivaagaard opens with an informational introduction featuring quotes from exactly these two figures. It begins, “The Bloomsbury Group’s members were born into the upper or upper middle classes and understood that a certain material foundation was necessary for thriving and engaging in creative pursuits.” A quote from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which she observes stockbrokers going indoors to make more and more money when the sun is shining, ends “five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.” Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in which he dreamed of a 15-hour working week, is quoted for the remark, “we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”
Both of these quotes are highly relevant in our time, and have no doubt been chosen for being so. They also demonstrate the enduring relevance of these two important thinkers. Beyond this first mention of their class backgrounds, however, class is conspicuously absent from the show. On the one hand it is quite liberating to look at their works outside of the ever-refracting prism of British class consciousness, on the other it becomes something of a blind spot — unnecessarily so, since, though in a ‘milder’ version, the issues were not absent from Danish society.
The first artwork the visitor is quite literally faced with at the end of the corridor is Duncan Grant’s Bathers by the Pond, 1920-21, painted in a pointillist style not unlike the flat brush marks of Signac, while in terms of subject matter it could at first sight be characterised as a previously unnoticed homoerotic detail from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. As in that painting, everyone is on display, though in this case without too many clothes on. The reclining nude in the foreground parallel to the picture frame is said to be none other than Keynes.
While the island of Grande Jatte is in the Seine and Parisians flocked to it on Sunday afternoons, this painting is presumed to most likely depict a scene at Charleston, the home in the country near Lewes that Grant shared with his lover David Garnett and Clive and Vanessa Bell and her children, where Keynes also had a bedroom. The motif is close cropped, the opposite bank is indicated but no crowd is over there. As such, the painting stakes out two themes that run through the exhibition: on the one hand, that the group challenged conventions, on the other, that despite their famous name, they seem often to have done so in the relative privacy of country retreats.
On display opposite the painting is a letter of 1914 from Vanessa Bell to Keynes: “… the only thing I can do, since you insist upon my writing, is to make my letter so bawdy that you will have to destroy it at once. Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you? It must have been delicious out on the downs in the afternoon sun … all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy — it sounds like the name of a station. … Perhaps this is all imaginary however and it really took place in a bedroom. I wonder whose? Not Gerald’s at any rate, for one really couldn’t have the heart to disarrange his exquisitely tight trousers…” The tone of playful, erudite irony, even at the remove of more than a hundred years, bespeaks the classical education of a certain intellectual class. One can’t help wondering for whom the group were challenging conventions.
Leonard Woolf wasn’t in any doubt. “We were in the process of constructing something new; we were in the vanguard of those who were building a new society,” he declares in a quote on the info placard in the next room. The writer, critic and academic Raymond Williams, a socialist from Wales, would have none of it, however. In The Significance of ‘Bloomsbury’ as a Social and Cultural Group from 1980, he compared the group unfavourably to the earlier Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement, which was non-capitalist in its ideals (“the difference between the fruit and its rotting, or between the hopefully planted seed and its monstrously distorted tree” - !)
From the perspective of his socialism, it’s not hard to see how Williams might have come down in favour of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement over Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshops. The latter was founded in 1913 by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the older Roger Fry, a cosmopolitan who had studied painting in Paris, worked as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and was the first to champion modernism and Cézanne in Britain. Examples of Omega’s products in the exhibition bear out this influence: fabric with an abstract blue and orange design; plates with stylised and partially abstracted floral motifs. The influence of modernism is clear, and the pieces are a long way from Morris’s two-dimensional but medievalist imagery.
For Morris, the arts could not exist separately from society. Fry’s art criticism, on the other hand, treats an artwork in terms of its content, then its truth to nature, and then, most importantly, its form. In doing this he contended that works such as those of Cézanne, Seurat and the Cubists form part of a great tradition that displays form and structure in the way works of the High Renaissance do. Morris, for his part, had inverted Vasari’s founding narrative of art history as a progression culminating with Michelangelo, judging the Gothic — an era of craftsmen and guilds, rather than the master’s workshop — to be superior to the Renaissance. Fry’s approach focuses on the idea that the form makes the art and needs no justification beyond itself, thus making art ‘timeless’ rather than seeing artworks as products of their time and society. The prerequisites for a materialist critique of Fry’s theoretical position and his work are as good as served on a handmade earthenware plate.
