"The Art of Bloomsbury"
2000-05-20 until 2000-09-03
Yale Center for British Art
New Haven, CT, USA United States of America

The lives, loves, and intrigues of the artists, writers, and intellectuals associated with the Bloomsbury Group in England have been the subject of increasing attention in recent decades. A celebratory new exhibition, The Art of Bloomsbury, is a comprehensive display of the extraordinary body of work produced by the group's most vivid artists and personalities focusing on Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry.

The Yale Center for British Art is the final stop for this exhibition that includes masterpiece paintings from the collections of the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Charleston Trust (East Sussex, England), and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (New York). The exhibition, curated by Richard Shone, is a visual feast of modernist art that provides a unique and rare opportunity to view Bloomsbury painting. Many works that have never been seen in the United States will be featured in the display.

Highlighting the period between c.1910 to 1925, The Art of Bloomsbury illustrates how members of the group were chiefly motivated by a strong reaction against an environment of academic and sterile realism prior to the First World War, embracing the new adventurous art emerging from Paris. The Bloomsbury Group derived its name from a residential district near central London, where most of the members lived.

The circle was primarily social and its members produced penetrating, often passionate portraits of each other, friends, and lovers. Many fascinating examples are included in this exhibition, among them well-known images of the novelists Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the biographer Lytton Strachey. Works by Bell, Fry, and Grant will be seen alongside a few examples by their contemporaries, such as Henry Lamb, Walter Sickert, Dora Carrington, and William Roberts. Sculptures, works on paper, and decorative objects from the Omega Workshop will also be shown, in addition to over 120 paintings. Books published by the Hogarth Press including all of Virginia Woolf’s novels, will be featured as well. Photographs and archival material include rarely seen photographs of Virginia Woolf by Julia Margaret Cameron and Man Ray.

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