The Bloomsbury Group in a fake
plane (from left to right): Unknown, David Garnett,
Vanessa Bell, Oliver Strachey, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, and
Barbara Bagenal.|
The Bloomsbury Group in a fake
plane (from left to right): Unknown, David Garnett,
Vanessa Bell, Oliver Strachey, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, and
Barbara Bagenal. |
This article was written exactly hundred years after the moving out of Virginia, Vanessa and Adrien Bell to the area of Bloomsbury where they started to hold gatherings with their friends to talk freely about literature, philosophy and art. Most of the members met at Cambridge university and kept on getting together afterwards in the hope of recreating the free and liberal atmosphere of the school. Considered by their pairs as snobbish to such an extent that the word Bloomsbury became a synonym for snobbish aesthetism, they participated to the arrival of modernism in England and let a strong footprint into the english and american literary and political outlook. They were a group of friends, lovers and colleagues who spent their time condemning the others and adulating themselves. They were rediscovered in the sixties, especially thanks to a biography of Strachey by Michael Holroyd, and their influence on further literary and art developments was fully acknowledged.
Cet article a été écrit exactement cent ans après l'installation de Virginia, Vanessa et Adrien Bell dans le quartier de Bloomsbury où ils commencèrent à tenir des réunions avec des amis, pour la plupart rencontrés à Cambridge, lors desquelles ils parlaient librement d'art, de littérature et de philosophie. Ce groupe d'amis, d'amants, de collègues eurent une influence majeure sur l'arrivée de la modernité en Angleterre mais leur apport fut longtemps sousestimé du fait de leur snobisme et de leur comportement de clan. Leur rôle dans la modification du paysage litéraire et politique anglo-saxon est maintenant reconnu à sa juste valeur.
Some friends and family in the garden of the house |
This article is aimed at describing the influences that played a role for the members of the Bloomsbury group and the conceptions they developed about art, aesthetics, … The first striking point is that the Bloomsbury group was definitly not a movement in the sense that there was little in common between the works of all members. They didn't develop one specific strict theory but shared some basic principles about what is art: Art should be an end in itself and the art's object does not as any other purpose but to be seen. They were greatly influenced by the post-impressionist painters such as Cezanne, of whom Roger Fry organized the first exhibitions in England. They all put an emphasis on the daily personal life, on the opposite of former writers who depicted a more heroic life. By all their works, novels as well as critcism, by speculating on the relationships in between the different forms of art and on the role of literary critics, the writers of the Bloomsbury group definitly played an essential role in the development of modernism and theories of biography, narrative, gender and genre.
Cet article tente de discerner les influences qui ont pesé sur les membres du Bloomsbury group ainsi que les conceptions qu'eux-mêmes ont développé sur l'art, l'esthetique… il est d'abord essentiel de voir que si les membres de ce groupe ne forment pas un mouvement à proprement parler car leurs oeuvres ont peu de choses en commun, il n'en reste pas moins qu'ils partagent certains principes de base. Inspirés notamment par les peintres post-impressionistes, ils posent l'intérêt de l'art pour l'art et se focalisent sur une représentation de la vie quotidienne, intime et non plus héroïque comme c'était le cas auparavant. Leurs travaux, même s'ils sont tous très différents, ont contribués de manière essentielle au développement de la modernité et de nouvelles théories dans le domaine de la littérature.
The house of the Bells, Charleston Farmhouse, in Bloomsbury where the group used to get together. |
This website gives a brief summary of the history of Bloomsbury, a part of West End, in London. The name comes from the surname of William Belmond who had a manor house called Blemondsisberi. The Bloomsbury group got its name from this area where they used to meet, in Virginia and Vanessa Bell's house. This group existed mostly between 1907 and 1930 but never edicted rules or elected a leader. Most of its members met at Cambridge university and kept on meeting to talk about literature, philosophy, politics, poetry… their influences can be found in Bernard Russel and A.N. Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and they incarned a spirit of agnosticism. The core members of the Bloomsbury group the novelist E.M. Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the art critic Clive Bell, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the Fabian writer Leonard Woolf, and the novelist and critic Virginia Woolf. All of them were later recognized for their work and are among the greatest british intellectuals of their time.
