Beyond Bloomsbury: In Conversation

INTRODUCTION

ELIZA GOODPASTURE, EDITOR

This collection of short essays is an opportunity for members of the University of York’s History of Art department, including current postgraduate students and alumni, to reflect on the York Art Gallery’s 2022 exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy. Aspectus chose to facilitate a conversation about this exhibition for our fourth issue for several reasons. First, we wished to generate conversation and engagement with a York-based exhibition and to highlight the strength of York’s excellent Art Gallery. Second, British art is one of our department’s great strengths, and this presented us with an opportunity to give a platform to many voices in the field. Finally, we hope that this conversation piece creates a diversity of manners of writing in the journal. It is a space for creative expression and more personal writing that falls outside the traditional confines of academic writing, but still maintains strong standards of criticism and analysis. 

The four authors whose work follows below have chosen a variety of artists and themes from the exhibition to focus on. They share an interest in class dynamics, the search for balance between biographical study and visual analysis, and the limitations and potentials of curatorial practice in a group show. The relevance of these themes reach far beyond this exhibition and are key to discussions facing the discipline of art history today.

BLACK IN BLOOMSBURY:
Race, Intimacy, and Distance in Duncan Grant's Portrait of Patrick Nelson

CAITLIN DOLEY

The first room of the Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy exhibition at York Art Gallery (March 4 to June 5, 2022) featured a particularly striking artwork. Amidst a sea of portraits of white faces was a painting of a nude black man’s back (Fig. 1, 1930s). Depicted with his head bowed, this man’s face is not visible to the viewer; instead, the painting shows the figure’s dramatically sloping shoulders, his back, his buttocks, and his thighs. For centuries black people appeared in European art as either slaves or exotic novelties. In this painting it is clear that this man is being presented as the latter: he is positioned against an exoticising rich green background and is posed in such a way that enables the viewer to admire his body freely without having to risk meeting his gaze. This rear-facing pose also renders the painting undeniably erotic.[1]

Produced by Duncan Grant (1885—1978) in the late 1930s, the painting is today titled Male Nude (Pat Nelson). But who was Pat Nelson? The exhibition label that accompanied the painting read: 

In a deeply historical sense, Carrington’s conflicted gender identity was informed by her complex sexuality. When Carrington writes about being torn “with two insides,” she refers not only to her divided attraction to men and women, but to a sense of being both feminine and masculine in her gender. Queer circles like the Bloomsbury Group were aware of contemporary Weimar sexology which posited a theory of homosexuality as a form of “gender inversion.”[13] Male homosexuality was explained as a feminine gender inversion, whereas female homosexuality was the inverse.[14] Sexuality and gender identity were not easily divisible categories—they were linked forms of queer embodiment and existence in the world. If Carrington was torn between two sexes in her attraction, what did that mean for her gender identity? In her letter to Brenan, Carrington acknowledges that she has “a female inside,” but feels divided and lingers on a “day-dream character of not being a female.”[15] 

Carrington also expresses an androgynous and mixed sense of her own gender identity when discussing moments of what could be called gender euphoria in trans theory, when Carrington feels joy and a sense of rightness in her gender presentation. Carrington describes cross-dressing as a boy while on a long walk with Lytton Strachey with a euphoric nostalgia, and details the joy she felt once when she tried on Strachey’s underwear: “I feel like a strong man with electric sparks flying out.”[16] This kind of gender play is characteristic of their relationship, but also speaks to a larger, lifelong journey of gender discovery for Carrington.[17]  It is important to not only focus on Carrington’s moments of gender dysphoria when exploring the trans possibilities of her life but to appreciate how androgyny and gender play affirmed her. 

