Duncan Grant Research Articles

Review: Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect

Review: <i>Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect</i>

Образы русских писателей-классиков в живописи и графике XIX–XX веков (на примере Н.В. Гоголя и Ф.М. Достоевского)

The article examines the portrait image of the writer in the context of his biography and work on the example of N.V. Gogol and F.M. Dostoevsky. Various methods of visual representation, traditional methods of image and the latest portrait formats in the Russian and European painting and graphics of the 19th–20th centuries become the subject of the author’s attention. Artistic works by Alexander Ivanov, Ilya Repin, Vasily Perov, Mikhail Klodt, Duncan Grant, Emile Filla, Hugo Mora and other artists are involved in the analysis. The article also reveals (on the example of studying biography and oeuvre, analyzing individual works of N.V. Gogol’s and F.M. Dostoevsky’s) the methodological potential and didactic orientation of these works. The author provides art criticism interpretations and philosophical commentaries that allow using these works in the practice of teaching literature. Based on the analysis and generalization of pedagogical experience, the article postulates the urgent need to expand the means of visualization in the literary education of schoolchildren. The article also problematizes the need to update visual materials to increase the effectiveness of studying literary classics, stimulating the schoolchildren’s interest in reading and further acquaintance and study of oeuvre of the writers included in the school curricula. The author of the article offers special questions and tasks that direct teachers to the study of traditional and innovative portrait art and its use in literature lessons in high school and considers the potential opportunities for its involvement in research project activities of students’.

Visiting elements thought to be “inactive”: non-human actors in Arthur Waley’s translation of Journey to the West

This paper applies actor–network theory (ANT) to study the non-human agents that participate in the translation and publication process of Monkey, an English translation of the Chinese classic Xi You Ji. The materials used consist mainly of the letters exchanged between the publisher George Allen & Unwin, the translator Arthur Waley, and the jacket and title page designer Duncan Grant. Moreover, the “Preface” of the translation written by the translator himself and the publisher’s autobiography are referenced as additional sources of information. The research reveals two groups of entities which act as what ANT scholars term as “non-human actors”. The first group consists of texts, more specifically, the “Preface” to Monkey and some letters exchanged between Waley as a translator and Unwin as a publisher, which reveals the reasons of re-translating Monkey and the translation strategy used. The second group includes the Second World War and the influenza epidemic in the 1940s that impeded the reprinting of Monkey. The paper concludes that, in addition to human actors, non-human actors that have also actively exerted influences on both the process and the outcome of a major translation project deserve to receive more attention when looking at translation as a social activity.

Dressing modern identity: Victorian style re-imagined in the Angelica Garnett Gift

Abstract This article discusses recent finds in the Angelica Garnett Gift of 8000 previously unseen works of art by Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, donated to The Charleston Trust in 2008. The Charleston Trust cares for Charleston House, the Sussex home of Bell and Grant, and the collection of their and their contemporaries’ artworks. The Angelica Garnett Gift has emphasized the overlooked importance of dress to the work and lives of Bell and Grant and calls for more attention on the sartorials of Bloomsbury. This article aims to spark discussion in this understudied field, focusing on two examples found in the Gift, which reinterpret and reclaim the Victorian styles of the top hat and the fan to express possibilities of modern identity. These works interrogate how dress can negotiate experiences of both gender and modernity while also revealing understudied artistic and design processes, for Duncan Grant with the Omega Workshops and Vanessa Bell later in life. The style of the Bloomsbury Group continues to inspire designers today who find their modernist dress equally suitable to express the contemporary moment.

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

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’.

AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (review)

