Alumni

Fall 2004 Faculty Book Review

Bloomsbury Rooms
Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity

A stunning publication, Bloomsbury Rooms, by Christopher Reed, chair of Lake Forest College’s Department of Art, offers a fascinating revisionist cultural history of the famed Bloomsbury group of artists, writers, critics, and political thinkers. In this, his third book, Reed focuses on the aesthetic and ideological origins and motivations that fueled this circle of friends’ refashioning of the domestic environment and the results of their efforts.

Throughout the past century, the “decorative” aspects of an artist’s work, and the decorative arts in general, have been denigrated or considered marginal. Building upon the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, which had fueled in England new regard for fine design and its application to even the most humble objects, the Bloomsbury group determined to take the radical forms and ideas of French Cubism and Fauvism directly into the domestic sphere. In effect, states Reed, they sought “to make domesticity the basis of a new social and aesthetic order, and to give visual expression to that order through the look of the home.” This was only fitting, for they were radically redefining concepts of self, family, and work with their embrace of homo- and bisexuality, feminism, socialism, and other revolutionary ideas.  

Bloomsbury Rooms is replete with breathtaking color reproductions of a variety of extant interiors, related paintings and sculptures, furnishings, and designs for various domestic objects generated by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and others, either independently or as part of the group’s Omega Workshops. Black and white period photographs document the original appearance of now-altered or no-longer-extant rooms. Quotes from the letters and writing of this highly literary circle allow Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Clive and Vanessa Bell, John Meynard Keynes, Fry, and others not only to suggest parallels between their verbal and visual aesthetic but also to express their ideas and goals directly. While the modernism of Virginia Wolff’s writing has long been acknowledged, this book restores major examples of Bloombury’s art—much of which is now in museums—to original contexts.  It establishes the importance of the group’s achievements in the visual and domestic realm, as they created, individually and collectively, in Reed’s words, environments “appropriate to their aspirations for new ways of life.”

Susan F. Rossen is Director of Publications at the Art Institute of Chicago.