8 minute read
Art History
ART HISTORY
Duncan Grant
Coinciding with the launch of two new exhibitions, RAVNEET AHLUWALIA celebrates the brave and intimate paintings of the Bloomsbury Group’s Scottish maverick
The collective power of the Bloomsbury Group left a long and lasting impression on the fi rst decades of the 20th century. This liberal congregation of intellectuals and creative types famously “lived in squares… and loved in triangles”, such were their complex, intertwined lives which played out amid the leafy residential enclaves of bohemian central London
A century on, however, while those controversial lifestyles continue to fascinate, the wide-ranging work that emerged from this hotbed of critical thinking has also lost none of its power to impress: Virginia Woolf’s novels remain loved and studied the world over for their idiosyncratic visions of urbane womanhood and English social structures, Clive Bell paved the way for abstract art with his theory of signifi cant form, and John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most infl uential economists thanks to his development of macroeconomics in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
Painting remained at the core of the group’s interests, however. Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, was an accomplished fi gurative artist, heavily enthralled to the simplifi ed forms and bold colours of Henri Matisse who she would have fi rst truly discovered, like much of Britain, via the 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. This landmark collection was arranged by another artistic Bloomsbury Group member, Roger Fry, and introduced the works of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso to the unsuspecting and rather traditionally minded British public of the time. Perhaps the most interesting and under-explored artist of the original
Duncan Grant was the most interesting and under-explored artist of the Bloomsbury Group
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTO: PRIVATE COLLECTION
BELOW The Pond, Winter, 1943, oil on canvas board, 41x51cm
TOP LEFT The Cat, Opussyquinusque, c.1932, oil on board, 23x31cm TOP RIGHT Duncan at Charleston, c.1933-'35 ABOVE The Hammock, c.1921'23, oil on canvas, 82x147cm Bloomsbury Group, however, was Duncan Grant. Amid the southern English dilettantes elsewhere in these literary gatherings, here was the only son of one of Scotland’s premier clans.
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was born on 21 January 1885 to Major and Mrs Bartle Grant at the family’s ancestral home, Doune House on the Rothiemurchus estate, about three miles from Aviemore. The Grants of Rothiemurchus were a branch of the wider Clan Grant, which still owns much of Inverness-shire and Duncan himself was the grandson of Sir John Grant, a prominent Whig MP.
Duncan’s early life was far from easy. Aged seven, he apparently had a premonition that his elderly grandfather would die the next day and remarkably it came true. “It was so easy for me to imagine my grandfather as a corpse,” he later recalled. “He was always white as wax, silent and laid out at full length.”
Money was also a worry, despite such inherited wealth. His ancestors had lived beyond their means and a third of Sir John’s estate was taken to pay off debts. Around this time, Duncan’s great aunt, Elizabeth Grant, wrote a personal memoir that was published in 1898 as Memoirs of a Highland Lady in which she laid out some of the family struggles. Interestingly, the Rothiemurchus estate website celebrates Elizabeth’s book today though no mention is made of Duncan in the family’s history – perhaps because he spent a large part of his early childhood overseas as his father was stationed in India.
While Major Grant was apparently stripped of his offi ce during this
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTOS: CHARLESTON/LAING ART GALLERY
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTO: TATE time and nearly faced imprisonment due to his debts, the family lived the comfortable colonial life in India with a number of staff. The bustling bazaars and the army’s Sunday parades provided endless visual inspiration for the young Duncan, who became fascinated by the movement and colour. When he was sent to prep school in England at the age of nine, he found comfort in his art class, spurred on by the encouragement of teachers and a number of art prizes.
A fidgety teenager, he avoided following his father into the army and instead began a period of studies, making copies of Renaissance works in Italy, attending Jacques-Emile Blanche’s Parisian atelier, and spending an unfulfilling term at the Slade.
By 1909, Grant had established his own London studio at 19 Fitzroy Square, a short walk from Bloomsbury and a place with a great artistic pedigree, given Ford Madox Brown and James McNeill Whistler had also lived on the square. It was here that Grant had begun making work indebted to Matisse and Picasso, both of whom he had become acquainted with. He achieved moderate success over the next few years, exhibiting with the New English Art Club and Walter Sickert’s fledgling Camden Town Group, while also producing designs for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, yet it wasn’t until the onset of the First World War forced a radical change of his metropolitan lifestyle that the Scottish artist’s work truly came into its own.
