Moments of Being

When I heard that the National Portrait Gallery were staging an exhibition about Virginia Woolf I was excited but worried too - she is my favourite writer and the concern is how do you do an exhibition of her which would include her writing as well as her personality.

 

Although I loved walking around the exhibition, the curator Frances Spalding (whose books on Bloomsbury I have enjoyed) has not really addressed that central problem of balancing the woman and her art.  That would not stop me however recommending it to anyone who admires Woolf and her work.

As you enter the exhibition you are confronted by a close-up of that extraordinary face along with a photograph of her bomb-shattered house in Tavistock Square in 1940, setting up the premise of the fragility of life.  After that it is a fairly chronological exhibition which only takes up four rooms.  This was also a bit disappointing, it gave the exhibition the air of skimming the surface.

Through the exhibition it was interesting to see the constant representations of Virginia through photographs, paintings and even sculpture.  The now-iconic Beresford photographs of the 20 year-old Miss Virginia Stephen share space with snapshots from family and friends - Bloomsbury loved to photograph itself! - and with professional photographers such as Giséle Freund and Man Ray.

Paintings of Virginia by her sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry share space with portraits of fellow Bloomsbury figures such as the artists named, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, Saxon Sidney Turner, Dora Carrington and of course Leonard Woolf.  Also included is Stephen Tomlin's haunting life-size bust of her, eyes wide with mouth open as if about to speak.

There were of course her publications: from her first novel THE VOYAGE OUT to the first Hogarth Press publications, hand-bound and printed by Virginia and Leonard, hand-written proofs as well as her great works where she wrestled the novel form into something new, something closer to life in all it's complexity.

The final room is called "Thinking Is My Fighting" and covers the growing threat of Fascism in the 1930s.  There is a drawing by Picasso called "Weeping Woman" which he donated to a fundraising event for Basque children which Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa and her youngest son Quentin had supported.  The title proved sadly prophetic when three weeks later, Vanessa's oldest son Julian was killed driving an ambulance for the Republicans in Spain, leaving Vanessa inconsolable.  Also on display is the Nazi 'black book', of intellectuals and writers who were to be arrested after a Nazi invasion, with Leonard and Virginia's names printed within.

All the way around the exhibition I felt Virginia eluding one's grasp, slipping around the far corner of the room, but here in the final room she was suddenly very close by.  Displayed in the same case as Virginia's taut, nervy letter to Hogarth Press editor John Lehmann on March 20th 1941 stating she felt her recent novel BETWEEN THE ACTS was unpublishable, was her walking stick that was found eight days later lying on the bank of the nearby River Ouse.

Facing this, framed together, were Virginia's last two letters, one to Vanessa, one to Leonard.  Although I have read these letters transcribed in countless biographies of her, to actually see them was incredibly moving and I cried as I looked at them.  Virginia the novelist, writing now for the last time to her sister and husband, the people who she loved the most.  Not writing to stretch the form or to test boundaries, just to express her love to those who would miss her the most and her apology that now she was losing herself to another of her terrible depressions she knew she could not find her way back this time.

And I thought of the last words of MRS DALLOWAY “...For there she was.”  For, finally in the exhibition, there she was.

So... where was I?

Hopefully Constant Reader you are still there.
 
It's been a while.
 
It's a funny thing but when you lose faith in what you think of things then it is difficult to think that others will be interested too.
 
So I have not shared my thoughts on this, that and t'other and have wondered what might make me start again.  That production? That film? That gig? That exhibition?
 
Well no.  Not that exhibition.
 
But this exhibition has!

 
Yesterday afternoon Owen and I had an adventure and made our way to the leafy 'burbs of Dulwich.  It's like another world!  Hard to believe it's only 20-something minutes from Brixton by bus.  I presume it's twinned with Richmond.  You know, the kind of place where you wonder how did we ever lose an Empire.
 
Which was all very appropriate as we went to see an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (I do like the use of the word Picture) which covered the years 1908 - 1922 in the artistic lives of six students of the Slade Art School: Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and, my own favourite, Dora Carrington.
 
It's not a huge exhibition but it does give you an insight into the six artists and in particular, their humanity.  Time and again your read their own comments on the changes they are living through - their struggles with what movement best represents them and in particular, the men's response to the all-encompassing impact of World War I.
 

 
I knew Carrington and, to a lesser degree, Gertler and Spencer, but it was good to get more familiar with the work of the other three, Nevinson in particular.  I had written him off as one of Wyndham Lewis' lot but was heartened to find out that they had fallen out.  His modernist works such as 'Dance Hall Scene' give way to the more, blocky woodcut-like paintings of the War years.  Along with Paul Nash's desolate paintings of the blasted Western Front, they make for sombre viewing,
 
It strikes me that Carrington is the most under-represented of the six artists while David Bomberg remains the most elusive to define.  The exhibition does leave you feeling oddly sad, as so few of them seemed to fulfil the genuine promise of their pre-war years.  Of the six, Carrington and Gertler killed themselves, Nevinson and Bomberg ended their lives in obscurity while Nash and Spencer thrived.  Spencer is the strangest case, his unique vision remains the most constant throughout the exhibition.  I wonder if this points to a reason for his more long-term success over his contemporaries.
 
Last year I had recourse to research more into Carrington's life so it was a joy to see her work again.  From her early pencil sketches - her study of Gertler is particularly fine - and a delightfully illustrated letter to Paul Nash, to her paintings, she reveals how she made the personal public.  None more so than in her hypnotic portrait of her beloved Lytton Strachey.

 
I stood looking at this picture for a long time, caught up in the intensity of her concentration, with, I don't mind telling you, a tear welling.  Entering the last room I read on the wall the entry she wrote 21 days after Lytton's death from undiagnosed cancer "Everything was for you... I see my paints, & think it is no use for Lytton will never see my pictures now, & I cry" and felt so sad.    

The exhibition is open until September 22nd so there is still plenty of time to experience it for yourselves - clicky on the image below:

Um.

It's good to be back x