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Posts Tagged ‘Bloomsbury Group’

The Charleston Festival is back — in person — beginning yesterday and running through May 29 at Charleston in Firle, Sussex.

The festival is the main fundraising event for the longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group.

Of particular interest to Bloomsbury scholars is Sunday’s program with Alex Jennings and Jonathon Pryce. At 5:30 p.m., the actors will do a live reading of “The Love Lives of Lytton Strachey,” revealing “a playful and uncensored portrait of a queer universe, shared in glorious candid detail with trusted friends,” according to the website.

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So many wonderful events, performances, and exhibits related to the Bloomsbury Group take place in England. Here is another I wish I could view — and it’s free. “Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy,” an exhibit that chronicles the “lives, loves and work” of the group opens at the Millennium Gallery of the Sheffield Museums Nov. 25 and runs until Feb. 13, 2022.

The Vanessa Bell portrait of Leonard Woolf that graces the cover of his biography by Victoria Glendinning is just one of the Bloomsbury Group portraits included in the exhibit.

Curated through a partnership between Sheffield Museums, York Museums Trust and the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition includes portraits of those who were intimately associated with the Bloomsbury Group, along with their peripheral friends and colleagues.

More than 140 works

Beyond Bloomsbury brings together more than 140 paintings, sculpture, works on paper and supporting material to celebrate key figures, including Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Most of the portraits included in the exhibit are informal and intimate.

It include paintings by Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, sculpture by Marcel Gimmond and Stephen Tomlin, and drawings and photographs by Cecil Beaton, George Charles Beresford, Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Nash.

Get introduced at a tour

The gallery is offering two free lunchtime tours to introduce viewers to the exhibit. Titled “Beyond Bloomsbury,” they will be held from 1-1:45 p.m. on Dec. 7 and Dec. 14.

Sheffield Museums are located at Arundel Gate, Sheffield S1 2PP.

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Members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain will spend Valentine’s Day with Virginia Woolf reading love letters between members of the Bloomsbury Group aloud.

Letters will include those between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

The meeting and reading of romantic letters will take place via Zoom on Sunday, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m. GMT or 3 p.m. EST. Members of the VWSGB can register by emailing Marielle O’Neill at marielleoneill88@hotmail.com.

If you are not a member of the group, find out how you can join.

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Charleston, a treasure trove of Bloomsbury art and culture, is in dire need. Can you help?

Charleston

The longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group, along with its garden, galleries, shop and café, are temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

That means the charity that receives no public funding is bereft of income from visitor admissions, as well as its main fundraising event. The Charleston Festival, scheduled for May, is cancelled.

As a result, Charleston has issued an emergency appeal for donations from those who appreciate this unique venue, no matter what side of the pond they live on.

You can find out more, including how to make a donation — whether you are a UK citizen or not — here.

Charleston as seen from the farm track to the home. The gravel, the lawn, bushes, and the facade of the house are the same as in the time of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

The Charleston garden

The Famous Women Dinner Service painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant between 1932 and 1934 has been on display in the Outer Studio at Charleston.

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This news comes from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. Member Martin Ferguson Smith is the author or co-author of two new articles on pivotal figures in the Bloomsbury Group.

  1. “Clive Bell’s Memoir of Annie Raven-Hill”, English Studies 100 (2019), pp. 823-854. Illustrated. With Helen Walasek.
    The first publication of Clive Bell’s frank recollections of his first lover, the wife of the illustrator and cartoonist Leonard Raven-Hill. The affair began in 1899, when she was 35 and he not quite 18, and continued on and off until 1914, seven years after he married Vanessa Bell. The memoir, fully annotated and discussed by the authors, is published in good time for the centenary of the exclusive Memoir Club, founded on 4 March 1920. Click on http://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2019.1658944, then select PDF. Please note that the authors’ allowance of free views via this link is not unlimited.
  2. “A Complete Strip-off: A Bloomsbury Threesome in the Nude at Studland”, The British Art Journal 20, 2 (Autumn 2019), pp. 72-77. Illustrated. The first presentation and discussion of a remarkable collection of nude photographs, taken out of doors, of Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry at Studland, Dorset, in September 1911. Accessible online, by kind permission of the editor of BAJ, at (and only at) www.martinfergusonsmith.com under “MODERN, Articles” and “RECENT NEWS, NOVEMBER 2019”.

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