In perspective

Quentin Bell Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Their Circle Richard Shone (Phaidon £8.95) This is the book that we have been waiting r°r---or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that this is the book that we need, even though our need may not have been perfectly aNarent to ourselves. It is an entirely necessary and a very welcome production. It redresses the balance of a record which had got dreadfully unbalanced; it fills a very large gap in our knowledge. And yet, by ,IllanY of us the gap has been barely apprenended, and, althot gh our judgments have staggered wildly, we barely supposed that our equilibrium was at fault.

Let me try to explain. Bloomsbury, the Bloomsbury of the imagination, was an exquisite place. Its apparent charms were such that Mr Christopher Campos went so far as to say that its true setting lay in the sa.lons of eighteenth-century France, with c,VIrginia Woolf reclining on a bergere. 'Iraehey, a thin ... man strangely remimsent of a certain portrait of Voltaire in an Invalid chair by the fire; and Forster, Roger FrYand Duncan Grant grouped around with Powdered wigs and snuff boxes.' This was how it looked to one observer. '0 a survivor it seems that certain remembered ingredients are lacking—amongst Others, the peculiar smell of fish that have for too long formed part of a still life, the trell of turps and burnt-off palettes, and 13Ints paint everywhere. It is a particularly 'Livid experience to sit upon an open tube of tPrussian Blue. Talking of which there were he. Patriotic poultry, their red combs and w.hlte plumage made highly 'significant' by vtlyld blue tail feathers. Mr Shone mentions leghorns but I don't think that he mentions the Belgian hares, and it would be a shame if they were allowed to scurry away ,Uhrecorded into the abyss of time. Duncan rant was to bring them from Suffolk to ;3ussex via London; but on reaching his Itudlo felt that they might be weary of 'ravelling and opened their basket. A ii111°Ilient later the creatures were secure fehind immovably heavy canvases. Duncan selt responsible for their welfare; he left thaucers of water and garlands of salad, and "e hares in their turn left those little round .rDellets which are characteristic of their race. r heY continued to avoid capture and it was nleared that they would breed. How this sr,atter was resolved I do not know, but at ene Point Mr Grant did manage to sistitl.guish the rather extensive fauna of his together, it was said, with several "elghbouring families, by the use of carbon in"oxide.

Were these the perplexities that troubled Mme du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin? Did Lord Chesterfield ever tell his son how to open a tin of sardines with a pair of canvas stretchers? I doubt it. If Bloomsbury did have a certain affinity with the France of the enlightenment, then I think that it extends beyond the salon; it is only a step from Diderot to Chard in, but that step takes one from the drawing room to the kitchen, and the kitchen is one of the realities of life that tend to get overlooked.

In the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the publication of Harrod's Maynard Keynes, we have learnt a great deal about Bloomsbury but the emphasis has been upon the writers and the political thinkers, upon people who are not concerned with the mechanic trades and base necessities of the painter, people therefore who can more easily be imagined amongst the exquisite futilities of the life beautiful. The painters were of course mentioned but neither their lives nor their work have been made the subject of detailed investigation so that, not only is our social history a little bit out of true, our art history has been quite simply defective. Whether one likes it or not—and to an historian the question is irrelevant— something which can be called 'Bloomsbury painting' existed, a fact which had very nearly escaped our attention.

This was so true that when about fifteen years ago the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted an Omega Workshops Exhibition, and thus interested a certain number of students to whom this was something entirely new, there was only one published source, a monograph by Pevsner, to which they could be directed for further information.

Since then, an increasingly large number of young art historians and artists have turned in this direction. Moreover the interest in literary Bloomsbury could hardly avoid arousing a corresponding curiosity concerning the history of its art. There have been exhibitions and there have been some good catalogues, but we still needed the book that would give us the grand outline of this neglected movement. Well, here it is. We may find fault with Mr Shone's book but it is still a most welcome event in the exploration of the history of British Painting.

Now let us look rapidly at those faults. The book suffers from a certain measure of indecision; I suspect that it was ill-treated by publishers at a pre-natal stage. As a result it rather lacks form and method. There are quite a number of sentences which I should have liked to have seen recast, sentences in which the meaning, through a transference or elision of ideas, has been obscured. These errors seem to me indefensible but not really very important.

