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In Full Bloom

By Marcella F. Veneziale

Published: December 1, 2008
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Courtesy Julie Magura, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Bloomsbury Blossoms: Vanessa Bell’s "Still Life of Flowers in Jug" (1948–50)


Courtesy Julie Magura, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Roger Fry’s "Paper Flowers on a Mantelpiece" (1919)

“A Room of Their Own,” an exhibition of works by the Bloomsbury group—an alliance of early 20th-century British artists, writers and economists who rebelled against strict Victorian culture and earned a reputation for radicalism—opens on December 18 at Duke University’s Nasher Museum, in Durham, North Carolina. Marking the 100-year-anniversary of the group’s founding, the show, jointly curated by the museums at Duke and Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, illuminates America’s reaction to the controversial posse. “Americans mostly come to Bloomsbury through literature,” says the Cornell curator Nancy Green, pointing to the authors Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster as two of the movement’s most widely recognized proponents. Works on display include everything from paintings, such as Roger Fry’s Head of a Model, 1913, to furniture, books and works on paper. The objects, many from private collections, date from 1910 through the 1970s and have never been publicly exhibited. 

"In Full Bloom" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.

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