Search results for ""Author Frances Spalding""

‘A delightful introduction to an enduring subject’ – Angela Wintle, Sussex Life The most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars, 'The Bloomsbury Group' was a union of friends who transformed British culture with their approach to art, design and society.The Group began the twentieth century with a desire to rebel and challenge what they felt were the religious, artistic, social and sexual taboos of Victorian England. Together they created a revolution in British style that resonates with contemporary painters, writers, actors, designers, fashion editors and publishers. This book explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, as well as their legacy to the twenty-first century. Author Frances Spalding demonstrates how this network of artists, lovers and patrons recorded one another obsessively in both words and images. She presents twenty fascinating biographies, all of which are illustrated with paintings and intimate photographs created by members of the Group. Highlighted in her revealing account are: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington.

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Virginia Woolf’s many novels, notably Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), transformed ideas about structure, plot and characterisation. The third child of Leslie and Julia Stephen, and sister of Vanessa (later Bell), Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group: that union of friends who revolutionised British culture with their innovative approach to art, design and society in the early years of the twentieth century. Portraiture figured greatly in Woolf’s life. Portraits by G.F. Watts and photographs made by her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, furnished rooms in which she lived. Written portraits were produced in the family home; her father, Leslie Stephen, published short biographies of Samuel Johnson, Pope, Swift, George Eliot and Thomas Hobbes, while editing the first twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography. Throughout her life, Woolf, a sharp observer and a brilliant wordsmith, composed memorable vignettes-in-words of people she knew or encountered, and was herself portrayed by artists and photographers on many occasions. Illustrated with over a hundred works from public and private collections, documentary photographs and extracts from her writings, this book catches Woolf’s appearance and that of the world around her. It also points to her pursuit of the hidden, the fleeting and the obscure, in her desire to understand better the place and moment in time and in history in which she lived. In charting some of the milestones in Woolf’s life, author Frances Spalding acknowledges the seen and unseen aspects of her subject; the outer and the inner, the recognisable and the concealed.

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The Times and Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 'Superb ... Spalding is a lucid and revealing guide who wears her scholarship lightly' Sunday Times 'Spalding’s prose is as clear as a Ravilious greenhouse, her thoughts as orderly as a Ben Nicholson white relief' The Times A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics. The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names – Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer – have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of ‘the real’ was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the ‘romantic’, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

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The definitive and authorised biography of the artist Vanessa Bell. Even through the lens of the twenty-first century, the story of Vanessa Bell’s life is unorthodox. A powerful magnetic figure, Bell lived at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group and was often the core figure around which the disparate individuals of the movement revolved. Her art and designs – so often overshadowed by her sister Virginia Woolf’s writings and fame and by the interest in her own unconventional life – made a significant contribution to the history of the Bloomsbury Group. Yet, until this authorised biography was written, she has remained a largely silent and enigmatic figure. In this captivating account, acclaimed art historian and biographer Frances Spalding restores Bell to the heart of the Bloomsbury Group, illuminating an exceptional life and the free-spirited circle among which she lived.

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In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic licence of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasizing that the lack of an independent income, and the titular ‘room of one’s own’, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential. As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One’s Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf features an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding.

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WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY FRANCES SPALDING AND ERICA WAGNERA party of English people board the Euphrosyne bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, young, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society. She is a free spirit, half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer. But their engagement is to end abruptly, not in marriage but in tragedy. Published in 1915, The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf's first novel.

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