‘The Phoenix of English Painting’: Figures of the Body in Duncan Grant, 1908–20

Abstract

Evaluations of Bloomsbury painting have been growing in complexity of explanation over the last two decades and this article partly arises from points in the research of both Christopher Reed and Lisa Tickner in its emphasis on contemporary cultural concepts of the male body and influential elements from popular entertainment culture. The bodily codes of imperial Hellenism – a compound of body-building physique rhetoric and recollections of Greek classical statuary – are traced. Grant's portraiture, in the turn to ‘Neo-Paganism’ as a peculiarly distinctive brand of British primitivism in his portrait of mountaineer George Mallory, is considered. The Bloomsbury nexus between Lytton Strachey and Grant is indicated as the place for the transmission of a new enthusiasm for the vulgar, free bodily expressionism and ethnicity found in the fashionable Sicilian drama Malia, which Grant incorporated into his painting. Grant was a comic artist, with a grasp on the mode of the carnivalesque, which was complemented by a kind of colonial fantasy. Bloomsbury culture was embedded in Empire and oriented towards India; much of Grant's art relies upon what David Cannadine has identified as ‘ornamentalism’.