Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "British Modernism's Many Manners ... and Its American Admirers" by Steve Moyer, which appeared in 2009 in Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bloomsbury, the group of innovative writers and artists, came out of its embryonic phase around 1910 as the Victorian era finally expired with the funeral of Edward VII. Its young mix of writers, thinkers, and artists stood at the vanguard of a shift in manners away from nineteenth-century formality and reticence and toward twentieth-century candor and playfulness. Male and female, mostly in their twenties, the Bloomsbury lot addressed each other by their first names, and, till the wee hours of the morning, reflected on how to spend their lives.

Fascinated by the difference between the world of appearances and the world of reality, in the visual and literary arts, the Bloomsberries (as they were sometimes called) experimented with brush and pen to express above all the subjective qualities of their work. For the painters, who opened themselves up to the currents swirling around on the [European] Continent since the final days of Impressionism, this translated into an emphasis on line, mass, contour, and the rhythms they create.

If any one work by the Bloomsbury painters sums up adequately the era's avant-garde break with London's Victorian taste in art, and the influence of the French Post-Impressionists on British artists, it would be Vanessa Bell's 1915 oil on canvas of Mary St. John Hutchinson. With arched eyebrow, lips slightly pursed, and cool self-assurance, Mrs. Hutchinson sits noticing something to her left, and the viewer, disarmed at first perhaps by the flatness of the composition and. the coarse brushwork, feels as much as sees the various tones of the few colors in the portrait—ochre, green, and pink, and, where the whites of the eyes should be, teal. The work broke all the reigning conventions in British painting. Treatment of subject, use of line and color, lack of shadowing, and the solidness of the background in relation to the figure are all in sync with the modernist modes that had been m style on the Continent, most notably in France.

If Bloomsbury had been an art department, Roger Fry would have been faculty chairman. Painter, curator, and instigator, Fry studied the sciences at Cambridge University in the 1880s, developing a habit of skepticism that would serve him well as he guided painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant toward modernism in the years leading up to World War I.

Influenced by paintings they had seen in France, Fry, Grant, and Bell experimented early on with cubism and abstraction, which helped the latter two immensely in their designing and painting of objects. Fry had also convinced the traditionally trained Grant to lighten the colors of his palette and Bell to express her feelings more completely. The result was an outpouring of their creative energy. Bell wrote, "That autumn of 1910 is to me a time when everything seemed springing to new life—a time when all was a sizzle of excitement, new relationships, new ideas, different and intense emotions seemed to be crowding into one's life."

Bloomsbury's anti-Victorian revolt had, in fact, as much to do with getting back to Fry's perceptions of the great traditions in art as it did with youthful rebellion. In France, the painter Simon Bussy acted as cicerone for the group, introducing them to French artists and reaffirming the necessity to study the old masters.

A Victorian ideal the group chose to keep was the veneration of comfortable home life but with the subsequent Bloomsbury love of color, brightening what they saw as stuffy and stodgy in the homes of their youth. Fry felt, moreover, that nineteenth-century British artists in general, and Victorian painters in particular, had lost their way by becoming preoccupied with attempts at highly detailed and, in some cases, photographically accurate representations of reality.

The French painters Fry admired had been trending toward a new aesthetic for over two decades. But these artists, unlike the Impressionists, had little in common as a group except for the fact that they were all influenced in some way by Impressionism's ideals; they passed through the era, learning from it and reacting to it while continuing to develop their own visions. Gauguin had been vibrantly imbuing his work with desire and emotion; Matisse pared his down to a harmonious interplay of line and rhythm; and Cézanne had been looking back to the masterpieces of primitive and epic works in order to bring about a monumental effect. Fry's study of their painting taught him a new language of design, which he wanted to try out himself and convince other British painters to take up.