“Bloomsbury” is a neighborhood in London, but it is better known today as the group name for the area’s most famous 20th-century residents: a collection of British artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, whose anti-establishment views changed the course of modern culture. The members of the Bloomsbury Group promoted free verse and free love. They wrote anti-war pamphlets, showcased post-Impressionist art, and published books via the Hogarth Press, established by Leonard Woolf and his wife, Virginia. They jokingly called themselves the “Bloomsberries.”Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, a Biography, by Mark Hussey. Bloomsbury, 578 pp., $40.The linchpin of the group was Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Stephen (1879-1961), who married the art critic Clive Bell in 1907. Vanessa, Virginia, and their two brothers lived at 46 Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum, where they hosted the group’s meetings. Their house became a magnet for cultural elites such as D.H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Picasso, and others.Bell was part of this clique of trendsetters, but he was and is one of the least appreciated. Known primarily for his seminal 1914 book Art, Bell promoted modernism to a…
Read More
That funny little creature twitching his pink skin – Yahoo News
