The Bloomsbury Group and Vorticism Group

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The Bloomsbury Group in London

The Bloomsbury Group was an informal association of artists and intellectuals in England
during the first half of the twentieth century1. Its members were artists, writers and
intellectuals who began to meet at 46 Gordon Square in the home where the artist Vanessa
Bell and her writer sister Virginia Woolf lived, in 1905 for drinks and conversation. Their
meetings continued for the next three decades, but with the deaths of key members in the
1930s and 1940s, the group lost its cohesion, although individual members remained
friends and continued their creative careers. The name Bloomsbury was first attached to
the group in 1912 when Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and other young artist associates,
exhibited work for the first time. This name referred to the area in which they lived and
worked; Bloomsbury is a district of garden squares surrounded by elegant town houses in
central London.2
There was never any formal organization of the Bloomsbury Group: no list of
members, no acknowledged leader, no official rules, and no recognized identity3. However,
biographies, diaries and letters from the members show that the Bloomsbury Group evolved
from two different sets of people. The first members were the writers and critics, university
friends of Vanessa's brother Thoby Stephen: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon SydneyTurner, Leonard Woolf, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Close friends of these
key figures also attended from time to time. Then the Friday Club was started by Vanessa
Bell and some of her art school friends, and it provided the focus for the members who
were artists. In addition to Vanessa and her friends Margery Snowdon, Mary Creighton and
Sylvia Milman, membership included Duncan Grant, John Nash, Henry Lamb, Edward
1 Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community
History of Political Economy. 43(1). 1.
http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/43/1/59.short
2Archive
Journals:
Bloomsbury.
TATE
London.http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/
Gallery
3 Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

of

Wadsworth and students from the Slade School of Art. Although set up as an exhibiting
society, it provided artists with the opportunity to discuss their work, ideas and
developments in the wider art world 4. The members of this group were also people whose
family backgrounds lay in the nineteenth-century professional world of education, colonial
administration, law and literature. This had given them social advantages and selfconfidence but they were also linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they considered
the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of the previous generation.
They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles.
The social life of the Group revolved around the various houses of the members and
their friends, and holidays together in France, Italy and Greece. The Bells, Woolfs and
Lytton Strachey all had country houses, and they also enjoyed the hospitality of wealthy
patrons including Lady Ottoline Morrell who frequently entertained them at her Garsington
home. These house visits helped to widen the circle of acquaintance and brought in people
such as the dancers Frederick Ashton and Lydia Lopokova, the star of the fashionable
Ballet Russe. To outsiders they were seen as outrageous, particularly because of their many
love affairs with partners seeming to move from one member of the Group to another. Even
today it is this impression of Bloomsbury that often dominates the thinking about them 5.
For the Bloomsburys it was pleasant and stimulating to work on a project together, but
being perceived as intellectually and artistically revolutionary was also thrilling for them 6.
Despite the criticisms leveled at them, many members were important thinkers and
innovators, whose achievements overshadow their backgrounds and lifestyle7.
4Archive
Journals:
Bloomsbury
members.
TATE
Gallery
of
London.http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_members.ht
m
5Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Lifestyles and Beliefs TATE Gallery of

London.http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_lifestylebelief
s.htm
6 Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.


The Bloomsbury Group, or some image of it, was recognized by the public for the
first time when they held the Post-Impressionistic exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 in London
and from then on, during the next three decades, many contributions to literature and the
arts were associated to the group8.Although the art of Bloomsbury may today look rather
traditional in the context of the development of twentieth-century art, their influence and
contribution to British art was considerable. As a matter of fact, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell,
and Duncan Grant were amongst the first in Britain to make purely abstract art. 9 Most
plastic and literary production was eclectic in style, picking up and dropping different
influences10. Bell and Grant founded and co-directed the Omega Workshops where they
produced textiles that were innovative, and still look very modern today. Their purpose was
to provide a new source of regular income to artists and to bring aesthetically pleasing
objects into the English home11. The Omega Workshops also fostered important relations
between applied and fine artists and introduced the work of contemporary European artists
to England12. Many the works consisted on portraits of impressionistic or expressionistic
7Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Lifestyles and Beliefs TATE Gallery of

London.http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_lifestylebelief
s.htm
8Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

9Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Influence and Achievements. TATE Gallery of
London.
http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_influenceachi
eve.htm
10 Janet Wolff. English Art and Principled Aesthetics. A Companion to British
Art: 1600 to the Present. Ed Dana Arnold and David Peters, Blackwell
Publishing, 2013. 62.
11Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

styles13 but they also developed their own experimental techniques as for example the
practice of anonymity; sometimes artists would not sign the works or would not include
facial features in paintings and drawings. This experimental practice seems to have had at
least two purposes: to receive funds from successful artists for distribution to others less
fortunate, and to strengthen the communication of aesthetic emotion through exclusion of
unimportant details14.
The other important woman painter in the group, apart from Vanessa Bell, was Dora
Carrington. The literature about their art remains remarkably limited, especially since most
of what does exist has focused on their personal histories and relationships with betterknown members of Bloomsbury, despite their own prolific artistic careers. Their
marginalization as artists can be attributed to various factors associated with their gender.
These include the perception of what constitutes professionalism in art, their extensive
production of decorative arts, and the perceived autobiographical and feminine nature of
their art. Although Bell and Carrington were the only women visual artists in Bloomsbury
they have been particularly discounted, while Grant and Fry, in contrast, have been better
treated. Dora Carrington's marginalization as an artist may be the result of her interest in
decorative work, and her choice of genres conventionally associated with the feminine. She
liked to work with woodcuts, glass, tinsel pictures and painted tiles inspired by traditional
decorative themes. Vanessa Bell, in contrast, produced art grounded in the new aesthetics of
12Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Influence and Achievements. TATE Gallery of

London.
http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_influenceachi
eve.htm
13Janet Wolff. English Art and Principled Aesthetics. A Companion to British
Art: 1600 to the Present. Ed Dana Arnold and David Peters, Blackwell
Publishing, 2013. 62.
14Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community History of
Political Economy. 43(1). 4. http://hope.dukejournals.org/content/43/1/59.short

the time, which means validated by the notion of "higher arts", and receiving a little more
attention than Carrington.15
Bibliography:
Archive Journals: Bloomsbury. TATE Gallery of London.
http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/
Archive Journals: Bloomsbury members. TATE Gallery of London.
http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_members.htm
Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Lifestyles and Beliefs. TATE Gallery of
London. http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_lifestyle
beliefs.htm
Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Influence and Achievements. TATE Gallery of
London. http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group_influenc
eachieve.htm
Goodwin, Crowford D. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community. History of
Political Economy. 43(1). 59-82.
Samantha Mussels. In the Shadow of Bloomsbury: Representing Vanessa Bell and Dora
Carrington in the Writing of Art History. Ontario: Queens University, 1999.
Wolff, Janett. English Art and Principled aesthetics. A companion to British Art: 1600 to
the Present. Ed Dana Arnold and David Peters. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013.
15Samantha Mussels. In the Shadow of Bloomsbury: Representing Vanessa Bell

and Dora Carrington in the Writing of Art History. Ontario, Queens University,
1999. 1-2, 10, 34-38.

The Vorticism Group

The Vorticists are the British avant-garde group which was formed in London in 1914 by
the artist, writer and polemicist Wyndham Lewis16 and members of the Rebel Art Center. Its
production included painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photographs17. Their
main objective was to produce a new living abstraction that expressed their sense of the
dynamism of the modern world18. Their most famous collaborators were the sculptors Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, the writers
Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme and the poet T. S. Eliot19.
The arrival of Vorticism was announced, with great enthusiasm and militant defiance, in a
manifesto published in the first issue of Blast magazine of which Lewis was the editor.
Vorticism was seen by Lewis as an independent alternative to Cubism, Futurism and
Expressionism, although many have also described the groups art as an expressionistic
Cubism and Futurism20, as a blurring the edges between these concurrent modern art
movements with a synthesizing approach21. With the help of Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska and
others, Lewis used the opening manifesto pages of Blast to launch an uninhibited attack on
a wide range of targets. The Vorticists wanted to destroy the lingering traces of the
16 Mark Antiff. The Vorticist I: Drawing the Vortex. Tate Etc. Issue 22, 1 May
2011. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/drawing-vortex
17 Richard Cork. Vorticism. Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, 2009.
http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10964
18 Mark Antiff. The Vorticist I: Drawing the Vortex. Tate Etc. Issue 22, 1 May
2011. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/drawing-vortex
20Richard Cork. Vorticism. Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, 2009.
21 Rod Rosenquist. London, Literature and Blast: The Vorticist as Crowd
master Flashpoint Magazine. May, 2010.
http://www.flashpointmag.com/blast.htm

