24th September

Art & Scandalous Lives of the Bloomsbury Group

The art of the three main ‘Bloomsbury’ artists (Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry) cannot be separated from their extraordinary lives. They, along with their literary and other intellectual companions (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, amongst others) were part of a movement, the popular name for which became widely used only after the death of around half its members.

This lecture looks at their work and reviews the multi-faceted relationships between Bell and Grant, Bell and Fry, Grant and (inter alia) Lytton Strachey, and several others.  In addition, it covers what many consider the most important contribution of the group to the visual arts in Britain, the so-called ‘Art-quake of 1910’, when Roger Fry, assisted by Vanessa’s husband, the art critic and writer, Clive Bell, mounted the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London.

Images kindly provided by Frank Woodgate