Exhibitions
A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections
December 18, 2008 - April 5, 2009
Nearly a century ago, the Bloomsbury group first took hold of the cultural imagination, their name becoming synonymous with wit, intelligence, political activism, and avant-garde art and literature. "Bloomsbury," named for a then slightly disreputable section of London surrounding the University, was centered on writers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell; economist John Maynard Keynes; artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington; and other notable personalities who circulated in their orbit including E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Wyndham Lewis.
This exhibition, organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury's beginnings, will examine the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970's by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators. The exhibition will include paintings, works on paper, decorative arts, and book arts borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States, and will focus on how this small group of artists made its imprint on the cultural thinking of its day. It is organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, with the assistance of the Nasher Museum of Art.
The exhibition premieres at the Nasher Museum of Art, then travels to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. It will also travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. It is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition and related programs are sponsored in part by the Duke University Provost's Common Fund and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc.
Image: Roger Fry (1866-1934), "Head of a Model," 1913. Oil on canvas, 34 x 28 inches. Private Collection.
