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Nasher Museum of Art presents The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections

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Friday, 19 December 2008 02:44

Duncan Grant - Helen Anrep at Charleston, 1942 - Oil on canvas, 16 X 32 inches - Private collection Image courtesy of Julie Maguera, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art 

DURHAM, NC - Nearly a century ago, the Bloomsbury group took hold of the cultural imagination, their name becoming synonymous with wit, intelligence, political activism and avant-garde art and literature in the Anglo-American world. "Bloomsbury", named for a then slightly disreputable neighborhood surrounding the University of London, was centered on writers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell; economist John Maynard Keynes; artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington; and other notable personalities who circulated in their orbit including E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Wyndham Lewis.

Vanessa Bell - 'Study for the Portrait of Leonard Woolf,' 1938. Oil on paper, 26 3/8 x 20 3/4 inches. Image courtesy of the Victoria University Library CollectionA Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury's beginnings, will examine the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970s by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators. The exhibition will include paintings, works on paper, decorative arts and book arts borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States, and will focus on how this small group of artists made its imprint on the cultural thinking of their day. On view 18 December through 15 April, 2009.

The exhibition is organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in conjunction with the Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition premieres at the Nasher Museum, then travels to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell. It will also travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

A Room of Their Own is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced in conjunction with the show. At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition and related programs are sponsored in part by the Duke University Provost's Common Fund, Duke's Graduate Liberal Studies Program, the Wachovia Foundation and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc.  Visit the Nasher Museum of Art at : http://www.nasher.duke.edu/

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