ARTES MAGAZINE

Palmer Museum of Art at  Pennsylvania State University

A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections

July 6–September 26, 2010  

Virginia Woolf, c. 1912, oil on paperboard, 14 1/2 x 12 inches, by Vanessa Bell (British, 1879–1961). Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton Massachusetts. Gift of Ann Safford Mandel, class of 1953. 

A century ago, the Bloomsbury group took hold of the cultural imagination, their name becoming synonymous with wit, intelligence, political activism, sexual scandal, and avant-garde art and literature. “Bloomsbury,” named for a London neighborhood surrounding the University of London, was centered on writers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell; economist John Maynard Keynes; artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington; and other notable personalities who circulated in their orbit, including E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Wyndham Lewis. 

Organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury’s beginnings, this exhibition examines the American interest in the art produced by the Bloomsbury artists and their collaborators by bringing together work borrowed from public and private collections across the United States and Canada. The exhibition includes paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts—including textiles, furniture, and ceramics—and captures the collaborative intimacy that characterized this group of twentieth-century moderns. 

A Room of Their Own also includes a selection of first edition books authored by the Bloomsbury literati with illustrations and original dust jackets designed by their artist colleagues. Published under the auspices of the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press and borrowed from local collections, these volumes augment the exhibition’s exploration of the relationship between art and literature in Bloomsbury. 

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue were organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., in conjunction with the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Its presentation at the Palmer is generously supported by the Department of English, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and the Friends of the Palmer Museum of Art. Christopher Reed, a contributor to the catalogue and associate professor of English and visual culture, is guest co-curator of the exhibition.