We are not always able to see original Bloomsbury art in person, but yesterday I got a look at several pieces exhibited at the Tate Britain.
Bell, Grant, Gertler
They include paintings by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister; Duncan Grant, Bell’s friend and lover who lived with her at Charleston; and Mark Gertler, who became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group through his patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell.
I share them with you here.
Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, 1912. An oft-visited beach in Dorset by Bell and her family. Bell uses bold colors and simple shapes, rather than emphasizing the subjects. It is likely that the figures in the foreground are Vanessa’s son Julian and his nanny.
Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Based on the theme “London on Holiday,” this painting was part of the decoration for the dining room at the Borough Polytechnic.
Duncan Grant, Head of Eve, 1913. In this head of the biblical figure of Eve, grant fuses Byzantine and early Italian style with the styles of Matisse and Picasso.
Duncan Grant, Film of Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1974. This is a digital film version of a scroll painting Grant composed in 1941. The music of Bach was meant to accompany it.
Mark Gertler, The Artist’s Brother Harry Holding an Apple, 1913.
Mark Gertler, Merry-Go-Round, 1916. Gertler, a pacifist, painted this during WWI while living in London as a conscientious objector. The fairground ride is transformed from something pleasurable into a metaphor for the relentless military machine that traps both soldiers and civilians.
Here is the call for papers for the International Virginia Woolf Society’s guaranteed panel at MLA 2017, held Jan. 5-8 in Philadelphia. Both align with the theme “Virginia Woolf Scholars Come to Their Senses.”
Two possible approaches are being offered:
papers addressing sense modalities in Woolf’s writing. How and to what end does Woolf evoke sensory experiences of smell, touch and taste in her writing?
papers offering or debating “corrective” readings of Woolf that suggest some kind of “progress” in Woolf criticism. Have earlier readings, such as poststructuralist or lesbian, been supplanted by contemporary approaches, or do we need a model other than “progression” to address Woolf’s critical heritage?
Abstracts of between 250-500 words should be sent by March 21 to Pamela Caughie at pcaughi@luc.edu. (Please note the “e” is dropped in Caughie). Participants must be MLA members by April 7, 2016.
My two-week stint doing research at the NYPL Berg Collection is over, and letters and rare books took up the last two days of my Short-Term Research Fellowship on the topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists.
The letters were written by Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey to a variety of correspondents, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and Nick Bagenal. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read them in their original form, taking time to decipher the usually elegant handwriting of the letter writers and savoring the idea of a world where friends and colleagues posted missives to each other on a regular, if not daily, basis.
It was special to be able to touch and handle papers nearly 100 years old that belonged to writers and artists I have read so much about and admire so greatly.
It was also invaluable to have access to such rare books as Clive Bell’s Civilization (1928), Julian Bell: Essays, Poems and Letters (1938) and David Garnett’s A Rabbit in the Air: Notes from a Diary Kept While Learning to Handle an Aeroplane (1932).
So while I knew that my research would come to an end, I felt sad when it did. I even felt a little lost when I turned the last page of Garnett’s book, realized I had no more documents or books in my queue and knew that I would soon be on my way back to my regular everyday life in Ohio.
I will miss the grandeur of the NYPL’s Schwartzman building, the luxurious silence of the Berg reading room, the helpful friendliness of librarians Anne Garner and Rebecca Filner, the expertise of Curator Isaac Gewirtz and the technical expertise of a regular volunteer and Yeats scholar named Neal who eagerly came to my aid when my laptop refused to reboot after loading some troublesome and unwanted Microsoft updates.
I hope all of those mentioned above will consider this an official public thank you for helping me have such a valuable experience.
Those who know me know that I am fascinated by the idea of how weather affects human behavior and human history.
Yesterday, while I was reading David Garnett’s 1941 book War in the Air: September 1939 to May 1941 at the Morgan Library & Museum, references to weather’s affects on the outcome of World War II kept popping out at me. We all know the important role weather played in the scheduling of the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy, but weather played a vital role in the war at many other times as well.
