Reading 8

The following passage is taken from an article titled “British Modernism’s Many Manners” by Steve Moyer (© 2009 Steve Moyer).

1. Bloomsbury, the group of innovative
2. writers and artists, came out of its
3. embryonic phase around 1910 as the
4. Victorian era finally expired with
5. the funeral of Edward VII. Its
6. young mix of writers, thinkers,
7. and artists stood at the vanguard
8. of a shift in manners away from
9. nineteenth-century formality and
10. reticence and toward
11. twentieth-century candor and
12. playfulness. Male and female,
13. mostly in their twenties, the
14. Bloomsbury lot addressed each
15. other by their first names and,
16. till the wee hours of the morning,
17. reflected on how to
18. spend their lives.
19. Fascinated by the difference
20. between the world of appearances
21. and the world of reality, in the
22. visual and literary arts, the
23. Bloomsberries (as they were
24. sometimes called) experimented
25. with brush and pen to express
26. above all the subjective qualities
27. of their work. For the painters,
28. who opened themselves up to the currents swirling around on
29. the Continent since the final days of
30. Impressionism, this translated into
31. an emphasis on line, mass, contour,
32. and the rhythms they create.
33. If any one work by the Bloomsbury
34. painters sums up adequately the
35. era’s avant-garde break with
36. London’s Victorian taste in art, and
37. the influence of the French Post-
38. Impressionists on British artists, it
39. would be Vanessa Bell’s 1915 oil on
40. canvas of Mary St. John Hutchinson.
41. With arched eyebrow, lips slightly
42. pursed, and cool self-assurance,
43. Mrs. Hutchinson sits noticing
44. something to her left, and the
45. viewer, disarmed at first perhaps by
46. the flatness of the composition and
47. the coarse brushwork, feels as much
48. as sees the various tones of the few
49. colors in the portrait—ochre, green,
50. and pink, and, where the whites of
51. the eyes should be, teal.
52. The work broke all the reigning
53. conventions in British painting.
54. Treatment of subject, use of line and
55. color, lack of shadowing, and the
56. solidness of the background in
57. relation to the figure are all in sync
58. with the modernist modes that had
59. been in style on the Continent,
60. most notably in France.
61. This English modernism struck a
62. chord with American collectors who
63. shared Bloomsbury’s rebellious
64. streak. They reveled in the rejection
65. of Victorian rigidities and embraced
66. Bloomsbury’s lightheartedness.
67. Inspired by Charleston farmhouse
68. (itself an embodiment of
69. Bloomsbury art and design
70. sensibilities) and the ceramics and
71. furniture produced by a Bloomsbury
72. offshoot, the Omega Workshops,
73. some Americans, before actually
74. having the money in hand to collect,
75. started copying the effects of
76. Bloomsbury in their own homes,
77. often painting their own interiors in
78. the same unorthodox,
79. highly decorative way.
80. If Bloomsbury had been an art
81. department, Roger Fry would have
82. been faculty chairman. Fellow art
83. critic Clive Bell called him the most
84. open-minded person he had ever
85. met. Painter, curator, and instigator,
86. Fry studied the sciences at
87. Cambridge in the 1880s, developing
88. a habit of skepticism that would
89. serve him well as he guided painters
90. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
91. toward modernism in the years
92. leading up to World War I. While at
93. Cambridge, Fry came under the
94. influence of philosopher G. E.
95. Moore, who helped him and
96. subsequently the Bloomsbury
97. painters develop their
98. aesthetic sense.