Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group. A loose association of writers, artists, and intellectuals that was a distinctive force in British cultural life during the early decades of the 20th century. Leading members of the group included the writers E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf, and the economist John Maynard Keynes; among the artists and critics were Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington (1893–1932), Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Henry Lamb. The group takes its name from the Bloomsbury district of London, where members often met at the houses of Clive and Vanessa Bell or of Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, and it stemmed from student friendships formed at Cambridge University; most of the ‘Bloomsberries’ had been at either King's College or Trinity College and many had been ‘Apostles’—members of an exclusive, semi-secret intellectual club. However, the Bloomsbury Group had no formal membership and no common social or aesthetic ideology. The members were united mainly by their belief in the importance of the arts and—in revolt against the restrictions of Victorian society—by their frankness and tolerance in sexual matters (several of them were homosexual or bisexual and their love lives were often complexly intertwined).

In the visual arts, the Bloomsbury Group made its most significant impact in the 1910s, after it had been joined by Roger Fry (he had lived in New York from 1906 to 1910). Fry was highly influential in promoting an awareness of modern art—through his writing and lecturing, through his two Post-Impressionist exhibitions (1910 and 1912), and through his founding of the Omega Workshops (1913). It was at this time, too, that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were at their most adventurous, both of them producing pure abstracts by 1914. However, the richly coloured figurative style in which the couple worked in the period between the two world wars is considered the ‘typical’ Bloomsbury style. By the early 1930s the Bloomsbury Group had ceased to exist in its original form. After the Second World War, its ideas fell out of fashion and its members were attacked as dilettantish and elitist. However, from the late 1960s there has been a great revival of interest in all aspects of the group.