Bloomsbury and Beyond

From the early years in London, flush with a new awareness of post-impressionism, to later work made at Charleston, the 'Bloomsbury' cultural milieu blazed a trail in British art. Working on both fine art projects and decorative schemes, this loose-knit group emerged as consistently imaginative practitioners. While demonstrably indebted to the European Avant Garde, their art was far from derivative. This presentation focuses on four artists whose work related to the Bloomsbury network, and whose vitality and variety has secured them a place in the history of British modernism.

In 1908, Mark Gertler enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. During his four years there, he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, C. R. W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Isaac Rosenberg among others. In this time, Gertler met the painter Dora Carrington whose affections he pursued relentlessly for many years. Much of his working life was spent in London and he was introduced to the Bloomsbury group by his patron Lady Ottoline Morrell. In 1911, he exhibited at the Friday Club, of which Vanessa Bell was the secretary and founder, and his work was admired for a time by Bell’s sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf. Gertler became acquainted with the art critic Roger Fry in the mid-1910s, and it was with Fry’s encouragement that Gertler began to take inspiration from Paul Cézanne.