Duncan Grant ART HIS TO RY
Coinciding with the launch of two new exhibitions, RAVNEET AHLUWALIA celebrates the brave and intimate paintings of the Bloomsbury Group’s Scottish maverick
26 Artists
& Illustrators
heavily enthralled to the simplified forms and bold colours of Henri Matisse who she would have first truly discovered, like much of Britain, via the 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. This landmark collection was arranged by another artistic Bloomsbury Group member, Roger Fry, and introduced the works of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso to the unsuspecting and rather traditionally minded British public of the time. Perhaps the most interesting and under-explored artist of the original
Duncan Grant was the most interesting and under-explored artist of the Bloom sbur y Group
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTO: PRIVATE COLLECTION
T
he collective power of the Bloomsbury Group left a long and lasting impression on the first decades of the 20th century. This liberal congregation of intellectuals and creative types famously “lived in squares… and loved in triangles”, such were their complex, intertwined lives which played out amid the leafy residential enclaves of bohemian central London A century on, however, while those controversial lifestyles continue to fascinate, the wide-ranging work that emerged from this hotbed of critical thinking has also lost none of its power to impress: Virginia Woolf’s novels remain loved and studied the world over for their idiosyncratic visions of urbane womanhood and English social structures, Clive Bell paved the way for abstract art with his theory of significant form, and John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most influential economists thanks to his development of macroeconomics in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Painting remained at the core of the group’s interests, however. Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, was an accomplished figurative artist,
