Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean; is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister; Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis; Woolf herself said; "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven; I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group.In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends; Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury groups frequent sojourns to France; the artists and writers they met there; and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters; memoirs; and photographs; the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf; Clive Bell; David Garnett; E. M. Forster; Lytton Strachey; Dora Carrington; and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France; from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry; Duncan Grant; and Vanessa Bell; to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny; the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey; Julian Bell; and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics; to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse; Pablo Picasso; Gertrude Stein; Andre Gide; Jean Marchand; and many others.Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France; that France was their anti-England; a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.
#4401759 in eBooks 2008-06-23 2008-06-23File Name: B007MA9B5G
Review