The period of the so-called Phoney War, the first eight months of Britain’s involvement in WWII,was one of them. From September 1939 to April 1940, the general public in Britain and France expected their governments to launch an all-out air attack on Germany, but that didn’t happen. It turns out that neither the Germans nor the Allies was prepared for such a move.
Ultimately, both sides saw the Phoney War as advantageous, according to Garnett. And for the Brits, weather played a part in that advantage. Since the prevailing winds of Western Europe come in from the Atlantic, Britain’s Royal Air Force was almost always in a better position to know weather conditions — and plan around them — than the German Luftwaffe, which had to send aircraft out on weather reconnaissance missions, costing them time and money.
Garnett also explains that the winter of 1939-1940 was particularly hard. Bomber crews suffered frostbite, and planes were lost because of icing. However, the weather had more severe consequences for Germany than for either England or France. Freezing weather halted traffic on the Danube, caused the overworked German railways to break down and caused a coal shortage as well. The cold winter weather made the estuaries of Germany’s rivers and shallow sea around the Friesian islands fill with floating ice. This then made it impossible for sea planes to take off or land on the water without risk of damaging their floats.
It also prevented the Germans from laying more magnetic mines designed to blow up British vessels made of steel as they traveled above them. In November of 1939, Hitler had predicted that these mines would be his “secret weapon” and would be responsible for Britain’s quick defeat. The bitter cold of that winter prevented that from happening.
The cold probably delayed the invasion of the Low Countries and the attack on the Western Front by one or two months as well, thus making it impossible for German forces to invade England in the summer of 1940 as planned.
November 1940 was full of clear days and cloudless skies in the south of England, tempting the German Air Force to begin a new form of annoying daylight raids. During these raids, weather conditions were also right for the high-speed, high-flying German aircraft to leave a trail of white vapor behind them. That allowed the people of Kent and East Sussex to watch the planes’ progress as they headed south across the English Channel.
A number of factors combined to make Germany’s May 1940 invasion of France a success. Chief among them was the weather. A spell of dry and perfect weather lasted from the beginning until the end of the attack. As Garnett wrote:
A week of rainy or foggy days in the middle of May might easily have saved France (100).
Having worked my way through Vanessa Bell’s letters to Maynard Keynes yesterday, I spent today with two of the Morgan’s rare books on the topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists.
The Morgan Library & Museum actually has five pertinent rare books on the topic in its catalogue, and originally I thought I would get through all of them today. But once I got a look at the content of the first, We Did Not Fight:1914-1918 Experiences of War Resisters, a collection of essays edited by Julian Bell and published in 1935, I knew I would have to schedule another work day at the Morgan.
The volume includes an introduction by Julian Bell in which he answers a question that had puzzled me: Why would Julian, an advocate of pacifism, end up volunteering for the Spanish Civil War? I found the answer to that at the end of his introduction when he says that his generation will succeed in ending war–and will use force to do so, if force is necessary (xix). It’s true that Julian was an ambulance driver, not a soldier, in the Spanish Civil War. But some pacifists, absolutists, would argue that any work that supports war should be rejected.
We Did Not Fight contains other essays that illuminate the circumstances surrounding conscientious objectors during World War I. Some recount the political and social climate at the beginning of the war. Others detail the particular hardships of working class COs. And still others describe the support and comraderie provided by the No-Conscription Fellowship, organized by the Quakers and Independent Labour Party supporters, which met from 1914 through 1919.
The final essay, “The Tribunals” by Adrian Stephen, brother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, details the ways the tribunals functioned. After the passage of the first Military Services Act in January 1916 instituted conscription of unmarried men age 19-40, local tribunals were set up to administer it. Their role was to make life and death decisions about who would be exempted from military service.
The second book I looked at was a pamphlet published by The Peace Pledge Union. Titled WarMongers, it was written by Clive Bell and published in September of 1938. My time had run so short by the time I got to it, that I resorted to taking photos of most of its pages so I could read it later. Thankfully, that is a practice the Morgan allows.