A trans analysis of Carrington’s life and work has yet to be published. Trans aspects of her life and identity in particular have been ignored until very recently. I have only been able to fleetingly outline the queer potential for further study on Carrington’s sexuality and gender. Further analysis ought to also explore queer forms of family making in Carrington’s household, another aspect of her queer radicalism. Carrington’s queerness pushed Bloomsbury’s boundaries much like her artwork: Carrington’s most characteristic work is closer to surrealism than the French post-Impressionist style preferred by the greats of the Friday Club. Her art and her queerness were not easy to categorise and assimilate to Bloomsbury’s acceptable level of artistic and queer counter-culturalism. Because of this, the richness of Carrington’s life has been neglected by scholars and galleries. However, just because we cannot neatly label someone’s sexuality or gender does not mean that we should leave queerness out of critical discussions and representations of the past. Queerness has never been about hard facts and labels, but rather a sense of otherness that challenges the cis-heteronormative status quo. Carrington’s life exemplifies this value and deserves adequate queer research and representation in galleries. Using a plurality of intersecting experiential queer frameworks, as I have done here, can allow us to better understand Carrington as she understood herself.

READING, WRITING, AND THE (IN)ACCESSIBLE WORD:
Vanessa Bell's Leonard Sidney Woolf (1940)

NICHOLAS DUNN-MCAFEE

Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy aims to illuminate the compelling work of an avowedly avant-garde interwar group of artists, writers, and thinkers. The set’s boundaries were porous and the influence of their output has been prodigious. Their contributions to painting, prose, economics, criticism, and taste test the limits of our neat disciplinary divides. It throws into relief a foundational issue any exhibition considering their legacy must contend with—not simply "which art best represents the Bloomsbury Group?" but "can visual art accurately convey the work of a multidisciplinary, loosely-defined coterie?"

The non-visual work of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, for example, remains prominent in both public and academic discourses about the Bloomsbury Group. I want to suggest that Vanessa Bell’s Leonard Sidney Woolf (Fig. 1, 1940) serves as a useful lens for thinking about the visual representation of the verbal.

His gaze is directed towards his sun-mottled hands, the writing instrument he holds in his right hand, and the writing paper he holds steady with his left hand. Indeed, his hands are the fulcrum of the scene—sitting as they do in the centre of the canvas and representing the scene’s only movement. In sensitively rendering L. S. Woolf’s body, hands, and gaze, however, Bell engenders the picture with a sense of cerebral dynamic—a man caught in thought, a mind in motion. Papers and work underneath, too, gesture to this sense of perpetual intellectual work: his writing, reading, and labour on the desk done only to be replenished from the shelf below.

In a subtle and, I think, sympathetic manner, the light renders the wooden border or frame of the chair (observe the top and visible corner) in a shade of pale purple-pink similar to L. S. Woolf’s shirt. Bell’s use of colour brings them into dialogue —suggesting Woolf "belongs" in or to the space. There is nothing discordant about the subject seen at work: his work is him and he is his work. Supporting this observation, the pink cover of another inanimate object—a booklet underneath the desk—further connects the man and the labour of reading and writing. Moreover, the surface of the desk shares that same colour, and Bell seems to be signalling an insoluble connection between Woolf and the concrete objects around him.

As the Gallery’s caption reminds us, L. S. Woolf's financial situation, class, and even race were in stark contrast to both his wife’s family and the wider Bloomsbury Group. I want to suggest that the most striking element of Bell’s depiction of this intense inner life is the absence of written language. That is: word is missing from the image—even though we can see the act of writing taking place. We see a host of objects that refer to or contain written language—papers, booklets, and the writing instrument. We know that words are being written and read from the incredible attention Woolf gives to the act of writing and reading in the scene.

Try as we might, we cannot put words on the paper, titles on the booklets, or letters on the typewriter’s keys. Its presence commands the fictive scene but it is absent from the real, flat picture plane hanging in the first room of the exhibition at York Art Gallery. 

Word, in short, escapes us, even if we can see its shadow.

In the fictive space of the scene—in the world the painted Woolf inhabits—written language is obviously there. Woolf is not simply sitting, he has sat down to read. Woolf’s hand is not merely holding the pen, he is in the middle of writing. The typewriter keys are not missing letters, the letters are seemingly unavailable to us. The books are not blank, it might simply be that the viewer is not the intended audience. Woolf’s gaze is directly towards the words that litter the objects on his desk. He is intellectually engaged with something even as the viewer sees nothing. In Bell’s Woolf oil painting, the subject is the only possible reader.

