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This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.

This chapter explores the context and after-effects of the exhibition ‘Manet and the Postimpressionists’ (1910). While seen, rightfully, as a central moment in modernism’s introduction to the British public, by way of the encounter with the work of Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and others, few studies have engaged with the explanatory and educational context of the exhibition, nor on the ways in which Postimpressionism became so central to British modernist design and decoration. This chapter, in particular, looks at Roger Fry’s writings on Postimpressionism, and argues that the term was simultaneously one that denoted both an artistic style and a pedagogical strategy designed to educate public taste.

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

This chapter details the encounters between modernist art and design and the British home. Using a range of case studies – in particular the Omega Workshops, the Isokon building in Hampstead and the activities of the Design Industries Association and Council for Art in Industry – it explores the reception of modernist home design and decoration in Britain in the decades before the Second World War. In particular, it discusses the rise of modernist design and decoration institutions, and charts their development and organisation.

The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs was founded in 1903 by a group of art theorists, scholars and historians that included Roger Fry, later a co-editor of the magazine for almost ten years (1909-1919). On Fry’s death in 1934, the magazine itself described him as ‘the man who in the past did most to establish it and mould its character’. Part of this character was a consistent attention to Chinese art that he shared with fellow Bloomsbury writers, artists and intellectuals. This chapter illuminates Fry’s practice as a theorist and an editor interested in the arts of China by examining how these were represented and discussed in the Burlington Magazine under his auspices. It focuses especially on the kinds of language, discourse and textual strategies of sinophile contributors such as Arthur Waley, Lawrence Binyon, Perceval Yetts and R.L. Hobson. The chapter locates their approaches to Chinese art within a longer-term Western historiography of China and its culture(s), as well as within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourses such as aestheticism, scientism and orientalism. It thus attempts to unpack the ideological implications of the ‘connoisseurship’ professed by the magazine’s title as applied to the subject of Chinese art.

This chapter examines the contradictions involved in Virginia Woolf's theorizing of biography as shaped by the experience of writing Roger Fry (1940). More specifically, it shows how Woolf's view of biography becomes increasingly contradictory from “The New Biography” (1927) to “The Art of Biography” (1939). In March 1940, Roger Fry received its first bad review, when Leonard claimed that Woolf employed the “wrong method.” Subsequent critics would accuse Woolf of failure on different and contradictory terms. Catherine Parke, for instance, insists on a return to tradition. Elizabeth Cooley argues that the book is “a peculiar double failure.” This essay considers Woolf's apparent retreat from biographical experiment with respect to Roger Fry, focusing on the evidence and accusations of failure that haunt the biography's critical legacy, and suggests new contexts for reading her method and practice.

Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the fascists (D 5: 211). The week before, Hitler marches into Prague and proclaims (Woolf writes) that “Czecko-Slovakia has ceased to exist).” Although Woolf's fluidity is affected, she remains bold. In January, she dons the mask of Cleopatra (perhaps ominously) for her brother Adrian's costume party. Using diary form, she starts her memoirs in April. And she continues her inner artistic struggle to resurrect Roger Fry. Across the year, she also seeks life enduring through her own diary—and in many other diaries as well. Some diarists aid her—like her diary-father, Sir Walter Scott. In January, Woolf wishes to also write on the remarkable journals of French painter Eugène Delacroix. However, in August, she finds, in F. L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938, an invitation to noble suicide. In the Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., the brilliant outsider and friend of Michael Field, which she reads in late December, she meets a diary stopped by war.

This chapter centres on Roger Fry’s concept of ‘significant form’, which can be seen as a distinct structure or shape within the novel/short story. It states that narrative was an uncertain source of aesthetic value because it was usually guilty of ‘suggesting emotion and conveying ideas’. The chapter looks at how literature employed ‘impure’ associations, as well as the challenge posed by Fry’s opinions on the unacceptable emotions often suggested by inferior works of art. It also looks at Woolf’s first attempts in modernist form.

This chapter reads French aesthetician Charles Mauron's work Aesthetics and Psychology, alongside its translator Roger Fry and publisher Virginia Woolf to explore formalism, aesthetic purity and contemplative attention.

