The Bloomsbury Air
By NEVILE WALLIS
THE selection from his life's work entitled 'Dun- can Grant and his World,' at Wildenstein's Gallery, offers much more than art opportunity to salute the most distinguished, modest, and gayest of our painters on the eve of his eightieth birthday. A cousin of Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant has been at the centre of the Bloomsbury circle of friends, their intellectual candour and freedom of thought in- fluencing English taste most -strongly for a quarter of a century after 1910. To ease our passage into that world (which lingers in the beauty and warmth of Charleston, the farm- house under the Sussex Downs), to indicate its wit, grace, as well as astringency to an inquisitive generation, are the aims of this exhibition pre- sented and thoughtfully introduced by Denys Sutton. Admittedly, the search for this temps perdu may be easier for literary students. Vir- ginia VVoolf's unique, painter-like vision as a novelist is, indeed, as widely recognised as the stimulus of Clive Bell's early essay on Civilisa- tion, sought after still on both sides of the Atlantic.
If there are already signs of awakening in- terest in the ethos of the `Bloomsberries,' that is due partly to the lapse of time which has re- moved old antagonism and prejudice. Further- more, middle-aged writers as able and scrupulous as Raymond Mortimer, Benedict Nicolson, Denys Sutton and Alan Clutton-Brock have all assisted in reappraising Bloomsbury's place, and Duncan Grant's in particular, in the English Post-Impressionist movement. But the stirrings of curiosity in the rising artistic generation may have more of self-interest. In the present chaotic condition of the art world —of grasping, power- ful middlemen, and nine-day reputations, of non-art and anti-art revivals and official Com- mittees squabbling in every tongue—there may be expected to be more desire to examine the standards of this group of highly talented people to see perhaps what humane lesson can usefully be learned.
Their common values stemmed from the Cam- bridge philosophy of G. E. Moore. His gospel, Principia Ethica, was published in 1904. An in- spirer of exceptional simplicity and integrity combined with intellectual power, Moore im- bued his disciples with a, peculiar passion for truth, a refusal to accept any standard unless it met with the approval of their own unaided judgment. In conversation the unrelenting if not always spoken question would be: 'What exactly do you mean by that?' Moore laid stress on certain states of consciousness, exalting the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoy- ment of beautiful objects. This savoir-vivre, spirited, alert and sceptical, characterised the Society, the Cambridge body which included Sir Leslie Stephen, a distinguished Victorian book- man. Its concepts were inherited by Stephen's brilliantly endowed daughters, Virginia and Vanessa, and influenced their husbands, Leonard Woolf and the late Clive Bell. As a bible of con- duct, Principia Ethica as deeply affected the ver- satile economist Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and informed the clarity of Roger's Fry's art criticism.
Amounting to a religion for the Bloomsbury circle, this humane philosophy has to be con- sidered in any true appreciation of Duncan Grant's painting. This has thrived amid the varied accomplishments of a ,company who, seemed to dominate a strident period by their unworldly standards, and by their high-bred irony and per- suasiveness in declaring their tenets. With the Bell family Duncan Grant formed a lasting friendship. Responding with equal ardour to the revelation of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London of 1910, his work and Vanessa Bell's long enjoyed a reciprocal influence. Sometimes the two artists would share the same model, and decorate together their pottery or table-tops. But artistically their temperaments differ, as Grant's gentler, inquiring nature shot with mischief differs from the emphatic character of Clive Bell.
Bell invented the phrase 'significant form' and asserted the irrelevance of subject. His are the ringing accents of Bloomsbury at its liveliest and most opinionated. His is the assurance of •a critic at ease with his audience, with himself, even with the opponents he bantered. We may disagree with his notions of culture, but cannot doubt that we are listening to a cultured man: his concepts are embodied in his style. 'The quarrel between Romance and Realism is the quarrel of people who cannot agree as to whether the history of Spain or the number of pips is the more important thing about an orange.' Such crackling aphorisms keep alive Clive Bell's Ail, his testament of the aesthetic based on Cezanne which he and Roger Fry so eloquently preached.
But while Duncan Grant's art flowered in this atmosphere, his own freedom of choice has en- sured no deviation (as Fry himself said) 'a hair's breadth from the direction which his pas- sion for art pointed out.' His early, independent love of Masaccio and Piero shows a student as eager, and searching still in his recent free copy after Chardin. What this exhibition—more pur- posefully chosen than the Tate retrospective in 1959—most clearly brings out to me is that rant's realist portraits and intimate interiors, at their best, are no whit less considerable than his fanci- ful stylised decorations in fauvist colour, which continued to embellish every surface after their charming employment in Fry's Omega Work- shops. Nor can 1 see that Grant's lyrical fantasy and his staider virtues represent any sort of split, if one recalls his Scottish strain which is in- variably overlooked. His visual wit and flourishes have nothing whatever in common with stereo- typed whimsy north of the Border, of course; but the Scot's instinct for never quite letting his feet off the ground even when his head is in the clouds is Duncan Grant's certainly. And, after all, are his most deeply felt portraits of his friends wanting in imagination?
Every shift of Manner, the very tempo of his brushwork, is peculiarly apt to these charac- terisations. With what delicate irony the strokes of brilliant fauvist colour illumine the charac- ters of Iris Tree, and that quelling bird of plumage Lady Ottoline Morrell. The artist's deeper intimacy is reflected in the certain rich sobriety of his Vanessa Bell, and Desmond MacCarthy, and assumes a Gallic fluency in his Simon Bussy. The Vuillardesque gravity of Grant's portrait of Virginia Woolf meditating in 1911 reveals already a tragic insight which ap- pears premonitory. Such affection, recorded in comfortable, untidy rooms where civilised talk seems only momentarily stilled, must surely in- crease respect for Grant as the years go by.
Meantime, the spirit of Bloomsbury persists wherever advanced debate and integrity are joined. Its philosophy is echoed in the study of liberal subjects increasingly integrated in the Art School course. Its conkience directs the anxiety of Professor Coldstream or Quentin Bell that the student's judgment be founded on his literary and art historical studies, not simply a weather-vane spun round by the Kasmin Gallery. And so Wildenstein's is at once a tribute to a variously gifted artist, and to the interplay of creative ideas over whisky, buns and cocoa in Gordon and Fitzroy Squares where 'Blooms- bury' came into being.
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