Victorian age and liberate their country from the past: in giant black letters, Blasts
inventive typography roared: Blast years 1837 to 1900 since a new century demanded a
more innovative art22.
The Vorticists forged their own distinctive style combining machine-age forms and
the energetic imagery suggested by a vortex. Ezra Pound declared in Blast that the vortex
is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. We use
the words greatest efficiency in the precise senseas they would be used in a text book of
Mechanics23, whereas Wyndham Lewis described it as a whirlpool, at whose heart is a
vortex of great silent place where all the energy is concentrated and there, at the point of
concentration, is stillness. It is this stillness which differentiates Vorticism from Italian
Futurism24.
Vorticist style in painting is more distinguishable than the Vorticist style within
literature. Though it is sometimes identified by literary critics, is not so easily
distinguishable from any other distinctly modernist writing 25. In their paintings, Vorticists
wanted to place the forms of machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings, and bridges in
the center26. They criticized cubism for its passive approach to its subject because it reduced
the artist's vitality and failed to represent the involvement in life which marks the truly
great and revolutionary artist. On the other hand, although they praised futurism for their
25Rod Rosenquist. London, Literature and Blast: The Vorticist as Crowd

vivacity27, they also criticized it for making their paintings too melodramatic and
spectacular, besides being undigested and blurring movement in their attempts to depict the
sensation of speed. In contrast, Lewis and his allies sought clarity of definition, enclosing
their forms with strong contours that often gave Vorticist pictures an almost sculptural
solidity28.
The containing line was a crucial element in Vorticism; even when the compositions
took on an explosive force that threatened to burst the bounds of the picture-frame, the
harsh lucidity of Vorticist design ensured that order prevailed. Familiarity with the results
of the Industrial Revolution made the Vorticists view the machine world with far less
excitement than the Futurists29. Their undoubted involvement with the age of
mechanization was coupled with an awareness of its darker side. Vorticist images possess a
cool, clear-cut consciousness of the impersonal harshness of the 20th-century world, and in
this respect they prophesy the destructive machine power that became so horrifyingly
evident in World War I30.
From 1914 to 1916 they produced an impressive range of images, which were
exhibited in the June 1915 Vorticist Exhibition at the Dor Gallery London. The members
that participated were Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska,
William Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth. However, soon after that
Gaudier-Brzeska died in the war and most of the other Vorticists had been sent away on
active service. The whole context of pre-war experimentation was dispersed by the
destructive power of mechanized warfare, which persuaded most of the former Vorticists to
27 Rod Rosenquist. London, Literature and Blast: The Vorticist as Crowd

pursue more representational directions thereafter31. In addition, the outbreak of the war, a
little over a year later, changed tastes; aggressive tactics in the art world seemed not only
trivial but also as bad taste32. By 1920 even Lewis was obliged to admit that the movement
was dead33.
The short-lived Vorticist movement was often seen as a predominantly masculine,
affair, but the work of the women members, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders was
equally compelling and innovative. Dismorr and Saunders were as thoroughly trained, and
could lay claim to as much professional recognition, as the other founding members of the
Vorticist group. Dismorr had studied at the Slade Academy of Arts and at the Atelier la
Palette in Paris under Jean Metzinger and JD Fergusson, and exhibited in Paris and in
London. Saunders had studied for three years with Rosa Waugh (Slade-trained and a former
pupil of Gwen John), before briefly attending the Slade and later the Central School of Arts
and Crafts. She exhibited in London and Paris from 1912, and was favorably noticed in
reviews by Roger Fry and Clive Bell34. When the first issue of Blast was released in July
1914 both of them signed the manifesto and were actively participating in the creative
process, but were always seen as marginal figures, even by the other members of the group
due to their gender35.
32Rod Rosenquist. London, Literature and Blast: The Vorticist as Crowd
34 Brigid Peppin. The Vorticist I: Women that a Movement Forgot. Tate Etc.
Issue 22, 1 May 2011. http://www.tate.org.uk/contextcomment/articles/women-movement-forgot
35Women Vorticists: Dismorr, Saunders and the Female Legacy. The Bight
Old Oak. March, 2013.
http://thebrightoldoak.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/women-vorticists-dismorrsaunders-and-the-female-legacy/