Grant was a conscientious objector to the war, yet, as a single man aged between 18 and 41, he was eligible for conscription after
ABOVE Venus and Adonis, c.1919, oil on canvas, 64x94cm
TOP RIGHT A linen chest painted by Duncan Grant, c.1916-'17 ABOVE RIGHT Julian Bell Reading, c.1930, oil on canvas, 80x52cm ABOVE Room with a View, 1919, oil on canvas, size unknown the Military Service Act of 1916. To avoid this, he found work as a farm labourer – a profession deemed of national importance – and Vanessa Bell arranged to sublet a 16thcentury farmhouse, Charleston, at the foot of the South Downs. By the autumn, Grant had moved here with his partner David Garnett, living alongside Vanessa, her husband Clive Bell, and their two children. It was a polyamorous arrangement, as Duncan and Vanessa gave birth to a child of their own on Christmas Day 1918.
While Charleston would become something of a rural retreat for the wider Bloomsbury Group, in those fi rst years it was a rather intense set-up, as the group worked on restoring the old house and walled garden, while trying to establish new ways of living and loving amid the complex web of jealousies and attachments. Grant’s art fl ourished, the Downs providing a natural backdrop to his elegant fi gurative work, while the backdrop of the confl ict helped inspire what the Charleston Trust has since called “a new type of war painting that replaces soldiers with fl owers, the trenches with farm buildings and the destructions of confl ict with creativity”.
Grant and Bell didn’t just restrict themselves to the page or canvas, as they applied their artistry to furniture, bed frames, fi replaces and even walls at Charleston. While also decorative, the apparent ambition was to blur the boundaries between art and life – this wasn’t just a space in which to create art but also a work of art in itself.
This period culminated in Grant’s debut solo exhibition which took place in February 1920 at the PatersonCarfax Gallery in Old Bond Street, London. The collection received mixed reviews from critics, with even Grant’s Bloomsbury cohort Roger Fry writing in The New Statesman that the artist must “amplify, solidify and deepen the expression of his vision”, yet the wider public clearly disagreed and 24 of the 31 canvases sold.
Though delayed due to the current pandemic, Charleston has just opened a centenary recreation of this collection titled Duncan Grant:
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTOS: CHARLESTON/PRIVATE COLLECTION
ABOVE The Student, c.1919, oil on canvas, size unknown
© THE ESTATE OF DUNCAN GRANT. PHOTO: PRIVATE COLLECTION 1920. It features intimate portrayals of life on the farm, from portraits of visiting Bloomsbury Group associates to landscapes dotted with cowsheds and apple blossom. One of the most striking and imaginative works is Venus and Adonis, a magenta-hued nude that apparently inspired Henry Moore's work and is now part of the Tate collection.
“In 1920 Duncan Grant was at the top of his game,” explains Dr Darren Clarke, Charleston’s Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions. “After 10 years of experimentation, he had developed his distinctive style that can be seen emerging across the paintings in this show. There is a palpable sense of freedom and energy in these beautiful, light-filled, lifeaffirming canvases, a visual freedom after the restrictions of war. These works were made at Charleston and present a secret life that the viewers in 1920 would have had no idea about. We can now appreciate these works not just as excellent paintings but as a document of this brave and experimental world that the artists at Charleston were creating.”
Showing alongside Grant’s centenary exhibition at Charleston will be a second exhibition of work by the young British artist Tunji AdeniyiJones. Astral Reflections will comprise nine large-scale figure paintings in watercolour, ink and acrylic, alongside four original prints. “The figures in my work are expressions of my identity and there is something very rewarding about using the body as a vehicle for storytelling,” says Adeniyi-Jones. “This is also something I really admire and appreciate about Duncan Grant’s work – his exploration and focus on the physical form.”
The New York-based artist was only born in 1992, 14 years after Grant’s death, yet his appearance here is testament to the continued relevance of the Bloomsbury Group painter. Duncan Grant: 1920 runs until 13 March 2022 at Charleston, East Sussex. www.charleston.org.uk Charleston – The Bloomsbury Muse runs until 10 November at Philip Mould & Company, London. www.philipmould.com
