Bloomsbury Rooms
by Christopher Reed

Duncan Grant
Michelangelesque Figures, c. 1945
Watercolor on paper
31.5" x 23.5"
Collection LLGAF

Read Reed's Book!
a review by Douglas Turnbaugh

Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. Christopher Reed. 2004. Yale University Press, USA. ISBN 0-300-10248-8. 314pp. with illustrations.

Judging this book by its cover would be misleading. The jacket illustration is a detail from The Kitchen (1914-17), by British artist Duncan Grant (1885-1978). We are shown three women, one holding a baby, but the saucy nude boy standing on the right of the painting has been cropped out (only his aesthetically beautiful elbow can be glimpsed). Does this signal a book about lesbian domesticity? And the title is slightly off-putting to non-scholars, suggesting academic gassing on arcane semiotics. So for "subculture" read "GLBTQ subculture" and you get closer to what the book is really about. Yale University Press' obfuscation gives no clue to Christopher Reed's fabulous text, super-charged with new found indicators of sexual liberation. The book is dedicated to his parents and his partner "with whom I have re-imagined domesticity." Brilliantly re-imagined!

Men's and women's gender roles, and class and social structures, were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century. An influential group of creative people, called the Bloomsbury Group, were the avant garde of the day. Beyond their aesthetic produce, they were infamous for abandoning Victorian/Edwardian rules of conduct to live out-of-wedlock and ambisexual lives. Reed elucidates how they influenced home decoration in Britain, creating spaces in which "to be modern" (in which to form non-traditional domestic relationships). Reed effectively challenges the accepted notion that these artists, with their sometimes cozy, always personal rooms, where needle-point was an art medium, drifted away from modernism. He reveals the Bloomsberries' work as an early form of modernism which celebrated personal, human freedom of expression. Later the word "modernism" came to be associated with the bare Bauhaus school, the house-as-machine-for-living style where no needle-point could be tolerated. This "modernism" relates to the fascist goal to impose rules and order on every aspect of life.

The aesthetic and ideological implications of Bloomsbury interiors were international in scope and constitute important episodes in the history of modernity. Bloomsbury modernism was later suppressed by sexist and homophobic attitudes that disparaged the decorative arts and domesticity, gay people in general, and Bloomsbury in particular. These attitudes are still prevalent and skew history. For example, Duncan Grant (his motto was "never be ashamed") was all his life an out gay man, the kind of happy homosexualist who confounds homophobes, such as art writer Frances Spalding, whom the homophobic estate of Duncan Grant chose to write his "official" biography. Her book belittles his achievements, his friends, and particularly his sexuality. One of the reasons Grant's reputation rests in limbo is that his "estate" holds the copyright for much of his work and has thus prevented many publications (and indeed delayed distribution of my biography in Britain).

Bloomsbury Rooms is an incredible book. It is a joy to read, sophisticated, witty, sexy, a delightfully thorough correction to the generally negative, and tacitly homophobic, criticism of Bloomsbury, and Duncan Grant, which preceded it. Reed's empathy for the Bloomsbury Group and his original thinking is supported by profound and impeccable erudition gained through years of dedicated research. It is very risky for an American to write about British art but the elegance and clarity of Reed's writing flows perfectly with the many letters and charming quotations he uses from his super-literate subjects, and he emerges triumphant. Christopher Reed is a great writer. Have him sign your copy of his book at the InterseXions Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, 12 and 13 November 2004 (co-sponsored by The
Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation).

P.S. As for contemporary expressions of the art of domesticity, we have the wondrous and uniquely personal loft created by our own Fritz and Charles, where amongst the many gay treasures an unambiguous painting by Duncan Grant graces a wall (see illustration).

Douglas Turnbaugh is the author of the first biography of Duncan Grant, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, 1987, and also Private: The Erotic Art of Duncan Grant, 1989. His memoir "With Duncan Grant and His Heirs," describing the obstacles he faced from the homophobic heiress, appeared in the James White Review, Summer 2003