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The Bloomsbury Look
Wendy Hitchmough
New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2020 Hardback. 184 p., 166 colour illustrations.
ISBN 978-0300244113. $40/£30
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
Thanks to the solidly established fame of Virginia Woolf, there is no
appearance that the Bloomsbury Group should ever be forgotten, a century or so
after its creation. The diversity of its production, including essay- and
fiction-writing as well as painting and the decorative arts, makes it more or
less comparable to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a gathering of poets and
painters whose ambitions were totally different. Over the last decades, homage
has been repeatedly paid to Bloomsbury, not only in England (“Modernism in Britain”,
Barbican, 1997; “The Art of Bloomsbury”, curated by Richard Stone, Tate
Gallery, 1999-2000; “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision”, curated by Frances
Spalding, National Portrait Gallery, 2014) but also in France, with the
“Conversation anglaise – Le groupe de Bloomsbury” exhibition (Musée de la
Piscine in Roubaix, 2009-10), not forgetting films like Christopher Hampton’s Carrington (1995), with Jonathan Pryce
as Lytton Strachey, or The Hours
where Nicole Kidman famously sported a prosthetic nose in order to play the
part of Virginia Woolf at the time of writing Mrs Dalloway. And there has been no shortage of publications
devoted to the visual aspect of Bloomsbury, like Richard Shone’s Bloomsbury Portraits (Phaidon, 2000).
One was therefore all the more impatient to discover the contents of Wendy
Hitchmough’s book, as the blurb mentions “a wealth of unpublished photographs
and archival material” and “extensive new research”. A former curator of Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s farmhouse and studio near
Lewes, Wendy Hitchmough is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of
Sussex. Her book gathers four essays devoted to the various possible meanings
of the “Bloomsbury Look” chosen as title for the volume: the use of
photography, the group’s sartorial idiosyncrasies, the Omega Workshops, and the
way Bloomsbury artists had their works displayed, bought and collected. The
Introduction examines the link between “Image and Identity”, showing how, over more
than six decades (from the very first time when Thoby Stephen invited home some
of his Cambridge friends to the 1960s and 1970s, when Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell
and Duncan Grant died), the Bloomsburyites found in their group “a protective
environment in which to test and explore experimental ideas and identities
before presenting them to a wider public” [5]. While marrying within the group
soon appeared as a “horrible necessity” for the Stephen sisters, Bloomsbury
allowed for all sorts of experiments flouting the conventions of domesticity
and sexuality, hence “a sexist and homophobic dismissal of Bloomsbury as part
of ‘a decadent and effeminate bourgeoisie’” [16]. Various group efforts – even
the Dreadnought hoax in 1910 – contributed to define an alternative identity,
opposing the progressive “in-group” of artists and activists to the “out-group”
of wealthy patrons. The self-fashioning of the group went across generations, notably
through the use of photography. Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits of Vanessa
and Virginia’s mother, which were prominently displayed in the Bells’ London
home, were part of a “line of beauty” going from Julia Stephen down to Angelica
Bell, Vanessa’s daughter by Duncan Grant. Through selecting, juxtaposing or
rejecting pictures, the creation of photographic family albums was a way to elaborate
visual narratives, “complex psychological constructions” [36], as a sort of
answer to the “Mausoleum Book” where Leslie Stephen expressed his grief at the
death of his wife. Those albums also included colonial references to the
British Raj “that bound Bloomsbury together” [39], reinforcing the group’s
sense of itself as network. When fame came to Virginia Woolf, she became not
only a maker of photographic portraits (in Orlando,
where she used pictures of Angelica or Vita Sackville-West) but also had to
control her own public image for advertising or reproduction in Vogue magazine. By experimenting with all sorts of extravagant clothing, haircuts or
nudity, Bloomsbury “arrived at a distinctive code of references that it could
call its own” [59]. Of course, the hundred years that have elapsed since its
heyday have sometimes made some differences almost invisible to modern eyes,
and what was highly unconventional in the 1910s or 1920s – like Lytton
Strachey’s “long beard and eccentric, almost Renaissance, hairstyle” [63] or
the rejection of the strict Edwardian dress code – may now seem quite
inconspicuous. The nakedness of children, visible on some photographs as well
as that of adults, might nowadays inspire some reservations, but was then part
of “the sexual candour and the alternative values that Bloomsbury advanced”
[68]. Going barefoot, wearing headscarves, all that was a way of asserting
one’s free-thinking modernism. In July 1913, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell opened the Omega Workshops, combining
a gallery, retail space and workshop, where they sold painted clothes for an
elite market and affordable jewels for a less well-off clientele. Using all the
available documents and memoirs, Wendy Hitchmough manages to give a sense of their
activity, which went on in spite World War I, Vanessa Bell designing dresses
and presenting her own collection in June 1915. “In portraits by Bloomsbury
artists, dress is rarely detailed for its decorative qualities, or as a
signifier of status or character. . . Clothing is blocked in with loose
brushwork. Its lines and colours are subject to artistic licence” [76-77];
nevertheless, it is possible to observe an Omega influence in the materials
depicted, which blur the boundaries between high art and decorative craft. “The
Omega Workshops’ extreme, Cubist clothing and its unconventional dresses
projected a distinctive, public identity for the Bloomsbury circle and its
friends” [125], but they closed in 1919. A final way of observing the dynamics within the group is to study the
various exhibitions in which Bloomsbury artists were involved, the notorious
Post-Impressionist shows of 1910 and 1913, the exhibitions of the Grafton Group
or “Twentieth Century Art : A Review of Modern Movements” which was hosted
by Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914. A close reading of contemporary reviews
reveals how critics judged Grant, Bell, Fry and others, who were flexible
enough to mix with Vorticists or, on the contrary, less daring artists.
Bloomsbury also bonded over competitive acquisitions: the Bells were the first
private collectors in England to buy a Picasso, Keynes had his own Cézanne.
Wendy Hitchmough also underlines what she calls Bloombury’s “cliquishness”
[143]: at exhibition openings, one could meet in person the people represented
on the paintings; Fry and Clive Bell reviewed the work of their friend Grant;
Virginia Woolf commissioned from her sister decorations for her home… Beyond the reference to a play by Israel Zangwill whose stage set and
furniture was designed by the Omega Workhops in 1918, one might have expected
some mention of Bloomsbury’s work for the theatre, which could also have
reminded the reader of the group’s international dimension. Duncan Grant worked
twice for Jacques Copeau: in 1914, he was responsible for the backdrop and
costumes of a production of Twelfth Night
at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, and in 1919 for some
performances of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et
Mélisande in New York. “Bloomsbury’s social and artistic porosity, and its rejection of dogma,
of formal memberships and manifestos, make its influence and its distinctive
identity difficult to chart, as they emerge only through detailed
investigation” [151]. Hitchmough’s investigation is very much detailed, and her
minute scrutiny of various forms of evidence does convey a precise impression
of the group’s visual identity, delivering the promised new take on Bloomsbury.
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