“I’m attracted to this linen chest, from the Bloomsbury group’s farmhouse of Charleston, because each panel painted by Duncan Grant tells a different story about the artists who moved to the Sussex property to live and work a century ago.
The painting on the underside of the lid is, perhaps, the greatest talking point. Grant retells the Leda and the Swan myth – the story of a maiden who is impregnated by the god Zeus after he appears to her in the form of a swan – and completely turns it on its head to reflect some of the group’s beliefs.
It is shorn of any machismo, and Grant replaces the mighty swan with a less-than-impressive duck, while making the female figure much larger.
The drapery framing the figures reveals the inspiration Grant took from European artists such as Poussin and Raphael. These influences have resulted in a panel painting – produced during the first world war – rejecting notions of nationalism and male heroism. It also sheds a little light on why the group settled in Sussex in the first place: Grant was a conscientious objector who was required to work on a nearby farm.
Another panel depicting the lean frame of a naked male swimmer also says much about Charleston being an enclave where people could live how they wanted, even, for instance, at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It wasn’t a utopia, though – the movement was riddled with anxieties.
This exhibition charts the complicated lives and work of the myriad radical writers, artists and thinkers who were drawn to the chocolate-box villages and seaside towns of Sussex in the first half of the 20th century. Alongside the Bloomsbury brigade, there’s the art and crafts of Eric Gill and David Jones over at Ditchling, the surrealism of Edward James at West Dean and the eerie watercolours of Edward Burra in Rye.
Many have difficult stories related to them, and reflecting some of their activities to audiences of all ages can be a delicate task.
David Jones’s painting, The Garden Enclosed, for example, was produced as a present for Eric Gill’s daughter Petra to mark their engagement and it captures an awkward embrace between the two at the Ditchling workshops. There’s a dropped doll on the ground and it’s hard not to look at that without thinking about the loss of innocence.
A lot of the people who made up these groups were wealthy, with enormous houses where just about anything could – and often did – happen, but I like the idea of multidisciplinary, modernist communities operating like think-tanks. After all, this chest normally sits in John Maynard Keynes’s old bedroom at Charleston, underneath Duncan Grant’s portrait of him hard at work on The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
Interview by John Holt. Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion is at Two Temple Place, London, until 23 April
The painting on the underside of the lid is, perhaps, the greatest talking point. Grant retells the Leda and the Swan myth – the story of a maiden who is impregnated by the god Zeus after he appears to her in the form of a swan – and completely turns it on its head to reflect some of the group’s beliefs.
It is shorn of any machismo, and Grant replaces the mighty swan with a less-than-impressive duck, while making the female figure much larger.
The drapery framing the figures reveals the inspiration Grant took from European artists such as Poussin and Raphael. These influences have resulted in a panel painting – produced during the first world war – rejecting notions of nationalism and male heroism. It also sheds a little light on why the group settled in Sussex in the first place: Grant was a conscientious objector who was required to work on a nearby farm.
Another panel depicting the lean frame of a naked male swimmer also says much about Charleston being an enclave where people could live how they wanted, even, for instance, at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It wasn’t a utopia, though – the movement was riddled with anxieties.
This exhibition charts the complicated lives and work of the myriad radical writers, artists and thinkers who were drawn to the chocolate-box villages and seaside towns of Sussex in the first half of the 20th century. Alongside the Bloomsbury brigade, there’s the art and crafts of Eric Gill and David Jones over at Ditchling, the surrealism of Edward James at West Dean and the eerie watercolours of Edward Burra in Rye.
Many have difficult stories related to them, and reflecting some of their activities to audiences of all ages can be a delicate task.
David Jones’s painting, The Garden Enclosed, for example, was produced as a present for Eric Gill’s daughter Petra to mark their engagement and it captures an awkward embrace between the two at the Ditchling workshops. There’s a dropped doll on the ground and it’s hard not to look at that without thinking about the loss of innocence.
A lot of the people who made up these groups were wealthy, with enormous houses where just about anything could – and often did – happen, but I like the idea of multidisciplinary, modernist communities operating like think-tanks. After all, this chest normally sits in John Maynard Keynes’s old bedroom at Charleston, underneath Duncan Grant’s portrait of him hard at work on The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
Interview by John Holt. Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion is at Two Temple Place, London, until 23 April