Neither the exhibition nor the catalogue attempt to place Omega Workshops in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement, which is a shame, as it would have been interesting to see what a Nordic approach, which tends to maintain quite a strict partition of Fine Art and Craft and Design, would make of this recurring impulse to handicraft in English society. It is an impulse that takes craft seriously as the material conveyor of ideas, as is clear in Clive Bell’s book Art, first published in 1914: “That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, &c, &c, is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. … if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have … discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.”
However, this quality turns out to be ‘Significant Form,’ which is “the relations and combinations of lines and colours,” a quality common to “a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets … Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne.” Like Fry, Bell’s aesthetic concepts are ‘timeless’, they encompass craft as works of art, but remove that craft from the social reality of its material production.
Bell is very explicit about the element of timelessness: “… men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure … because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place…” Couched in this is the socio-cultural belief that, for example, the Victorian social conventions the Bloomsbury group sought to overturn were indeed merely customs that would change and be seen as folly; at the same time, it is a canonical modernist belief about art’s formal qualities and their universal social meaning and potential, which did not stand the test, in socio-cultural terms, of time, the attempt to practice of the ideals, and the rise of the mass media society of the spectacle, and in art historical terms of materialist, feminist, relational and postcolonial discourses (apologies if I missed any). Herein lies the problem of claiming the relatively exclusive realm of the Bloomsbury group’s artistic production for broad social change.
However, included in the exhibition is some work by Omega, the reception of which does serve to illustrate the prudery and priggishness still current in British society in the early 20th century, no doubt of the sort which the Bloomsbury group wished to contest and overturn. These are two lacquered pine wood dining room chairs, with rattan seats and backs, one of them, now faded, apparently once a scarlet red. The accompanying sign relates the story of two young women entering Omega’s showroom and searching in vain, until they admitted that they had been told the group’s work was “immoral” and wanted to see it. In reply to being asked what they imagined, they said they didn’t know, but suggested “a kind of combination of an armchair and a commode.” The artist Winifred Gill who had shown them around replied that the rumour was probably due to them selling scarlet dining chairs.
Today this of course seems absurd, and we can all chuckle at scarlet chairs being ‘immoral’. But no further explanation of what is at play here is offered, so I will attempt a reading. What could the imaginations — dare one say fantasies — of the two young women have aired? Their suggestion illustrates the abhorrence of mixing strictly divided public and private spaces, and of indicating the body in society — that is, the social sphere of London’s leisure class. A commode can mean several things, among them ‘a bedside table with a cabinet below for a chamber pot or washbasin’, or ‘a movable piece of furniture, sometimes in the form of a chair, with a hinged flap concealing a chamber pot’. The possibility such a private piece of furniture, restricted to the realm of the bedroom and intended for the body’s base and ‘unspeakable’ fluids, could be combined with an armchair, the seat of leisure, was at once ‘unthinkable’ and clearly an enticing thought. But once again one has to ask for whom were the bodily functions ‘unspeakable’? These are Victorian ideas of propriety that lived on, mostly, in society. Or to put it another way, it is difficult to be so prim if one lives in a cramped house with many other people, and/or has to share toilets in the yard.
A different kind of decorative art was found at Charleston. Included are a set of kitchen cupboard doors painted by Duncan Grant, a carafe of red wine depicted on one and a bowl of fruit on the other. They caused me to associate immediately to the bathroom doors painted by Leonora Carrington in 1939 in her and Max Ernst’s country refuge in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche. The imagery couldn’t be more different, but the impulses seem to be related: children of the English upper middle class rebelling against it, fleeing to the countryside to create their own worlds of homely comfort in which to practice social and sexual liberation.
