Bloomsbury at Home. - Hardcover

Pamela Todd began her working life at Punch magazine where her duties included reviewing new art exhibitions and old established restaurants. Thus food and art combined at a formative stage. In her subsequent roles as a journalist, editor, author and, for ten years, a literary agent, the combination remained seductive and never far away. Bloomsbury at Home, her tenth book, follows on from the success of The Impressionist's Table, also published by Pavilion.

Published as a catalog to accompany a traveling exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, and The Yale Center for British Art, The Art of Bloomsbury focuses on the artists of this circle, which flourished in England during the first decades of the 20th century. In three scholarly essays, the artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and critic Roger Fry are discussed in terms of their relationship to French modernist art and abstraction. Also emphasized is the vision of ritual and ceremony and the dreamlike quality of the Bloomsbury artists' work, which had its roots in the tradition of the 19th-century high Victorian imagination. A catalog of beautiful color illustrations of all art objects in the exhibition is divided up chronologically and thematically, with each section accompanied by a short introductory essay. Highly recommended for all art libraries and academic libraries supporting programs in art. Bloomsbury at Home focuses upon the districts and houses where the artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group chose to live and how these places reflected their ideas on art and life. The Bloomsbury group's evocation of these places is illustrated through excerpts from letters, diaries, memoirs, and personal anecdotes. Physical details of the houses are described, as are the daily details of the lives of these artists. A helpful and succinct glossary of the biographies of all of the members of the Bloomsbury group is included in the front of this volume. Nice photographs and color reproductions of artworks and interiors are included. This is an enjoyable book, and although not very scholarly, it has interesting firsthand accounts of life during this period. Recommended for general art collections.
-Sandra Rothenberg, Framingham State Coll. Lib., MA
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