...a society of artists who devote themselves to Book Reviews applied design. Their most important work lies in the application of pictorial designs to the decora- Deborah Sugg-Ryan tion of walls, and the designing of various hang- ings.4 Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity by Christopher Reed (New Haven & The Daily Mail called the Omega Workshops’ London: Yale University Press for The Bard Graduate exhibit a “Post-Impressionist room:” Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, The wall panels surrounded by plain rectangular and Culture, New York, 2004) ISBN 0-300-10248-8, surfaces of blue, strawboard colour, and dark 324 pages, B/W and color illustrations, index. (hard- chocolate, represent—if so crude a word may be cover) $45.00. used for an art that tries to avoid the representa- tion of anything approaching reality—dancing Footnotes begin on page 100. figures, or rather, the abstract rhythm and volume of dancing figures, expressed in systems of The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish spheric intersecting curves tinted in rose-colour of the neck, and its skin is “greenery-yallery,” despite and light green. the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and Dissenting Aesthetes, It described the furniture as “severe in line and star- however, were compelled to call in as much modern tling in colour and applied decoration.” The marquetry talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine was “of distinctly cubist character” and the carpet was work without which they knew their efforts would not “geometrically patterned in daring though tastefully rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party or command contrasted colours.” 5 The Arts and Crafts movement more attention.1 influenced the clean lines and stark simplicity of the In 1913 the artist Wyndham Lewis, best known room’s furniture. The painted designs on the furniture for his later association with the Vorticists, attacked the and walls were reminiscent of avant-garde European Bloomsbury designer and critic Roger Fry in a notorious artists such as Cézanne and Picasso, and reflected “round robin” that he sent to The Observer newspaper contemporary interest in non-European art. Much of following the Omega Workshop’s participation earlier the surface decoration employed by Omega was highly that year in the Art Furniture section of the Daily Mail abstracted. Ideal Home Exhibition with a display of painted furni- The Omega’s room was certainly popularly ture. Omega was a commercial decorative arts venture, perceived as avant-garde. The Daily Mail reported Prince connected with the Bloomsbury Group, supported and Princess Alexander of Teck’s response to the room by liberal middle-class and wealthy patrons, such as “with freakish patterns” as “the reverse of admiration.”6 Ottoline Morrell.2 Roger Fry (who was famous for orga- A lady correspondent said, “I am not sure if I should like nizing an exhibition of Post-Impressionism in London in to live in the Post-Impressionist room:” the winter of 1910-11) set up Omega in July 1913, influ- ...with its weird furniture, its wall pictures of enced by the “good design” ideals of the Arts and Crafts men and women which seemed to be made up movement. As well as Wyndham Lewis, he employed of scythes, blades and cubes. “Horrible!” said well-known artistic and literary figures including a woman beside me, and forthwith she walked Winifred Gill, Frederick Etchells, Spencer Gore, Vanessa away. Bell and Duncan Grant. The occasion of Bloomsbury showing at the Ideal However, five minutes later the woman was back Home exhibition was an interesting incursion of high art for another look, perhaps “to wonder if there may be into popular consumer culture. The exhibition was set up something in it after all.” 7 The Daily Mail warned that by the popular middle market newspaper The Daily Mail the room was likely to cause much discussion: provoking in 1908 to educate and entertain the aspiring middle- “severe condemnation as well as enthusiastic praise.” 8 classes in the new arts of homemaking. The exhibition The Daily Mail’s main motive in engaging the services catalogue described the Omega room simply as a “sitting of the Omega Workshops was thus perhaps to provoke room:” “The walls are decorated in distemper by various some of the criticism and notoriety that Fry’s exhibition artists working together on the general theme of designs of Post-Impressionism had received three years earlier. based on the movements of dance.”3 The catalogue listed What art historians have dubbed the “Ideal Home cushions, curtains, upholstery, furniture, floor rugs and rumpus” tore the Omega Workshops apart less than six a mantelpiece that were all designed by artists from the months after it had been set up and resulted in Lewis and Omega Workshops which it explained as: four other artists leaving.9 Lewis’ derision of Fry’s Omega

