“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.”
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 conservative British audience, whose aesthetic views had been shaped primarily by John Ruskin, a Victorian critic who championed J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites for capturing the moods of nature.
In his new biography, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, Mark Hussey, a professor of English at Pace University, explains how Bell broke with traditionalist aesthetic ideas and learned to appreciate modern artists such as Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.
Bell’s main inspiration was the painter and art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934), at the time considered the greatest influence on art since Ruskin. Fry introduced the British to modern art, as well as to new methods of art appreciation that emphasized a work’s formal properties rather than its ability to represent truth or beauty. Bell came to espouse a controversial theory of art known as “Significant Form,” which held that a painting’s line and color should yield aesthetic pleasure apart from its subject matter. Not everyone was impressed — D.H. Lawrence thought Bell’s theory was “piffle.”
Hussey’s biography starts with a drawing that the 14-year-old Bell sent to his sister and then focuses on Bell’s interest in art and women. He builds the book mainly from bits of gossip gathered from letters and postcards by and about Bell.
The numerous quotes, although entertaining, make the book feel less like a narrative about Bell’s life and more like a first draft that needs to be shaped into a story. Hussey includes photographs of Bell but only a few images of the many paintings he references, forcing readers to search for the paintings online if they want Hussey’s full meaning.
Bell came from a nouveau riche family in wealthy Wiltshire, England. He was a middling student of history at Cambridge, where he was chastised for his sloppy writing style and overuse of colloquialisms. This style, however, made his aesthetic views more understandable to readers. After studying in Paris, where he was impressed by French modernist paintings, he returned to London, fell in love with Vanessa Stephen, and began to revolt against his family’s plebeian ways.
Vanessa refused his proposal of marriage several times before finally yielding. These rejections didn’t help Bell’s inferiority complex. Nearly everything he wrote — hundreds of articles as well as 14 books and pamphlets — Hussey suggests, was intended to cultivate favor with the Bloomsberries.
Although Bell loved Vanessa, he was an inveterate womanizer, partly because the conquests made him feel successful. Their marriage was an open one, and during its course, he had at least 13 love affairs. Even as a teenager, he had an affair with a next-door neighbor. (Vanessa was no slouch in that department either — although she had two sons with Clive, the bisexual artist Duncan Grant fathered her only daughter, Angelica.)
The most illustrious Bloomsbury member was arguably Vanessa’s sister, Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway. A groundbreaking feminist writer, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative technique shaped modern literature. One of Hussey’s subplots is the love-hate relationship between Virginia and Clive, as both vied for Vanessa’s attention. My favorite lines in this biography belong to Woolf, who, on hearing of Bell’s depression, suggested it was due to his realization that he was a fraud, something, she said, she feared in herself.
One of the book’s pleasures is its engaging look at literary luminaries such as Huxley, Eliot, James Joyce, and Henry James. Eliot especially disliked Bell because he was attracted to Bell’s lover Mary Hutchinson. The bad feelings were mutual, since Bell at first did not consider Eliot’s work poetry.
With his receding hairline, Bell was not especially attractive and felt socially inferior to his wife, her family, and his friends and lovers, who made snide remarks about him. Even Vanessa was none too charitable in her first estimation, saying, “I could no more marry him than I could fly.” Virginia called Bell “that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter” and wondered what was wrong with her sister’s eyesight. Another Bloomsberry, the historian Lytton Strachey, wrote there were several layers to Bell, with “stupidity” running “transversely through all the other layers.”
Bell had his faults, but as Hussey shows, stupidity wasn’t one of them. He was more productive than the Bloomsberries ever believed him to be, especially if you consider how difficult it was for Bell to popularize modern art to a public that expected art to present “truths of nature.” Ultimately, according to this well-researched but gossipy and willy-nilly biography, Bell may have been underappreciated, but that just made him work harder.
Diane Scharper is the author of several books including Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability. She teaches memoir and poetry for the Johns Hopkins Osher Program.
