“But somebody you wouldn't forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art

Summary

Fetish or art? Ethnographic or fine arts museum? Artist or savage? Aesthetic or magical? Conscious or unconscious?—such are the many contradictions of African art. Bloomsbury's encounter with African art is deep and complex if one traces the references here and there in the experiences and writings of the various members: the African objects on the window sill in Duncan Grant's bedroom at Charleston (photo number 80, Anscombe 154) echoes in the paintings of Bell, Fry, and Grant; Omega; Fry's multiple writings on Negro art, Virginia Woolf's thoughts recorded in her biography of Fry, her diary, and her letters;1 or even in the eye-popping ivory bracelets worn by Nancy Cunard on the social periphery of Bloomsbury (Gordon 46, 86, 92). Indeed, in her biography of Fry, more than once Woolf mentions Fry's “trophy of cotton goods from Manchester suited to “untutored negresses” (RF 152) and Fry's moves from house to house with “Chinese statues, the Italian cabinets, the negro masks” and with the “negro carvings” (RF 225, 255).

And he would explain that it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a little further. He demonstrated; he persuaded; he argued. The argument rose and soared. It vanished into the clouds. Then back it swooped to the picture. And not only to the picture—to the stuffs, to the pots, to the hats. He seemed never to come into a room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands. There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes. The cotton goods made the chintz curtains look faded and old-fashioned like the Watts portrait. There were hats, enormous hats, boldly decorated and thickly plaited to withstand a tropical sun and delight the untutored taste of negresses. And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had! Under his influence, his excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, all were connected. (RF 152-53).

And certainly images of African art embedded in works like The Voyage Out (1915), The Waves (1931), Orlando (1928), and “the very fine Negress” of A Room of One's Own (1929)2—all these instances—suggest some importance attached to these artifacts of “primitive” culture.