Reviewed by: AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States Maggie Humm AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Janet Wolff. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 172. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). A new book of essays by Janet Wolff is always a welcome event. This one was written over a long time scale ("The 'Jewish Mark' in English Painting" is 1993-1994), and four of the six essays are published elsewhere; hence, AngloModern is less a unified argument than a collection of stimulating pieces. Wolff's focus is on the "social coordinates of the production of 'modernism,'" rather than on the dismantling of the canon (6). But her book does add additional and important arguments for re-envisioning constructions of modernism. Wolff's own lens is explicitly gendered as she explores constructions of masculinity and ethnicity, and engagingly clarifies her own class, gender and ethnic locations as a "resident alien" (the title of her 1995 book). The first of the six slim chapters, "Women at the Whitney: 1910-30," describes an exhibition which Wolff was invited to propose to the Whitney (a proposal later abandoned). The invitation encouraged Wolff into detailed reflections about modernist aesthetics and the "complex social networks of friendships, patronage and personal relationships and exhibition histories" (17-8). Wolff's deft handling of a range of information is stimulating; my guess is that she is an inspiring teacher. Chapter two is a case study of the American artist Kathleen McEnery, who exhibited at the key 1913 Armory Show in New York. She was later "rediscovered" and included in the 1987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Wolff situates McEnery in her historical context, interweaving issues of class, gender and geography [End Page 188] to arrive at a nuanced conclusion that "the questioning of aesthetic evaluations is merely raised and not answered by the critical questioning of the canon and its exclusions" (67). I agree with Wolff that re-envisioning has to be a much more complex process than simply one of "rediscovery." During my own visit to the National Museum in Washington, the docent certainly chose to privilege "canoninic" women artists—such as Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and Mary Cassatt—rather than rethink the terms by which women's art is defined. In chapter three, Wolff revisits her oft-cited work on the invisible flâneuse, and addresses the recent work of Parsons, Nava and Wilson on women's use of public space (omitted in Wolff's earlier revisiting in Resident Alien).1 Wolff proposes that rather than validating hitherto marginalized feminine practices (shopping) as flânerie, we acknowledge the city's more indeterminate discourses. Although this is a sophisticated approach, if Wolff had consulted working class women's autobiographies she might have favored a more positive feminine geography of modernism.2 Chapter four attempts the conceptually difficult task of producing a non-essentialist concept of the feminine through an examination of Simmel and Benjamin and an excellent reading of the work of Gwen John. Other fruitful dialogues could take place with feminist philosophers of "femininity"—see for example Sandra Bartky's attack on the centring of women's bodies in "normative" femininity (a key theme for art historians) and Biddy Martin's work on lesbian performativity, a discussion replete with possibilities for any rethinking of the gaze.3 The final chapters focus on the English artist Mark Gertler, Bloomsbury and discourses of the Jew as Other in modernity. Wolff claims that Bloomsbury's decorative art shows that the "influence of the avant-garde movements elsewhere in Europe was nonexistent here"; I find this comment odd, given that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked with the most technically innovative textile designer, Allan Walton, in the 1930s, and that Bell's earlier (1913) Painted Omega Screen (Tents and Figures) reflects the work of several French artists including Derain. While it might be true, as Wolff claims, that Bloomsbury's "friendship networks worked on a system of patronage and brokerage" it is worth remembering that one obvious reason for Bloomsbury solidarities was to protect its many gay, bi-sexual and pacifist...

Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends

This volume presents a literary and visual overview of the interchange between France and England as experienced by members of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington during the years 1906-1939, particularly their travels and sojourns in France which shaped much of their thinking, their painting, and to some extent their writing.

Under the Sign of Donne

IN THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM in Cambridge, there is a painting by Stanley Spencer, Donne Arriving in (Fig. 1). It is almost his earliest, done in 1911 when Spencer was an eighteen-year-old student at the Slade School of Art. It was exhibited the following year at the Grafton Gallery's Sec ond Post Impressionist exhibition, although not particularly noticed in the hubbub and horror caused by the Cezannes or even by the paintings of the British group—Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and their soon to be nemesis, Wyndham Lewis. There is certainly something of a Cezanesque proto-geometry to the painting's spaces, but in its subject and the generating idea for that subject it was quite unlike the others on those gallery walls. The figures are both their own tombstones and their resurrected bodies. They are at once stationary and in motion, here and there, in prayer and expectation— John Donne just happening by. The painting was prompted by Spencer's re ceiving a copy of Donne's Sermons from his fellow Slade students, Gwen and Jacques Raverat, and in particular by the phrase, to Go to Heaven by which Spencer interpreted as going past Heaven, alongside it, heaven here being Widbrook Common, a place near Cookham, where Spencer spent most of his life, receiving and painting heavenly visitors.1 Suddenly coming upon that painting prompted a series of questions that resulted in this partial inventory of twentieth century Donne signs and sight ings. Among them—where was Donne in the literary/artistic imagination at the start of the century during the years immediately before the 1912 Grierson edition and in the decades that followed? Who read him, painted him, thought about him? What have been the terms of the engagement? And behind those questions—why Donne? This investigation is more exploratory than polemi cal. The cast of characters is so varied, the Donnes invoked so multiple (love poet, dandy, satirist, religious poet, polemicist, priest), and the responses so various, that gathering the materials and making them speak to each other is in itself a useful enterprise. For it is remarkable that a writer so word specific as Donne, so much a figure (even as a composite of many figures) of a time, of

The art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

Foreword 7 Acknowledgements 9 The Artists of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant RICHARD SHONE 11 Image and Theme in Bloomsbury Art RICHARD MORPHET 23 Defining Modernism: Roger Fry and Clive Bell in the 1920S JAMES BEECHEY 39 Catalogue RICHARD SHONE 53 Some Early Impressions - Paintings 1892-1911 55 The Voyage Out - Paintings 1911-13 73 Essays in Biography - Portraits 1910-25 93 A Room of One's Own - Still-Life Paintings 1914-19 117 Vision and Design - The Omega Workshops: furniture, applied art, paintings, works on paper 1911-18 137 Beginning Again - Paintings 1916-20 183 Transformations - Paintings post-1920 205 Works on Paper and Sculpture 243 Photographs and Books 274 Chronologies 275 Bibliography 287 Index 290

Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant

Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant

Bloomsbury's Prophet. G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (review)

