Connecting Lives: Intimate Artworks of the Bloomsbury Group

Until Dec 10th

4/5

Drawn from the university’s own art collections, Intimate Artworks of the Bloomsbury Group explores the intricate private lives of those at its heart; Virginia Wolf, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant. Just 7 objects reveal their complicated relationships and renowned bohemian lifestyle, in an exhibition curated by the students of MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies.

In so few pieces, a remarkable narrative from birth to death is achieved, one that feels strangely intimate. Starting with Grant’s Woman and Child and Bell’s Mother and Child parallel works much more revealing since the two had a child together, through to Grant’s The Post-Impressionists Ball, where the figures are identified as the four artists, and Fry’s Reclining Nude, a sketch of Nina Homnett with whom he had an affair; their scandalous, promiscuous relationships are shown in a vibrant, colourful, liberating mood. Virginia Wolf’s suicide shatters the narrative like it did her sister, Vanessa Bell, and her poignant design, The Death of the Moth, which was never intended for publication, is a touching end.

More than just biography, Connecting Lives also explores the group’s ideas of aesthetics in art and literature. The establishment in 1913 of the Omega Workshop and their interest in interior designs created fashionable pieces and motifs. The two Mother and Child paintings are in fact tile designs for Omega as is Grant’s Angel With Guitar sketch, if this one sits rather tenuously in the exhibition overall. Further Omega patters can be appreciated in another exhibition also at Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, the Sadler Gift, in a portrait of Nina Homnett by Roger Fry, this time fully clothed in one of the dresses designed by Vanessa Bell for the Omega Workshop.

Alongside the 7 pieces are displayed several books from the Brotherton’s own shelves, including examples of Roger Fry’s letters to the others, a Virginia Wolf novel with pictures by Grant and Bell’s cover design of her sister’s other novels. For the Bloomsbury Group shaped more than just paint and fabric, it transformed Virginia Wolf, her writing and English. Neither this exhibition nor any other can display Wolf like an old battered paperback. So take half an hour, pass by Parkinson Court and peak at the intimate lives of the Bloomsbury group. Like me, you might even leave determined to pick up Virginia again.