An in-depth study of how the famed Bloomsbury Group expressed their liberal philosophies and collective identity in visual form

The Bloomsbury Group was a loose collective of forward-thinking writers, artists, and intellectuals in London, with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster among its esteemed members. The group’s works and radical beliefs, spanning literature, economics, politics, and non-normative relationships, changed the course of 20th-century culture and society. Although its members resisted definition, their art and dress imparted a coherent, distinctive group identity.

Drawing on unpublished photographs and extensive new research, The Bloomsbury Look is the first in-depth analysis of how the Bloomsbury Group generated and broadcast its self-fashioned aesthetic. One chapter is dedicated to photography, which was essential to the group’s visual narrative—from casual snapshots, to amateur studio portraits, to family albums. Others examine the Omega Workshops as a design center, and the evidence for its dress collections, spreading the Bloomsbury aesthetic to the general public. Finally, the book considers the group’s extensive participation in 20th-century modernism as artists, models, curators, critics, and collectors.

In 1905, following a period of significant ill health, French painter Georges Rouault (1871-1958) observed a scene that would have a profound influence on his career: an elderly circus clown, sat alone on the back of a wagon on the side of the road, mending his costume for an upcoming performance. Rouault later recalled how struck he was by the image of the out-of-context clown, most notably the contrast between ‘brilliant and scintillating things made to amuse us, and this infinitely sad life […]’ (qtd. in Dyrness, 1971, p. 149). From this moment, clowns and other relics of the circus became a dominant feature of the artist’s work. While Rouault is certainly not unique in giving his attention to clowns in this period, there are two issues that make his treatment of the subject unique. The first includes the scale of his output. Between 1905 and 1956, Rouault produced around 170 individual works of art about the circus, more than any other subject in his collection. The second issue concerns the artist’s method: his deliberate distortion of his subject through the use of deep hues, messy lines and broad, inky strokes. As art historian William Dyrness points out, Rouault’s aim was to show that ‘under the happily painted apparition, dwells a stranger to happiness’ (ibid., 154).

This paper will take a closer look at Rouault’s paintings in the wider context of European avant-garde arts practices, where circus and clowning were commonly drawn upon for inspiration. I will concentrate on the (un)popular status of Rouault’s clowns; that is, the way he appropriates and then dismantles the iconic image of the clown, rendering it unfamiliar and alien to its native popular audience. My analysis will consider how his images perform this unmaking for viewers, as well as the multiple readings such a distinctive aesthetic can produce.

Citation:
William A. Dyrness, 1971, Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation, Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing.

This article appraises Ben Enwonwu’s contribution to postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. To do so, it analyses his artistic responses to the political crisis that resulted in the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967–70). The article argues that Enwonwu’s varied Biafrascapes, expressed as portraits, landscape paintings and mythopoetic imagery, reflect his struggle to ethically convey the conflict’s complex realities and legacies.

In the West, Chinoiserie and Chinese export art have been studied extensively, however not until museology and modern curating revolutionised during the 1960s and 1970s, had researches in both fields fundamentally reached the breaking point in methods and approaches.
In the past 30 years, it is discernable that Chinoiserie and Chinese export art could be merged under the banner of communicating art history, and comparative researches prevailed, which made such a tendency much more apparent. In Mainland China, serious studies have been conducted since the 1980s, further discoveries and arguments were made respectively based on the previous studies in the West. Nevertheless, the two researches have not been synthesized and recognized as a distinctive subject in the field of culture studies, cultural exchange and communication to be specific with the perspective of globalisation and modernisation. This book aims at elucidating that art history has never been absolutely isolated, geographically and culturally; and since the age of exploration, China and the West has been in direct contact, within which new tastes and styles emerged and changed the course of art.
The curtain of communication between the two regions in painting was pulled up by the Portuguese explorers, who in 1514 reached China; and henceforth Westerners were able to trade with China directly. Catholic paintings were not only brought to China and gained tremendous response among the Chinese intellectuals, but also taught in Macau, where local artists started painting with Western manner. In Qing dynasty, paintings of Western manner were commissioned by the emperors for various purposes and the craftsmen at court brought the skills back to the provincial areas and reshaped the print industry.
Meanwhile in Europe, Chinese objects appeared in masterpieces, and eventually paintings of Chinese taste were identified as Chinoiserie. Chinese fashion was extremely popular at the French court in the 18th century, and soon after it became prevalent throughout well nigh all European nations not only within the circle of aristocracy but also that of the common place. That social phenomenon was regard as Chinoiserie.
More than a hundred paintings were selected to cover the time spin from 1514 to 1885, for representing the trajectory of as well as the turning points in the history of art, with degrees of profundity and accuracy. It is hoped that new discourses and approaches could be recognised and could benefit the future researches on connoisseurship, cultural exchange and social transition in early modern history of art. This book focuses on three different spheres of cultural production, namely religion, politics and economics, as a means to reconstruct the history and contextualise and de-contexualise objects of art for more reliable interpretations.
By the end of the 19th century, it seemed that Chinoiserie as a social phenomenon in art was replaced by Japonaiserie, however in 1885, Japan declared abandoning sino-centric cultural sphere and embracing European civilisation with indestructible determination, as European culture was heading to the righteous path to the modern age. Even so, the artistic communication between China and the West did not cease to exist; and imperialist powers did not wipe out the traditional Chinese concept of art, rather China and the West both entered, ineluctably, into a new era of art: modernism.
Chinoiseire and Chinese export paintings were generated throughout the history of globalication and cultural communication, and they could help reconstruct its history and brought its representation with degrees of the visualised grandiloquence and splendour.