Having made much of the question of class, I will do what one must: let it go, and speak of something else. From around the same time as the cupboard doors stems a wooden box also painted by Duncan Grant, with figures on all four sides. On one a male nude with angel wings blows into a gold trumpet; on the opposite another plays a lyre. With its head tilted coyly-coquettishly, piercing turquoise blue irises stare out at the viewer from almond-shaped, apparently kohl-lined eyes set under stylised arched eyebrows, above full red-orange lips and a rosy-rouged cheek. A prettified Picasso face, perhaps a divine Jeune homme d’Avignon?
Picasso was no stranger to the Bells, and in the house at Charleston his painting Pots et citron hung on the wall of the sitting room, as depicted in Vanessa Bell’s Clive Bell and Duncan Grant in the Sitting Room at Charleston, 1945. Clive Bell had bought the painting in Paris in 1911, all three visited Picasso in Paris and held dinner parties for him in London. By the time of Bell’s painting, the Bells and Grant had co-habited at Charleston for almost 30 years. With glass of red wine in one hand and a heavy book open on his lap, Bell looks straight at Grant, his eyes rotated further than his head so that he looks out of the corner of his eyes, which are perhaps also narrowed a touch. Grant leans forward, a piece of paper curled in one hand, his face fully in profile and his eyes almost entirely shut; it is impossible to tell if he is looking back at Bell or straight ahead into thin air, the expression on his face is indeterminate. His other hand rests on the thigh of one leg crossed over the other. He might be about to get up from the chair. Behind him a table lamp shines its light across his head, and above that hangs Picasso’s painting, with its two almond-shaped lemons, silver-white pot and jagged forms, cut by the edge of the canvas. Behind Bell stands a screen — a piece of furniture designed to divide and conceal, and further back a white coffee pot of traditional, Victorian shape, while directly above and behind his head hangs a still life painting.
If the lower part of the picture is read as a flat plane, aided by the geometric shapes of the carpet, the slippered feet of the two men constitute their closest proximity, and are in a sense bridged by the open book on the floor. Between their upper bodies and heads a vast space seems to yawn, all the vaster if the picture is here read illusionistically, the three-dimensional space leading to a corner and the end wall appearing to be far away. In the midst of that expanse of wallpaper hangs a small painting a seascape with a black ship that appears to be either approaching or leaving port.
Vanessa Bell’s painting of 21 years previously, Clive Bell and Family, 1924, depicts Bell seated in an armchair with a book, outdoors, perhaps in front of the pond at Charleston. Crouched to his left is the Bells’ eldest son, apparently holding a hunting rifle and looking down on the head of the girl in front of him. On Bell’s right, in the foreground, their second child is seated on the ground, looking directly at the youngest child, the girl, who stands between Bell’s legs. Her feet are crossed in a gesture of shyness, her gaze is downcast, and her right hand is held up to her chest with the faintest indication of the index finger pointing to herself, as if to say “Me?” She was the result of Vanessa Bell’s relationship with Duncan Grant, while Clive Bell acted as her official father. The latter is the only one of the other three figures who doesn’t look at Angelica, he looks out of the corner of his eyes, to his right, at something outside the picture frame, his lips perfectly straight, with a look of what might be vague melancholy.
There are depths in Vanessa Bell’s paintings which remain unexplored in the exhibition’s info material, depths that figure a mother’s concern for her children, perhaps an ambivalent relationship to her husband — or else it could be quite the opposite: the look of Clive Bell and the gesture of Angelica might express not Vanessa Bell’s feelings about them, but the feelings that the likely judgements of society would bring forth in them if ‘the truth were known’. In the later painting from 1945, while light shines on Grant, the jagged lemons bought by Bell appear to be dropping onto Grant’s head. But the painting’s interpretation remains out of reach, the whole image equivocates, its apparent ‘realism’ doesn’t quite cohere. Taken together, these two paintings and their hanging in the exhibition might be characterised as The Quiet Drama of Clive Bell’s Gaze.
