The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University will present A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections from July 18 to October 18, 2009.
Conceived to exemplify the breadth and strength of the complex artistic output of the Bloomsbury artists, the exhibition will include over 190 paintings, watercolors, drawings, books from the Hogarth Press, and decorative works from the Omega Workshops.
“A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established,” says Nancy E. Green, the organizing curator and the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Johnson Museum, “their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits.”
The name Bloomsbury conjures up an image of early twentieth-century Bohemia, where a core group of literary friends that included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster were joined by a host of other writers, including D. H. Lawrence; philosophers such as Bertrand Russell; economist John Maynard Keynes; and poets like T. S. Eliot. But Bloomsbury was much more richly patterned and complex than even this eminent list suggests. A group of fine artists, including Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, critic and painter Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey’s talented cousin Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington, Strachey’s longtime companion, formed the nucleus of visual Bloomsbury.
Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women’s rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. The exhibition, by examining the group’s responses to these issues, provides a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today.
A Room of Their Own is accompanied by a complete exhibition catalogue, distributed by Cornell University Press, with essays by leading Bloomsbury scholars: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography, Dartmouth College; Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Exeter in Devon, England; and author of Carrington: A Life; Benjamin Harvey, Assistant Professor of Art History, Mississippi State University; Mark Hussey, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Pace University; and Christopher Reed, Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture, The Pennsylvania State University, who coedited the catalogue with curator and contributor Nancy Green.
The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, located on the campus of Cornell University, is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. The Museum is completely accessible for mobility-impaired visitors, and a wheelchair is available in the lobby. Metered parking is available in the lot next to the Museum. For more information, please call 607 255-6464. Visit the Museum’s website at www.museum.cornell.edu. The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is a proud member of Ithaca’s Discovery Trail: www.DiscoveryTrail.com.
Image: Vanessa Bell (British, 1879-1961), Virginia Woolf, ca. 1912. Oil on paperboard. Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art.