504 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:3JULY 1988 with the main tradition of Anglo-American philosophy from the fifties onward. Yet their influence was diffuse and deep. J. A. Smith exercised great influence over H. H. Joachim, the formidable Aristotle and Spinoza scholar, as he did over H.J. Paton, the Croce-influenced philosopher later to become a foremost authority on Kant. Collingwood's influence was even greater, if more diffuse. Both Sir Malcolm Knox and G. R. G. Mure have noted his effect upon them, to say nothing of Collingwood's great reputation in America. James Patrick deserves our thanks for this interesting, well-researched, welldocumented addition to our history of philosophy at Oxford in the first four decades of the present century. It casts considerable light on some little known (in America), but significant philosophic figures. And it demonstrates once again the sociological consequences of philosophical fellowship. If Sainte-Beuve were alive today, he would welcome it as a significant contribution to his theory of intellectual ~lites. ALBERT WILLIAM LEVI Washington University Tom Regan. Bloomsbury'sProphet. G. E. Moore and theDevelopmentofHis Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pp. xix + 3o7. $~9.95. Tom Regan's book is mainly, though not entirely, devoted to exploring the development of G. E. Moore's early moral philosophy and its influence upon the famous Bloomsbury group. That Moore was at one time an Idealist, that he went through personal travails, something like the crises experienced by Carlyle and Mill (though less severe), and that he was admired by the Bloomsberries, as Regan calls them, all of this is well known. But Regan, working with unpublished correspondence and other materials , fills in the outlines in vivid detail. The prospective reader might thus have expected the work to transport us on a dull voyage over familiar terrain. Instead, it turns out to be an entertaining, informative and provocative essay full of interesting theses, not all of them convincing. Regan suggests, for instance, on highly circumstantial grounds that Moore may have had a homosexual relationship with A. R. Ainsworth and then presupposes the truth of this conjecture to explain why Moore never criticized the homosexual activities of some of the Bloomsberries. That the Bloomsberries were not only "liberated" by the standards of their time but even by ours is well documented in the spate of recent books about them (by Edel, Levy and Skidelsky, for instance). Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant were lovers. Grant abandoned Strachey forJ. M. Keynes, and then rejected him for Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), who had broken off an extra marital affair with Roger Fry to join Grant. Some of Regan's most provocative theses are connected with these sorts of activities by the Bloomsberries. He holds that they found in Principia Ethica thejustification for their unconventional way of life. In particular, they read Chapter 5 as proving that the conditions for the application of moral rules are vague, and accordingly that it should be left to reflective, individual human judgment to decide on the proper course of action in a given moral situation. And this line of argumentation, Regan states, was the basis for their rejection of conventional morality. BOOK REVIEWS 505 The evidence Regan introduces on behalf of these assertions is exiguous. In the welter of words the Bloomsberries wrote about themselves and their philosophies of life, Regan cannot seem to find a direct quote demonstrating that it was this argument that they found in Moore. Indeed, much of the evidence he cites has a contrary import: Virginia Woolf has read Principia ten times and complains she cannot understand it. Another of Regan's theses is that the Bloomsbury construal of Moore is the correct one. But a careful reading of Chapter 5 shows that Moore argues that the answer to the question, "What kinds of actions ought we to perform?" is that we ought always to follow the dictates of common morality. "In short," he writes on page 162 of P.E., "though we may be sure that there are cases where the rule should be broken, we can never know which those cases are, and ought, therefore, never to break it." There...

Keynes and the economics of the arts

In one of his most memorable phrases, delivered in a speech very near the end of his life, Keynes said that economists are "the trustees not of civilization, but of the possibility of civilization."(l) In the civilization that Keynes the economist worked so unremittingly to make possible it is clear that he awarded art a high, perhaps indeed, the very highest place. Since he was a man of action as well as a man of thought, it was characteristic of him that he should not only enjoy the passive contemplation of art, ballet, and the theater, but also engage himself as an art and book collector and as the promoter, innovator, and organizer of an astonishing array of arts enterprises. And since he was not only brilliantly articulate but also notably practical and energetic, it should not surprise us that by these efforts he did actually put his mark on the development of British culture. This paper briefly reviews Keynes' many and varied activities as a lifelong entrepreneur for the arts and examines those of his writings that deal directly or by implication with the economics of art and culture. In March, 1918 Keynes was travelling to war-time Paris on Treasury business. Degas' private art collection was coming up for auction. At the suggestion of the peti n ter Duncan Grant, one of his Bloomsbury friends, Keynes persuaded the Chancellor of the Exchequer to let him have £20,000 to buy pictures for the National Gallery. Charles Holmes, the Gallery's Director, accompanied him to carry out the actual bidding. In Paris Holmes succeeded in buying thirteen paintings and eleven drawings by 19th century French masters, but Keynes could not persuade him to bid on any of the Cezannes. Paris was then under siege by Big Bertha, which may have depressed prices, and according to David Garnett's recollections, the adventurers returned home with £5,000 unspent. On his own account, Keynes purchased a small Cezanne still life as well as works by Delacroix, Ingres, and Degas. Both Harrod and Duncan Grant date Keynes' career as a serious