‘Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’
So ends the quotation of Virgina Woolf which greets you as you walk into the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy, on now at Millennium Gallery in Sheffield’s city center until February thirteenth.
As an English graduate and lover of the Modernist genre, I was thrilled to see an exhibition of this interesting group and fascinating period of creative and cultural history. The Bloomsbury Group, or Set, was a literary and artistic collective active in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the 1910s and 1920s.
Named after the London district where the group first formed, the group was an intellectual hub and meeting place for writers, painters, philosophers and intellectuals. They, as Modernists, sought new, original, experimental ways of approaching art, literature, politics and philosophy.
Going into the exhibition, I was ready to read about and view the work of the writers and artists I admire and have learned about; and indeed I did, though with far more history of what I didn’t know about Bloomsbury as well.
The exhibition, as you read in-depth upon entry, seeks to showcase the icons of Bloomsbury like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster and Vanessa Bell to only name four.
But what it also does, very effectively, is give exposure and reverence to the lesser known members of Bloomsbury and those anonymous figures who existed on its peripheries. Members like Mulk Raj Anand, an anti-imperialist Indian writer, and Edward Carpenter, a writer and social campaigner who lived openly with his lover George Merrill on the outskirts of Sheffield.
As well as this celebration of lesser known members, the exhibition acknowledges and considers figures like the servants and maids who worked for the Bloomsbury Group – who were often aristocrats and socialites, whose ability to commit their lives to revolutionary art was allowed by these servant-supported privileges.
This is an informative perspective which is rarely explored when Bloomsbury is looked back upon; which so to confirms the importance of the information and reading aspect of an exhibition, as this is where the gems of history are often found.
In saying that however, a few of the information cards in the exhibition were home to my only, small area of improvement. Some of the information of a few paintings did read as quite opinion and perspective based, when, in my view, it should always be given objectively, thereby allowing the viewer to make up their own mind. So, if you go, look at the work first, take it all in, then read the corresponding information.
What makes this exhibition sing though, is its commitment to breadth. It gives a wide, carefully considered portrayal of the variety that, as I now know, was actually central to Bloomsbury’s place in history.
The Bloomsbury Group weren’t just aristocrats or people with the same artistic vision, but were (though far fewer) people of colour, queer people and campiagners for social justice who clashed with some of Bloomsbury’s more established members. This specific aspect is also tenderly and with great insight responded to in paintings by contemporary artist Sahara Longe, whose work also features.
With this breadth and presentation of Bloomsbury as a set of people who often differed massively and had opposing Modernist visions of what revolutionary art and ideas should be, this exhibition rings true to our contemporary world.
Modernist Bloomsbury grew in a period of uncertain difficult times: World War One occurred and then ominously hung over Britain for years, opposing political sides sought to pave a new future and great social changes brewed, some working and some failing. After all, the 1920s saw the writing and publication of Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ and Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’: two apocalyptic poems that responded to the uncertain times and uneasy state of their poets’ worlds.
So, now one hundred years after Bloomsbury: what art, literature and ideas will revolutionize our pandemic, populism and political division ridden world? Should we heed Woolf’s welcoming quotation?: ‘Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different.’