This chapter examines contradictions in Virginia Woolf's relationship to art and auto/biography within the context of Bloomsbury. It discusses Bloomsbury's relationship to the African art that was introduced in England by that “contradictory and catalytic figure” Roger Fry, and that was “by nature contradictory when decontextualized and viewed from within Western culture.” Focusing in particular on the responses of Woolf, Fry, and Clive Bell to the 1920 exhibition of African objects at the Chelsea Book Club, the chapter highlights “the nuanced contradictions about African material culture” circulating in Bloomsbury. It suggests that the responses of Bloomsbury members to African objects reflect the argument of ambiguity and ambivalence.

This chapter discusses the publicity practices of the Hogarth Press, examining the career of American artist E. McKnight Kauffer, who designed the cover and logo of the Press. It looks at Kauffer's experience in book production and his connections with Bloomsbury figures such as Roger Fry, describing his work as suitable to the Hogarth Press due to its productive engagement with books and art and commerce.

“By the summer of 1934,” Hermione Lee writes, Hitler's “ambitions and his methods were fully apparent.” In the mid-1930s, Nazis issue regulations to eliminate women doctors and lawyers in Germany. German universities reduce the female quota of students to just ten percent. On October 28, 1934, Oswald Mosley stages a vicious attack on Jews during a British Union of Fascists rally at the Royal Albert Hall. Beyond these alarming national and international threats, Woolf faces inner personal (and artistic) loss and outer public attack, as she writes in her diary. She starts to speak of “warnings” in this journal. However, André Gide’s Pages de Journal, 1929–32 give her new direction in August 1934. In September, Guy de Maupassant's travel diary Sur l’eau (Afloat) particularly helps her to navigate through Roger Fry's unexpected death. She both enters its words in her diary and uses Afloat for a key moment in her novel The Years. In October, Alice James's Journal helps Woolf calibrate British women's social and sexual lives in the first decades of The Years and shows her—as do Gide's and Maupassant's diaries—a fierce fight, both without and within, between constraint and freedom.

The early twentieth-century revolution in visual art that came to be known in England as post-impressionism emphasized the view that artistic creativity resides not only in the making of the artwork, but also in the interaction between the artwork and the spectator, an orientation which the contemporary discipline of neuroaesthetics holds in our time. Clive Bell’s theory of “significant form” provided an approachable way for the British public to integrate their understanding of the new art into existing notions of art history and led to a severely diminished role for representation in visual art. Bell’s theory is identifiable as one manifestation of pervasive changes in the understanding of creativity and perception that were sweeping through Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bell could not say why certain combinations of lines and colors led to the experience of an “aesthetic emotion,” only that they did. Contemporary researchers in neuroaesthetics, such as Semir Zeki, have returned to Bell’s notion to ask whether the experience of aesthetic emotion might be due to some common neural organization. This chapter points to commonalities between the speculations of Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, and those of contemporary researchers into brain processes.

While the city has been at the center of literary modernist studies through such influential formulations as Raymond Williams’s “metropolitan forms of perception,” the influence of architectural modernism has received comparatively little attention. Far from a lagging branch of the modern movement, architecture and design instigated one of the defining divides in British literary modernism, between Vorticism and Bloomsbury. At a time when Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were just starting their careers, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry formulated rival utopias, to be achieved through an architecture and design-driven mass modernism. These debates culminated in D. H. Lawrence’s end-of-life call to “Pull down my native village to the last brick” and use modernist planning to “[m]ake a new England.” The conflation of creation and violent destruction initially inspired members of the Auden Group but ultimately caused many mid-century authors to become wary of uniting aesthetic revolution with political revolution.

An Australian by birth, Florence Melian Stawell, who was educated as a classicist at both Trinity College (Melbourne) and Newnham College (Cambridge) was a civilian living in London during the Great War. She shared this experience with Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and many of their Bloomsbury friends. But unlike Woolf, whose life during the war has been the subject of some attention (my own Virginia Woolf and the Great War, for example), the home-front experience of Stawell and her literary output, including her anthology of poetry (The Price of Freedom) and her writings on a range of topics (patriotism, education, and the League of Nations among them), has been overlooked. This paper suggests that we may well find the Great War as a way into the life and work of this underappreciated woman, a contemporary of Virginia Woolf.