Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity

The book traces the development of Bloomsbury's domestic aesthetic from the group's influential promulgation of Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through the 1930s. In detailed studies of rooms and environments created for Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, among others, by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, and her artist colleagues Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, Reed challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from modernism. He presents their work as an alternative form of modernism, later suppressed by sexist and homophobic attitudes that disparaged the decorative arts and domesticity in general, as well as Bloomsbury in particular. The aesthetic and ideological implications of the Bloomsbury interiors were international in scope, Christopher Reed argues, and constitute important episodes in this history of modernity.
Contemporary photographs, paintings and surviving interiors, notably at Grant and Bell's Sussex farmhouse, Charleston, illustrate the remarkable creativity of the Bloomsbury domestic aesthetic.

Christopher Reed is professor and chair of the art department at Lake Forest College.