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi.2007.23.4.98 by guest on 27 September 2021 Workshops as a “pleasant tea-party” and his emphasis formulated a domestic modernism in which housework on its feminine characteristics drew its strength from both literally and metaphorically was privileged over its the domestic resonances that the Ideal Home Exhibition binary opposite of heroism (p.2). This builds on Reed’s carried, which could not have been further removed from insightful and pioneering 1996 edited volume Not At what Lewis dubbed the “rough and masculine” work of Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and modernism. In addition, at the heart of their conflict was Design (surely long overdue for a reprint), which inves- Lewis’ contention that Fry’s ideas were merely “a fatal tigated the ambivalence and hostility of modernists to compromise, an attempt to dress up nineteenth-century the domestic sphere. Central to Bloomsbury’s aesthetic concepts in the surface glitter of Post-impressionism.”10 and in opposition to Lewis’ “rough and masculine work” Whilst Fry’s aesthetic at this point was based on the was what Reed calls the “subculture of Bloomsbury,” a legacy of Cézanne, resisting total abstraction, Lewis and term he uses to describe their re-imagining and remaking the younger artists were attracted by extremism and of domesticity and the development of a “literal house their desire for radical reputations mirrored that of the style” (p. 14). Elsewhere he makes it clear that this is a Futurists.11 As a direct result of the “ideal home rumpus” sexual subculture—he rejects the term “queer” as histori- the British avant-garde art scene was split into two. In cally inappropriate and lacking the gender distinctions spring 1914, Lewis and his supporters formed the Rebel that the Bloomsbury group themselves made between Art Centre, which eventually became the Vorticist group. lesbians and gay men—that reimagines domesticity Fry and Lewis thus represent two different tendencies outside of norms of heterosexual coupledom. As he within British Modernism. Fry’s work at this juncture says: can be roughly aligned to the “fitness for purpose” The recent reorientation of linguistic and anthro- ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement and Lewis with pological theories of sexuality away from essen- a more hard-edged Modernism, gendered feminine and tialist categories of sexual orientation and toward masculine respectively. more fluid notions of performance has the ironic Christopher Reed’s brilliant and richly anecdotal effect of returning self-styled postmodernists to new book Bloomsbury Rooms challenges the orthodoxy of interests that characterised “modern” sexuality in the “rough and masculine work” of British modernism. the Twenties, among them the play with gendered It is surprising that he does not recount the “Ideal Home roles and costumes to create forms of outsider rumpus,” given that it is such an apocryphal event in identity that allow for a wide range of uncon- British modernism and serves to illustrate the gendered ventional romantic and erotic friendships. From aspect of his thesis so well. Reed sets out to: this perspective, the culture of Vogue and the …include not just women, but everything that Sitwells, costume parties and camp, re-emerges as patriarchy has dismissed as negligible by its asso- crucial to the history, not just of Bloomsbury and ciation with the feminine. Stepping outside the modernist aesthetics, but of sexuality (pp. 2412). traditional proprieties of art history, this study acknowledges a community of men and women Thus the term “camp” is usefully employed in a who worked to imagine new forms of domesticity discussion of Grant’s interiors and subcultural signifying and who embodied their ideas in the look of the practices. This could usefully be extended in the future home (p. 17). as a tool to investigate another “other” British modern- ism: the camp of the all-white Vogue regency interior set Therefore Reed rethinks the constituents of British surrounding Syrie Maugham. Modernism and rescues it from the stranglehold of both Reed argues that the Bloomsbury artists and its arts and crafts legacy and the austere temptations of designers developed what he calls the “Amusing Style” continental “international style” modernism. Crucial to of interior design, the “promiscuous pleasures” of which, Reed’s project is not only the furniture, paintings and alongside jazz, were seen as part of a crisis in British other decorative objects produced by the Bloomsbury national identity by British critics who “seized upon the Group’s artists, designers and writers but also the rhetorics of Le Corbusier to help reassert an authorita- processes by which they produced their homes and the tive masculinity” (p. 16). Reed takes his term “Amusing ways in which they lived within them. For example, he Style” from contemporary writings on Bloomsbury, discusses a number of Virginia Woolf’s domestic settings which used it to “signify an aesthetic known in its own as inhabited material spaces, fictive and non-fictive writ- era simply as ‘modern,’ but so different from what was ten spaces and visually represented spaces (on the covers later sanctioned as modernism” (p. 236). He argues that of her books). as well as transgressing sexual boundaries, this style The modernism of Bloomsbury rooms, Reed argues, also blurred national and historical ones. This “modern” lies in their conscious making as spaces in which to be sensibility included the mixing up of objects imported modern. Bloomsbury artists, designers and writers from the continent as well as displaying Victorian objects