The paintings of Vanessa Bell may serve to exemplify the crux of a discussion about women artists who have been overlooked or ‘written out’ of art history, which has been had in Denmark in recent years. It is a discussion that turns on the concepts and perception of artistic quality and significance as they are understood in traditional art historical discourse. Putting on my art historian’s cap, I would have to say that Vanessa Bell’s contribution to art history in terms of a history of the development of art is minimal. But these days it is perfectly legitimate, desirable even in terms of formulating new and more inclusive histories, to take off that cap and throw it to the wind in order to say something else about Vanessa Bell: the exhibition shows her progression from her student days as a painter of flowers — the genre which academy tradition had designated as suitable for women — through a series of genres, themes and styles, to reveal herself as a portrait painter of psychological subtlety. That pick-n-mix bag of styles would, with one’s art historian cap on, be a cause for doubt, for questioning if the artist ever found herself and what she wanted to ‘say’. But I get the impression that she painted what she felt like, in both senses of the phrase — and in so doing painted much as she lived, in defiance of convention and in the relative freedom offered by the privilege of a country retreat.
Duncan Grant’s erotic drawings turn out to be a hidden treasure and are a highlight of this fascinating exhibition. After having been shared discreetly in private circles for more than half a century, they came to public light in 2020 when they were given to The Charleston Trust. In one image a red devil, or is it Pan with his hairy hindquarters and spindly legs, takes a woman from behind, except that the woman is transgender since she also has a penis, which Pan has worked to ejaculation point. The transgender woman is drawn in a pose reminiscent of a Discobolus, but the disc-throwing hand playfully grasps Pan by the back of the neck, as though s/he had anything against the situation. It reminds me of a wonderful Hellenistic sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, in which Pan has grabbed Aphrodite by the wrist and has his other hand around her back, and she is about to respond, a cheeky smile on her lips, by slapping him with her sandal.
Another drawing of three men engaged in highly aroused wrestling has the style both of archaic period red figure pottery and Picasso or Matisse in their Mediterranean periods, as though The Dance had been crossed with the depiction of a priapic palaestra scene. In a third drawing a man kisses another man’s knee, apparently holding him aloft with his own strength. These are drawings full of humour, muscular strength, roughness and tenderness. They are playfully, eruditely ironic in a similar way to Vanessa Bell’s quoted letter to Keynes, classical in their references, refashioning both the ancient idea of paideia — the education of the ideal (male) member of the polis to be well-rounded and refined in intellect, morals, and physicality — and the undercurrent of violence present in myths such as that of Pan. In that sense they are also the product of a certain intellectual class, yet their depiction of joy and freedom, the straightforwardness of subject matter, also allows them to communicate beyond a knowledge of their high cultural sources.
The exhibition at Nivaagaard is, despite my quibbles about the issue of class, excellent and instructive. It is well curated, leading the visitor on a progression through the various themes and ideas which feels both intuitive and logical. As well as the works of art and craft, it also includes well-chosen information about topics such as forbidden books, the love of gardening demonstrated by Roger Fry at Charleston and Leonard Woolf at Monk’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s most important works such as Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. The contemporary concerns for both the natural world and the issue of trans identity can be seen as prefigured in the works and lives of the Bloomsbury group.
Hidden away among Virginia Woolf’s work, but not included in the exhibition’s display of books, can be found an introduction she wrote for the book Life as We Have Known It, published by the Co-operative of Working Women between the two world wars, which contains accounts of the often servile lives of working class women. Her social conscience, at least, extended beyond the sphere of her relative privilege as the child of an intellectual elite, though not a financial one. It is also necessary to say of the Bloomsbury group that by keeping their efforts at radical social change within the parameters of capitalism — explicitly so in the case of Keynes, despite his “revolutionary macro-economy” as Lise Villemoes Grønvold puts it in the catalogue — they left their ideals open to the restrictive power that the financial imperative wields over most people, whatever their attempts to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.” As Grønvold herself admits, “The experiments were for most of the Bloomsbury group more connected to everyday life — although a kind of everyday life only allowed to a privileged and comfortable social class.”
Christopher Sand-Iversen
The author studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art (he acknowledges the intellectual privilege) and among other things runs the small publisher RSS Press in Copenhagen.