On a damp mid-week morning last October I visited the Barbican Centre, London to see the Modern Couples Exhibition. I had not been to the Barbican before and found it to be cavernous and very Sixtyish.
The exhibition covered nearly 50 modern couples and how they inspired each other in their creative endeavours which helped shape the development of modern art, design and literature in the first half of the 20th century. This was an inventive and creative exhibition so I thought over a few blogs I would cover three or four of these modern couples, the first being Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry.
Bell had (from an outsiders viewpoint) a colourful life which could be said to have overshadowed her artistic achievements. While married to the critic Clive Bell, they had an open marriage and she had affairs with painter and critic Roger Fry and the artist Duncan Grant. Bell, a radical painter in her day, was a member of the Bloomsbury group along with her younger sister Virginia Woolf. This Group had a reputation for leading a bohemian lifestyle and having complex love affairs embracing creative freedom, sexual permissiveness and atheism.
The American writer Dorothy Parker cleverly remarked on the Bloomsbury Group that they ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.’ It is possibly the scandalisation of the Group’s relationships and lifestyles that has overshadowed their contribution to modernity and in Bell’s case to her experimental and pioneering art.
In her diary, Woolf remembers her sister’s early passion for art: “Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. ‘When I am a famous painter –‘ she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way”. This perhaps illustrates one of Bell’s character traits that she had a tendency for self-depreciation yet she was very much at the centre of Bloomsbury ideas but marginalised in the public psyche by the male fraternity of Grant, Fry and her husband.
Bell rejected Victorian art and its ideal of femininity and encouraged by the Post-Impressionist exhibition – works by Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, organised by Roger Fry in 1910 she painted in bright colours and bold forms, incorporating Fauvism, Cubism and abstraction. Around this time Bell wrote ‘All was a sizzle of excitement, new relationships, new ideas, different and intense emotions seemed crowding into one’s life.’
In this inter-connected world it is interesting and perhaps ironic to note that Bell’s Mother Julia Prinsep Stephen was a Pre-Raphaelite model particularly used by Edward Burne-Jones as in his The Annunciation. It could be said that Burne-Jones epitomised Victorian art which was an anathema to Bell who strode the path to modernity.
Bell was also an interior designer and with Grant was given a commission in 1932 by Mr & Mrs Kenneth Clark to produce a Famous Women Dinner Service, comprising 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history. Bell also designed book jackets for her sister’s books which were published by the Hogarth Press.
In 1910 Fry met the Bells and was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf wrote in her biography of Fry that ‘He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together’. Fry began his affair with Bell in 1911 but it ended in 1913 when Bell fell in love with Duncan Grant.
In November 1910, Fry organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term he coined) and brought such artists as Gauguin, Manet, Matisse and Van Gogh to the attention of the British public. Whilst the exhibition was eventually regarded as a critical moment in art it was not well received at the time with the public not quite ready for the avant-garde!
In 1913 Fry founded the Omega Workshops based in Fitzroy Square whose members included Bell and Grant. The Workshops sold furniture, fabrics and household accessories designed and made by artists. The premises in Fitzroy Square included studios where products were designed and made, and public showrooms where customers could browse and buy Omega's designs.
Fry died unexpectedly after a fall in his London home in 1934 aged 67.
It is difficult to assess (without detailed research) who benefited most from the Bell/Fry relationship. Bell was certainly liberated by the post-impressionist output introduced to her by Fry and likewise Bell introduced Fry to the Bloomsbury Group. They often worked together (with Duncan Grant) painting the same subjects such as friends, interiors and still-lifes. It is probably fair to say that their relationship was collaborative (the Omega Workshop being a clear example) and they both developed as artists through the creative energy, inspiration and support that they gave to each other.
*Vanessa Bell (30 May 1879 to 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and sister of Virginia Woolf. She studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901. During her lifetime she exhibited works in London and Paris and has been praised for innovative works and contributions to design. Just before the outbreak of WW1, the Bells together with Grant and his lover David Garnett moved from London to Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex where she died in 1961.
** Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 to 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was the first person to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain. The art historian described Fry as ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin…in so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry’.