Inventing Post Impressionism/Charleston
Yesterday I went to Charleston near Lewes for the exhibition Inventing Post Impressionism.
The connection between Charleston and Post Impressionism is the art critic Roger Fry who invented the term.
Charleston was the home of Vanessa and Clive Bell and the Sussex outpost of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf lived and died nearby and Clive Bell and Roger Fry organised two exhibitions of Post Impressionism at the Grafron Gallery which drew thousands.
After fusty Victorian art, the patrician Royal Academy and the National Gallery, which promoted Italian Renaissance art, these two exhibitions introduced artists like Edouard Vuillard, Manet – and especially Paul Cézanne – to an eager art public.
The famous economist Maynard Keynes visited Charleston regularly and once dropped a Cezanne still life of fruit at the entrance.
Thankfully it was retrieved and is one of many superb pictures on view alongside a glorious Eugene Boudin picture of the beach at Touville.
There are also paintings by Renoir, Leger, Bonnard, Pissarro, Redon and Van Gogh and – though confined to two rooms – well worth a visit.
The two conspicuous artists absent were Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.
Many of the pictures were lent by the Barber Institute in Birmingham but probably originated in Charleston.
The Bloomsberries were a colourful lot of which Dorothy Parker observed:
“They lived in squares but had relationships in triangles …”
No doubt the American humourist was thinking of the brief sexual liaison between Vanessa Bell and gay painter Duncan Grant which produced a daughter Angélique who married Grant’s lover Bunny Garnett.
Grant is generally regarded as the best painter of the Bloomsberries and his retrospective is coming up this year.