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi.2007.23.4.98 by guest on 27 September 2021 “for qualities other than which the Victorians themselves university research that favors the journal article over admired in them” alongside modern ones (p. 237). The the monograph, is undoubted. He writes as elegantly, decorations on Bloomsbury furniture of the 1920s, for wittily and, at times, as venomously as his subjects; I example, contained pastiches and references to a wide relished his Bloomsburyesque acerbic footnotes where variety of historical subject matter in visual art and he takes great delight in demolishing his rivals. Yale’s design, including classical mythology. Reed makes the production values are, as ever, high and the book’s important point that this is closely related to the work profuse and lavish illustrations show many “lost” inte- of literary modernists, particularly formalist theories of riors for the first time. literature, which emphasised the free play of connotation Bloomsbury Rooms should be read not just by and illusion. This insightful point, which is accepted by Bloomsbury enthusiasts (although it has much, for exam- literary critics, is often overlooked by design historians. ple, to add to our understanding of Virginia Woolf) but Much previous writing on Bloomsbury has hitherto also by anybody interested in modernism in art, design, emphasized its Englishness at the expense of its inter- architecture and literature. It is an important challenge nationalism. Reed again challenges the conventional to the monolithic view of modernism in design, which historiography by investigating the links between tends to focus on the industrial and the mass-produced. Bloomsbury artists and France, especially Matisse (whose Reed quite rightly points out that the international style domestic output was recently reassessed in an excellent is just that, a style. The book could usefully be read exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in alongside Michael T Saler’s The Avant-Garde in Inter-War London that focused on his textiles). The Bloomsbury England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground artists, Reed contends, responded to modern French (2001)—a book that deserves to be much better known by paintings by imagining them realized as places to inhabit design historians—which posits the notion of “medieval (p. 110). Thus they “aspired to make modernism the Modernism” to describe the activities of Frank Pick and look of modern life” (p. 110). Consequently Bloomsbury his acolytes who pursued a different version of modern- revolutionized the look and thus values of the modern ism to Bloomsbury’s derived from British Arts and British home. Crafts ideals. Indeed, I for one would pay good money Central also to Reed’s argument is the influence to see Saler and Reed share a platform. Reed’s book also, of Primitivism, with the term referring not just to non- most importantly, brings the issues of sexuality and the Western art, particularly sculpture, but also to European domestic sphere to centre stage and in so doing demol- medieval sculpture. As Reed shows, Bloomsbury was ishes the “rough and masculine” work of modernism. particularly enamored with the Near East. For Roger Fry in particular, an embracing of primal sensations 1 Quoted in R. Cork Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine and experiences was crucial to his vision of the modern Age volume 1, (London, 1976), 94. home at Durbins, his suburban residence in Guildford. 2 S.K. Tillyard The Impact of Modernism, 1900-1920, (London, 1988), Bloomsbury’s primitivism thus aimed to “create modern 68. spaces for modern enactments of sex and gender” (p. 87). 3 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (London, 1913), 51. A Their “primivitist ideal” was an intellectual, emotional, full description of the individual elements in the room can be found and sensual freedom at odds with what they perceived in J. Collins The Omega Workshops (1983), 54–60. as British “close-mindedness, conformity and coldness” 4 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue (1913), 105. (p. 110). 5 Daily Mail (October 7, 1913): 5. Reed contests the common claim that the 6 Daily Mail (October 10, 1913): 7. Bloomsbury Group’s post-war aesthetic represented a 7 Daily Mail (October 11, 1913): 3. retreat from modern issues and concerns. He repoliticizes 8 Daily Mail (October 7, 1913): 5. them and in so doing challenges conventional masculin- 9 See Q. Bell & S. Chaplin “The Ideal Home Rumpus,” “Apollo” ist notions of politics as located only in the public sphere. (October 1964): 284-91; J. Collins, The Omega Workshops, (1983), He explains that what he calls their “aesthetics of consci- 54–6; Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, 1988. entious objection” was a refuge from modern values 10 Quoted in Cork, Vorticism (1976), 94. under siege. Their interest in the early Renaissance, 11 Ibid., 96. he says, “turned away from an avant-garde model of progressive leadership and toward an ideal of stubborn dissent from a culture gone awry” (p. 181). The look of their homes was an aesthetic manifestation of their political resistance to war that they saw as threatening modernism’s fundamental principles. The depth and gravitas of Reed’s impressive inter- disciplinary scholarship, which few British academics could hope to match in the current audit culture of

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