The visual artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group are not so well known in the United States. The explanations for this are varied, but essentially boil down to the fact that few of them ever achieved fame here for their art. Roger Fry was best known for the pioneering art criticism he wrote in the early days of modernism; Vanessa Bell is most often portrayed as the artist sister of Virginia Woolf; Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant, both talented artists, typically earn brief mention as part of the broader group of creative individuals who formed part of the group. In fact, the paintings, prints, and decorative arts that Fry, Bell, Carrington, and Grant created have been most often eclipsed by Clive Bell’s and Fry’s art criticism, Maynard Keynes’s economic theories, and the literary works of Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Woolf.

The organizers of A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, led by curator Nancy Green who has dedicated years of scholarship to the project, decided to sidestep the common literature-centered approach to their stories and give these artists the space they deserve. The title, a fitting reference to Woolf’s novel A Room of One’s Own, signals the curatorial premise—these artists have indeed earned a room of their own. The chief protagonists are seen on their own terms, and the artworks are allowed to be judged on their own merits and not as auxiliary illustrations to another, typically literary, history. To this end, Green has made a sweeping selection chronicling both the longevity of these artists’ careers and the breadth of activities included within their artistic practices.

The biographies of Fry, Bell, Carrington, and Grant are interwoven through the exhibition as they were in reality over the first four decades of the twentieth century, and provide an organizing principle for the exhibition. Rather than four one-person shows, Green has braided their stories together to demonstrate the importance of artistic relationships in their art. What emerges is a tale of four artists strongly influenced by the example of both Postimpressionist art and the ideas of their close friends. These artists spent their lives refining the use of intuitive coloration and expressive line. All accomplished, though none terribly innovative, these four led rich lives that were infused with music, lively conversation, reading, and the pursuit of several types of visual and decorative art.

Telling such a story in the context of a museum exhibition provides several challenges, foremost of which is the sheer complexity of the narrative. The Bloomsbury Group was not an official entity. Rather, it was an appellation created by a friend to describe the rather remarkable circle of friends who often gathered at the apartment shared by Bell and Woolf in the Bloomsbury section of London. The name held fast to the group long after they had moved out of London. Famous for being somewhat inbred socially, these individuals enjoyed a life of productive leisure. Turning their backs on industrial society and the urban squalor it begat, they removed to the country. There they formed an insular community of like-minded friends: individuals committed to living a life dedicated to beauty, joy, and intellectual stimulation.

At the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, visitors were introduced to a small selection of the range of works covered in the exhibition. In a few cases and with limited wall-hung work, the curators summarized the exhibition with samples from several key moments in the artists’ careers. This visual précis helped enormously as the next section covered the artists at the earliest stages of their artistic lives—drawings and paintings made before they had achieved either technical proficiency or recognition.

The catalyst for the group’s modernism, that is to say their mature work, came in the form of two exhibitions organized by Fry in 1910 and 1912. As the current show’s organizers justifiably argue, Fry’s scholarship on Postimpressionism shocked or (sometimes and) excited British artists, most of whom were still under the sway of Victorian aesthetic preferences. For the artists of the Bloomsbury group, the exhibition amounted to a shared life-changing epiphany, the results of which lingered with them for the duration of their creative lives. Their work would carry on the ideals of expressive color and flowing line, especially as charted by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Maruice Denis, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

Though their tendency toward high key color (particularly in their later works), similar subject range, and bold forms linked the group somewhat, the exhibition offered an excellent primer in the significant differences of approach that each artist evolved. In some instances, such as Fry’s Winifred Gill by the Pool at Durbins (1912) and Grant’s Winifred Gill (ca. 1911—12), the subject and the moment must have been identical. In both pictures the young Winifred sits by a pool reading, her head draped with a beautiful scarf. For Fry, the scene consists of three broad, flat areas of only softly modulated color denoting pool, grass, and house. The figure, the solid pyramid resting on the mid-point of the picture, has a reflection in the pool which completes a diamond shape dominating the whole composition. Despite the lack of modeling in the figure or the landscape, Fry suggests space through the recession of the poolside and a chair positioned conveniently along a possible orthogonal. Grant’s composition differs significantly. Painted with rows of bold strokes evocative of both Van Gogh and Cézanne, Grant emphasizes the picture plane and denies the subject either volume or a deep space to occupy. Including both paintings revealed not just the specific formal approaches of Fry and Grant but also the range of approaches covered by Postimpressionism.