What is much more serious, but much more defensible, is the fact that Mr Shone makes hardly any attempt to place the achievements of the Bloomsbury painters within an art-historical context. He concentrates upon Vanessa Bell and her circle,

a circle which includes Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Carrington, Nina Hamnett, Edward Wolfe, Frederick Porter and, at its extremity, Mark Gertler. He hardly tells us how or whether these artists were connected with the Camden Town Group on their 'right' or the Vorticist on their 'left'. And although he has a good deal to say concern' ing the friendships which the Bloomsbury artists formed with Matisse, Picasso, Doucet, Derain, Segonzac and Marchand, he has very little to say concerning the aesthetic results, if there were any, which resulted from these relationships. To this Mr Shone may simply reply that that was not the kind of book that he intended to write. Having previously said that this is the book that we have been wait' ing for I am rather ill-placed to argue the point; nevertheless I shall do so, for I believe that the implications of this volurne are worth pursuing and that such a pursuit could give us a wider and a richer understanding of the period as a whole.

I have already made use of the terus 'right' and 'left' in much the same sense as that which we employ in describing the hemicycle of the Chamber of Deputies and, in a general way, if we think of 'advanced art' in England about the year 1914, we ni aY place Augustus John at one extremity of the political arc and Wyndham Lewis at the other without undue distortion. And yet this book does oblige us to recognise that, although Bloomsbury may not be t°° inaccurately imagined as occupying a central position, it forms a very mobile, a yell' erratic centre.

A painting 11" x 168" designed to be seen as it travels behind an aperture, so that, a continually changing concatenation 0.1 abstract forms moves in time to music, Is, exactly the kind of thing that we shool° expect from a disciple of the futurists (wordS, such as 'kinetic form' and 'synaesthesia reverberate in the catalogue notes of the mind) and yet the picture itself was painted by Duncan Grant in 1914. Twenty years ag° most critics would have been astonished t° hear that he ever ventured away frool strictly representational style, and yet It IS, now clear that in the years 1913, 1914 au' 1915 he and Vanessa Bell were very Much preoccupied by abstract form. This 0,5 something which never, I think, intereste° their younger associates—Carrington, Gert: ler or Wolfe, any more than it affected their older friends in the Camden Town GrooP; Perhaps one had to be born at just the 00" time to contract that particular fever, and by the time that their juniors might have beer expected to make the same kind of exPerlments—that is to say about 1916—the whole movement had petered out; eyed; where there was a return to some kind 0' representational painting—and this is true not only of Bloomsbury, but also of BO berg and Lewis. Indeed a very similar evolution takes place simultaneously in the work of Picasso. At another time this might have been simplY explained by Picasso's influence; but duorg

the war years artists in Britain were so much isolated that they could hardly tell what was happening abroad. The change of direction

to a very large extent, unanimous, but 11 does not seem to have been concerted. Why then did it occur?

It so happens that, about ten years later, I did ask Vanessa Bell what had caused this remarkable voile-Thee. Her reply (and she

vif.as speaking for herself) was that she simp became bored by abstraction and

found that she was much happier when able to draw upon the infinite complexities of the visible world. She would not have admitted What I believe to be a related cause: that she Was very much concerned with a kind of content which could hardly be expressed in abstract terms. But her reply, though it certainly did express truly a part of her mind, does not resolve why it was that this dise"erY should be made simultaneously by sl.tch very different artists in such very different circumstances. The subsequent history of abstract art is e,ve, n more puzzling. Mr Shone says, and I tmok rightly, that the Bloomsbury artists alMost forgot their non-representational Phase, A generation coming to maturity about the time of the Second World War ,nd, as most people would see it, representing Part of the opposition to Bloomsbury, Ca!) hardly be blamed for being uncons,ctous of what had happened to their elders Defore 1916. Nevertheless, there is someth'ng a little odd about the movement which,

in its re-dedication to abstraction, seems to have an almost revivalist flavour, to have been a nostalgic attempt to revive the heroic 'pre-war' epoch and yet was genuinely felt to be avant-garde, avant-garde in the sense of breaking new ground. This feeling was so strong and had so much popular support that, even today, after two generations of use and misuse, abstract art is still felt to be in some way 'modern'.

Rightly or wrongly Mr Shone leaves the consideration of phenomena such as these to others. He is content to provide a starting point for future analysts; his book should therefore be regarded as source material rather than as argument. As such, as a collection of excellent reproductions, of biographical information and of anecdotes (many of them extremely funny) it is admirable.

It may be compared with William T. Whitley's two volumes of Artists and their Friends in England. Like Whitley, Shone establishes a lasting claim on our gratitude by his diligence and perseverance and by his ability to unearth forgotten facts. I have spoken of 'little mistakes and errors of fact' ; they are indeed little, and speaking as one who is in a position to verify a number of his statements, I should say that he possesses the great, indeed the essential virtue of a chronicler: a deep and serious respect for the truth. When such probity is combined with a real gift for research the results are indeed valuable.