THE BLOOMSBURY COTTAGE

JONATHAN KING

Before a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) at Charleston in 2018, artist and writer Lauren John Joseph reminded an uncomfortable audience that "the louche lives of the Bloomsbury Group (all of their experiments in art and in sexuality) were made possible squarely by the economic privileges they enjoyed"; the "lives of impoverished queer people," by contrast, have been "recorded in police records, rather than coffee table books."[1] Joseph’s statement, both facetious and apt, indicates how forays into "queer history" often amount to encountering an abundance of records in some cases and ghostly, ephemeral, or absent traces in others.[2] A disparity determined by class, along with any conversation around Bloomsbury’s Life, Love and Legacy, as seen at the York Art Gallery exhibition, comes with manifold tensions. Frustrated longing and exclusion brims under the surface of every painting. Insofar as Bloomsbury has a stake within a queer genealogy, this cannot be sundered from their privileged position within it.[3]

As we learn in the first room of the exhibition, the very origins of so-called "Bloomsbury" arise from the acquisition of real estate. That is, after the death of her father in 1904, Vanessa Stephen (later Bell) left the more fashionable Kensington and moved herself and her siblings, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian, into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf later reflected on this move: "We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins …, we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock."[4] Permitted by rooms of their own, the professional successes of the Stephen sisters were arguably unnecessary for their continued experimentations in their respective arts, as their creative pursuits needed only to supplement the private incomes inherited from their upper middle-class families.[5] 

It was Gordon Square where weekly "at homes" were held, comprising intellectual discussions with Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends, and where Lytton Strachey famously pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress and enquired "Semen?" "With that one word," Woolf recorded, "all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips."[6] Other more rural homes would later offer sites of social, sexual and artistic experimentation for the group, such as Asheham and Charleston in East Sussex. It was as early as 1914, when Bell began exchanging titillating and bawdy letters with her male friends, that she wrote to John Maynard Keynes at Asheham imagining "all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy" with "one or more of the young men we left for you."[7] At Charleston, Bell and fellow painter Duncan Grant would live in a brief, and at times uncomfortable, ménage à trois with Grant’s lover David Garnett during the First World War. As emulated by Lydia Capriani in her mural at the centre of the York exhibition, the interiors of Charleston followed the legacy of the by-then defunct Omega Workshops (started as a socialist enterprise). They signalled the group’s break from social and sexual mores as the post-impressionist painting broke free from the canvas to cover the walls. 

Bloomsbury’s re-working of the domestic interior speaks to what Christopher Reed calls their queer, "ragged" spaces of "psychological interiority."[8] In other words, houses such as Charleston reflect the queer experiences and subjectivities of their inhabitants. Nevertheless, queer interiority might seem relatively inconsequential for the queer lives outside of Bloomsbury’s milieu, even if they do show that social disruptiveness was at the heart of their thinking about living, loving, and creating. This feeling of exclusivity is expressed potently in the response of D. H. Lawrence, who after meeting Grant, Keynes, and Frances Birrell in 1915, wrote a scathing letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell: 

For working-class Lawrence, who had grown up in a coal mining town in Nottinghamshire, Bloomsbury was an exclusive group that possessed an unrelatable, bourgeois frivolity. Yet alongside class disparity, this frustrated feeling of exclusion is perceivably wrapped up in his own complicated, and more repressed, relationship with homosexuality.[10] The "hard little shell" of Lawrence’s Bloomsbury complicates this further with implications of domesticity, speaking to the fortified "shell," or "cottage," of the dream home described by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958). For Bachelard, the dream home is a fantasy that at once includes and excludes.[11] It is therefore what I call their "queer privilege" that has led many like Lawrence to roll their eyes at the hermetically sealed freedoms found within the Bloomsbury Cottage; an enviable, irreverent, queer dream of home and dynamic not afforded to those who were (and still are) unable to forge their own chosen family. 

Nevertheless, while it is important to be conscious of the privileges found in the Bloomsbury Cottage, at all costs we should avoid "Bloomsbury Bashing"; a catchy appellation given to acts of disparaging criticisms of the group that, like Lawrence’s frustrations, are rooted in homophobic, misogynistic rejections of domesticity and interiority as much as they are class divisions.[12] Rather, we should ask ourselves what it is that draws us into the Bloomsbury Cottage time and time again, and how we may address it to critique, as well as claim, a queer past haunted by class oppressions.