Fry’s twin exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 established for the group a crystallizing event—the moment when their stylistic fates were more or less sealed. One feels the presence of Pierre Bonnard’s example in some of the later works, but by then they had all essentially reached artistic maturity and continued working for decades on a variety of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Among the highlights of the selection were several still lifes that steal the show: Carrington’s brilliant Begonias (1927), Fry’s deceptively complex The Blue Bowl (ca. 1918), both of Bell’s late works Still Life of Flowers in a Jug (1948–50) and Flowers in a Patterned Pot (1951), and Grant’s Still Life with Salt-Glazed Pitcher (1915). The still life offered artists maximum control over their arrangements of forms in space and the opportunity to focus on painterly issues first and foremost. It is a subject that seems to have inspired some of the greatest work among these artists, as it did for many of the artists they admired.

An especially interesting chapter in the lives of these artists was the arts and crafts collaborative, The Omega Workshop, founded by Fry in 1913. Fry updated the Arts and Crafts movement ideals of artist-designed utilitarian objects, offering the public the chance to obtain handcrafted beauty as an alternative to the tyranny of industrialized standardization. Enlisting the help of his artist friends, Fry’s Omega Workshop produced objects ranging from relatively inexpensive everyday pottery (thick-walled and built to last) to expensive hand-painted or inlaid furniture. One can find in the creation of the Omega Workshop an obvious extension of Williams Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, but also a conceptual bridge between the Vienna Workshop and, later, the Bauhaus—all shared a desire to make living with art a possibility for the general public. In this, the Bloomsbury group displayed a rare nod to social concern. Alas, their prices precluded the widespread adoption of their products, but the work that has survived to the present is eagerly collected by fans of the group.

This highlights one of the most interesting sub-themes of the exhibition: it was all drawn from American collections. While it was probably an expedient decision initially (and a prudent one considering the cost of international loans in the present insurance climate), the objects presented a fascinating glimpse into American collecting habits—one discussed in the exhibition’s catalogue by Christopher Reed. On the one hand, it is perhaps surprising that Americans have collected the group at all. Insular, aristocratic, bookish, and British, the Bloomsbury Group does not appeal to those American collectors on the lookout for works that reinforce mythologies inherent to national identity—artist-heroes who struggle against adversity to produce evidence of American cultural coherence.

On the other hand, the work has been collected in some depth in North America, and the significance of that activity is quite revealing. Only one painting is drawn from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example; and it is an extremely atypical composition by Bell. More often, the literary associations of the group seem to have inspired acquisitions. Several works belong to college and university art museums, and many of the private collectors are individuals first drawn to the group though its authors. Finally, there is a significant number of works borrowed from gay collectors whose interest in the works extends beyond the literary and into the history of homosexual identity. Sexual openness was a hallmark of the Bloomsbury Group, and though publicly closeted, Grant provides a positive model of gay life.

Grant lived with Bell and her husband Clive in their country house “Charleston” in Sussex. The house became the embodiment of their artistic and social ideals. They decorated almost every available surface with paint, creating their own Postimpressionist adaption of the Gesamtkunstwerk established by the various secession groups active in the previous decades. “Charleston” has become a destination for fans of the Bloomsbury Group. With this exhibition traveling to six venues across the United States, and with its ambitious 272-page color catalogue, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections will likely increase interest in visiting the fabled cottage in Sussex. And it will absolutely encourage a reassessment of both the lives and artistic contributions of Fry, Bell, Carrington, and Grant.