Frances Spalding

"The Bloomsbury Group was a union of friends who transformed British culture with their innovative approach to art, design and society." "The Group began the twentieth century with a desire to rebel and challenge the religious, artistic, social and social taboos of Victorian England. Together they achieved 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 how they shaped the development of British Modernism. Author Frances Spalking demonstrates how this network of artists, lovers and patrons recorded one another obsessively in both words and images. She presents nineteen fascinating biographies, all of which are illustrated with paintings and intimate photographs created by members of the Group. Included in her revealing account are: Virginia and Leonard Woold, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington."--Jacket.

Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet until this authorised biography was written, she largely remained a silent and inscrutable figure. Tantalising glimpses of her life appeared mainly in her sister, Virginia Woolf's, letters, diaries and biography. Frances Spalding here draws upon a mass of unpublished documents to reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life. She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's move into the Bloomsbury Group and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists ran parallel with an increasingly unorthodox personal life that spun in convoluted threads between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her sister.

The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her. The letters - at times witty and irreverent, at times melancholy and introspective - are possibly even more revealing for their insights into the complex personality of the novelist herself. "A true letter", she insisted, "should be like a film of wax pressed close to the graving of the mind". The book contains biographical notes on the main recipients of the letters, together with background information on Virginia Woolf's life and work. Frances Spalding's previous books include "British Art Since 1900" and biographies of the painters Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. This book is beautifully illustrated with contemporary photographs and paintings, many by members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.

"It was the inspiration and determination of one individual, the sugar magnate Henry Tate, which brought the Tate Gallery into being in 1897. In this first complete account, Frances Spalding assesses the impact of successive Directors and the changing place of the Tate in British cultural life. She draws on extensive archive materials, as well as interviews with past and present Directors, Trustees and staff to tell the story of the Tate."--Book jacket.

Rhoda Pritzker (1914–2007), born in Manchester, England, was a journalist and short story writer who immigrated to America in 1940. Marrying into a Chicago-based family of financiers and philanthropists, she became an important philanthropist in her own right, supporting education, the arts, and animal rights. As a collector, she never lost touch with her British roots, assembling a singular collection of twentieth-century paintings and sculpture, much of which has been given to the Yale Center for British Art by the Libra Foundation of the family of Susan and Nicholas Pritzker. Featuring over one hundred works of art, Modernism and Memory showcases Rhoda Pritzker’s intensely personal collection displayed alongside more than fifty related objects from the Center. This exhibition aims to offer a richer understanding of Pritzker’s collecting style while highlighting developments in the work of notable modern British artists.^ Rhoda Pritzker collected most actively in the 1950s. Loyal to no school and admiring both abstraction and representation, she acquired important works by such artists as Prunella Clough, Alan Davie, Ivon Hitchens, William Turnbull, and Keith Vaughan. She also enjoyed a close friendship with the combative artist Michael Ayrton, resulting in the acquisition of a number of paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. Her collection of mostly small-scale sculptures included works by major artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth but also early works by sculptors who would achieve international recognition, including Kenneth Armitage, Bernard Meadows, Reg Butler, Anthony Caro, and Eduardo Paolozzi. Northern artists were particularly favored by Pritzker, and she amassed an artistically noteworthy selection of paintings by L. S. Lowry, Alan Lowndes, and Helen Bradley that evoke scenes recalling Pritzker’s childhood in an industrial conurbation and on the Lancashire coast.^ Five works by Lowry that Pritzker held most dear to her heart are showcased in the exhibition. These paintings depict the eerie emptiness of seaside and rural scenes and the isolated figure in which this artist, famous for crowd scenes, became interested later in his career. The exhibition juxtaposes these haunting works with Lowry’s major oil painting from 1952, The Market Place, which itself exemplifies one of Pritzker’s favorite themes—scenes of everyday life represented with a sprinkling of humor.--Yale website.