Cet article donne un bref résumé de l'histoire de Bloomsbury, une partie de West End, un quartier de Londres. Il s'attarde sur la contribution à la célébrité de ce quartier du Bloomsbury group, qui doit son nom au fait qu'il se réunissait dans la maison de Vanessa et Virginia Bell, située dans ce quartier. Ce groupe d'artistes a principalement existé entre 1907 et 1930 mais jamais de manière formelle. Largement inspiré par les écrits de Bernard Russel et A. N. Whitehead et privilégiant le principe de l'agnosticisme, ce groupe réfléchissait aussi bien à des questions philosophiques que politiques. Les membres les plus connus et les plus impliqués de ce groupe étaient les écrivains E.M. Forster, Virginia et Leonard Woolf, les peintres Vanessa Bell et Duncan Grant, l'économiste John Maynard Keynes, le biographe Lytton Strachey qui comptent tous aujourd'hui parmi les plus grands intellectuels britanniques de l'époque.
Kew Gardens, with woodcuts by Vanessa Bell and a hand-painted
cover by Roger Fry. 1st ed. London: Hogarth Press, 1919.
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This website presents the Hogarth Press, at first a small independent press created in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. From 1917 to 1938, together they printed their own work as well as the work of their friends from the Bloomsbury group and even some translations by them of famous authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Freud, which was the first translation into english. First they did hand-printing given their lack of money and the size of their press but the success of Virginia Woolf's Kew gardens in 1919 turned them into a commercial press. This unexpected success did not prevent them from printing the work of other unknown members from the Bloomsbury group, such as Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes, William Plomer, Vita Sackville-West, and, of course, themselves. The covers of thos works were often made by other members of the group such as Dora Carrington or Vanessa Bell. After Virginia Woolf stopped having an interest in the press in 1938, Leonard Woolf hired John Lehmann to help him until 1945 and the people who took control over the press always respected the wish of the original owners for quality.
Léonard et Virginia Woolf créèrent en 1917 une petite presse indépendante, la Hogarth Press, qui leur permit d'éditer leur propre travail ainsi que celui de leur amis du Bloomsbury group et les traductions qu'ils faisaient d'auteurs étrangers comme Dostoievski ou Freud. Le succès en 1919 du livre de Virginia Woolf, Kew gardens, les amena se transformer en une maison d'édition plus commerciale tout en conservant leurs exigences de qualité des travaux qu'ils publiaient. Ils publièrent ainsi de nombreux ouvrages, principalement ceux de leurs amis écrivains, généralement illustrés par des peintres membres du groupe également. Si Virginia Woolf se désintéressa de l'édition en 1938, son mari puis les personnes qui reprirent leur maison d'édition continuèrent à perpétuer la qualité des publications de Hogarth Press.
 Iceland poppies by Vanessa Bell (1909) |
This article presents the Bloomsbury group, an group of artists who met at Cambridge. The Bloomsberries, as they were called, were rejected by the mainstream high society of their time. This unformal group based on friendship was considered to be snob and condescendant to all the other artists they disliked. The article gives the exemple of Virginia Woolf, one of the most known member of this group, to explain how her behaviour could have been taken as an insult to other people. As for other members, the work of Virginia Woolf was extremely pionnier for the literature of that time and her relationships and love affairs were shoking for the high english society of the beginning of the twentieth century. Through exemples found in Virginia Woolf's novels, this article shows how she saw herself as a snob and how she justified it through her need to more self-confidence.
Cet article présente le Bloosmbury group et ces membres et s'intéresse plus particulièrement à Virginia Woolf, comme un emblême des comportements et des pensées de ce groupe formé en partie à Cambridge. Du fait de leur travail artistique d'avant-garde et leurs histoires d'amours hors normes pour l'époque, ce groupe était perçu comme snob et condescendant. Virginia Woolf elle-même reconnaît le snobisme dont elle fait preuve mais le glorifie et le justifie par la nécessité de pallier à son manque de confiance en elle.
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