Bibliography:
Women Vorticists: Dismorr, Saunders and the Female Legacy. The Bight
Old Oak. March, 2013. http://thebrightoldoak.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/women
vorticists-dismorr-saunders-and-the-female-legacy/
Peppin, Brigid. The Vorticist I: Women that a Movement Forgot. Tate Etc. Issue 22, 1
May 2011. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/women-movement
forgot
Antiff, Mark. The Vorticist I: Drawing the Vortex. Tate Etc. Issue 22, 1 May 2011.
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/drawing-vortex
Rosenquist, Rod. London, Literature and Blast: The Vorticist as Crowd master
Flashpoint Magazine. May, 2010. http://www.flashpointmag.com/blast.htm

The Ashcan School

The Ashcan School was a group of realist painters from the United States that was born
during the first years of the 20th Century. The term was first used referring to this group in
the book Art in America in Modern Times in 193436. The members did not have a political
position in particular (some of them where apolitical) or an ideal 37; what is characteristic of
this group is what they tried to portray in their work, which is real life or urban reality,
which they achieved painting the less glamorous parts of the city.
Robert Henri, who is considered to be the father of the movement, promoted the
idea of making art akin to journalism, to portray reality, what life was like in the big
cities. They believed that what was truly beautiful is what is real, and therefore what should
constitute art38. Their work consists mostly of New York landscapes, the city where all the
members of the first generation of the group moved to.
The first generation of this group consisted of Henri and his pupils in Philadelpia,
William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan; the second generation is
considered to have been formed by Henris students in New York. Although some of the
members of the group were also part of the group called The Eight, the two groups are
different; the second was formed some years after the Aschan School, and they only
gathered for one exhibition; however, this exhibition was of great impact for American art
and the Aschan group gained some fame after it was held in New York.
The group openly challenged the American Impressionists, who were heavily
influenced by French Impressionism, and the academics.39 However, critics nowadays tend
36Anonymous. Ashcan School. History of Art. http://www.visual-artscork.com/history-of-art/ashcan-school.htm
37 Anonymous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_School
38 Anonymous. Ashcan School. Art Movements.
http://www.artmovements.co.uk/ashcanschool.htm
39Weinberg, H. Barbara. "The Ashcan School". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art
History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ashc/hd_ashc.htm

to see their art less concerned with the social aspect that the group itself claimed it to be,
since they never really had the purpose to participate in a social reform or movement.
Besides, years later Social Realism appeared, which was clearly a movement that
commented on social issues; some critics see this movement as an evolution to the Aschan
School project.40
The movement may not have an obvious relation to women painting; however, there
is a subtle link between them: Robert Henri, during the last decade of the 19 th Century,
worked as a teacher in the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia, where he was very
influential. His views were influential for several women painters.
Bibliography:
Anonymous. Ashcan School. History of Art. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history

of-art/ashcan-school.htm
Anonymous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_School
Anonymous. Ashcan School. Art Movements.
http://www.artmovements.co.uk/ashcanschool.htm
Weinberg, H. Barbara. "The Ashcan School". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ashc/hd_ashc.htm
40 http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/social-realism.htm

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Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

Valle Gracia Andrea Montserrat

The Bloomsbury Group in London

3 Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

5Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Lifestyles and Beliefs TATE Gallery of

6 Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

7Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Lifestyles and Beliefs TATE Gallery of

8Crouford D. Goodwin. The Bloomsbury Group as a Creative Community.

Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

12Archive Journals: Bloomsbury Influence and Achievements. TATE Gallery of

Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

15Samantha Mussels. In the Shadow of Bloomsbury: Representing Vanessa Bell

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The Vorticism Group

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Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

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Rosete Montiel Mara de los ngeles

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The Ashcan School

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Anonymous. Ashcan School. History of Art. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history

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