Bloomsbury and France Art and Friends

by Caws, Mary Ann; Wright, Sarah Bird

• ISBN13: 9780195117523
• ISBN10: 0195117522
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now therehas never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublishedletters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influenceof French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to therelationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artistsand friends in the 20th century.

Author Biography

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate School and is the author of Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa, and Carrington. She lives in New York City. Sarah Bird Wright is an independent scholar and the author of many books, including Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. She lives in Midlothian, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Michael Holroyd
Acknowledgments	xi
Sources	xiv
Abbreviations and Archives	xv
Maps	xvii
Introduction	3	(14)
Founding Bloomsbury in France	17	(130)
Beginnings: Friends in France, 1896--1910	21	(8)
Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Ralph Partridge	29	(20)
Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West	49	(24)
Clive Bell and His Circle	73	(22)
John Maynard Keynes	95	(12)
Ottoline Morrell	107	(16)
Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson	123	(8)
Frances Partridge	131	(16)
Painters Across the Channel, 1910--1938	147	(118)
Painters in France, 1910--1921: Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry	149	(30)
Painters in Provence, 1921--1938
St.-Tropez, 1921--1927	179	(12)
Duncan Grant Aboard the Arequipa, 1924--1925	191	(6)
Cassis, 1925--1929	197	(26)
Last Years in the Midi, 1930--1938	223	(12)
Visual Translations	235	(30)
Writers and Thinkers	265	(108)
The Maurons, E. M. Forster, Julian Bell, and Bloomsbury	267	(24)
Intellectuals at Pontigny	291	(12)
Roger Fry's France	303	(24)
Simon and Dorothy Bussy, Andre Gide	327	(24)
Literary Translations	351	(22)
Conclusion	371	(2)
List of Major Figures	373	(6)
Chronology	379	(8)
Notes	387	(20)
Selected Bibliography	407	(3)
List of Illustrations	410	(6)
Index	416