Hangin' with Bloomsbury Group at the Block Museum

portrait of Leonard Woolf by Roger Fry

The Block Museum in Evanston currently has an exhibit of work by the Bloomsbury Group, a loose association of friends, colleagues and lovers that included among others, the writer Virginia Woolf (once portrayed by Nicole Kidman wearing a prosthetic nose in the movie The Hours, but perhaps better know as the author of Mrs. Dalloway) and her sister, the painter Venessa Bell, art critic Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Roger Fry, writer E.M. Forster and historian Lytton Strachey... and other interesting folks. The exhibit is free, and runs through March 14.

The cultural impact this group had on the art, literature, decorative arts and in Keynes’ case, economic theory, of the first half of the 20th Century in the English-speaking world and beyond, is hugely significant in retrospect. In their own times, the various members of this community were thought to be highly controversial. None of the Bloomsbury men served in WWI, choosing to be Conscientious Objectors instead. Many in the group had what were unconventional lifestyles for their times. (That means they were gay and/or slept around and often did not have regular jobs and sometimes wore funny clothes. )

In 1910 Roger Fry organized an exhibit called Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term he coined), featuring work of Gaugin, Manet, Matisse, and Van Gogh in England, bringing their art to the public’s attention. The public was not universally appreciative; some of their reactions are in one of several video installations that are part of the Bloomsbury Group exhibit.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and her husband biographer and essayist Leonard Woolf created a small press in their dining room, an enterprise that eventually evolved into a commercial venture, but not before they’d hand-published works by various members of their circle, as well as works by Sigmund Freud, Christopher Isherwood, and the first UK book edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1924.

Roger Fry founded a decorative arts artists’ cooperative called the Omega Workshop; Vanessa Bell and friends painted decorative designs onto the walls, windows, and furniture of the Charleston Farmhouse where she and Virginia and others lived for a time before WWI; and of course, Virginia Woolf wrote brilliant novels that have become part of our literary canon.

"sitting room" at the Omega Workshop

The Block Museum has a whole slew of films and lectures about various characters and aspects of this remarkable group; you might want to combine a visit to the exhibit with a viewing of the documentary The War Within: A Portrait of Virginia Woolf, Saturday, January 30, 2 pm, or attend a gallery talk and exhibit tour at 6pm on March 11. There are also lectures, family workshops, Merchant-Ivory movies and more. Check out the full listings here.