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| 7/10/2009 2:07:00 PM Email this article • Print this article |
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Included in the Bloomsbury artists exhibition at the Johnson Museum is this piece by Roger Fry, titled 'Paper Flowers on a Mantelpiece,' created in 1919 using oil on canvas on board. The image is from the collection of Bannon and Barnabas McHenry. (Image provided by Johnson Museum) |
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Room With A View
by Wylie Schwartz
Nearly a century ago, the Bloomsbury group, named for a then slightly disreputable area surrounding the University of London, was centered around writers such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell; the economist John Maynard Keynes; and artists like Vanessa Bell, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry. Although they were of another era, the group was known for tackling issues of international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women's rights, the environment, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in art and in life.
In commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the group's beginnings, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, has organized a traveling exhibition titled, "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections," which will be on view at the Johnson Museum from July 18 to October 18, 2009. Designed to examine the American reception of the complex artistic output produced between 1910 and the 1970s by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators, the show will include paintings, works on paper, decorative arts and book arts borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States, and will focus on how this small group of artists made an imprint on the cultural thinking of their day, while perhaps offering a mirror on how people can address similar concerns today.
We recently checked in with Nancy E. Green, the organizing curator and the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Johnson Museum, to find out more about the show.
Ithaca Times: Can you tell us something of your background?
Nancy Green: I've been a curator at the Johnson Museum since 1985, specializing in works on paper: prints, drawings, and photographs, but I have also organized exhibitions around another area of interest of mine: decorative arts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bloomsbury show covers both of these interests with examples of both fine and decorative art produced by the artists in the Bloomsbury circle.
IT: Where did the impetus for this project begin?
NG: All of the curators periodically work on shows that travel to other institutions but they are a large undertaking that involves nearly all the staff so we tend to only do them every five years or so. I had the idea for this exhibition many years ago, in the early 1990s, when I visited the Bloomsbury Workshop in London, which specializes in the work of these artists. I had read Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster along with biographies of Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Carrington, and I became engaged by their stories. When we think of modern art, Picasso and Matisse easily come to mind, but the Bloomsbury group was also part of the avant garde. Roger Fry, an important writer, critic, painter, and curator, organized the first and second Post-Impressionist shows in London in 1910 and 1912 to introduce the British public to the work being done on the Continent.
IT: Can you describe the significance of the Bloomsbury Group?
NG: Unlike many of the modern artists, the Bloomsbury group was engaged in all the arts, from theater design, to book arts, to drawings and prints, fabric and furniture design, as well as painting. They connected with the leading artists of the day - Picasso, Matisse, Derain - and were interested in music, theater, and ballet, designing sets for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe and opening up their own design shop, the Omega Workshops. The writers, too, were experimental and innovative in their approach to the novel, literary criticism, essays, and biography. One can imagine the vast range of their interests, and their conversations must have been fascinating. Their love lives were often complicated and messy and they could be each other's best supporters and harshest critics.
IT: There is a curatorial emphasis in the show on 'the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970s' How was this reception different, if at all, from that of their British or European counterparts?
NG: Many of the Bloomsbury artists' work remains in British collections, but for this show, we only borrowed from American collections and emphasized the American reaction to Bloomsbury and what was collected by public and private collectors in this country. Most Americans came to an interest in the Bloomsbury group through the writers. Though she never visited America, Virginia Woolf was well known here, as were the books she and her husband published at their Hogarth Press, many examples of which are in the exhibition. An appreciation of the art came much later and very few works by the artists were in museum collections before the 1960s when there was a rebirth of interest in Virginia Woolf and, by extension, the Bloomsbury group. They were much better known in England, through their social connections and their frequent exhibitions and, of course, Roger Fry's complimentary reviews of the shows.
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Suicide has recently come to Ithaca in a very public, and at times controversial, way. This past academic year, after three years with no suicides, Cornell experienced what is known in the scientific community as a "suicide cluster." OK, so maybe you're like me and you thought this whole JetBlue flight attendant story was good for maybe one news cycle.  |
