Making furniture fun again
Robert Weinberg goes to see the Bloomsburys’ short-lived foray into interior design at PostImpressionist Living: The Omega Workshops at Charleston, East Sussex
The Bloomsbury circle may have famously lived in squares and loved in triangles, but when it came to interior design, their geometry was somewhat more daring. The avant-garde set’s short-lived, experimental foray into decorative furnishings and fittings – known as the Omega Workshops – is recalled in a new exhibition at Charleston, the East Sussex farmhouse to which Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in October 1916. Here the Bloomsbury way of life found its most enduring expression, and Charleston’s new galleries are the natural setting for this fascinating and long-overdue show.
The Victorian domestic aesthetic into which the Bloomsburys were born was overbearingly cluttered and dull. So, while flying in the face of convention in every other way, they also determined to defy the dreary tastes of the age and surround themselves with beautiful things. The Omega Workshops were created by the British art critic Roger Fry. (Initially an establishment figure, his sanity was widely called into question when he staged, in 1910 and 1912, the first two exhibitions in Britain of Post-Impressionism – a term he coined.)
Fry was depressed by British design – he described Britain as “Birds Custard Isle” – and set out, through Omega, to improve things. “It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics,” said Fry. “We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.”
Fry also hoped to blur the boundary between fine and applied arts, while offering struggling artists an income. Bell and Grant joined as directors, and the likes of Paul Nash and Gaudier-Brzeska went on the payroll. Everything Omega produced or sold was intended to translate the
joy felt by its creator to the purchaser. To ensure that pieces were bought purely for their aesthetic appeal, and not any particular artist’s reputation, works were anonymised with the Omega symbol.
To buy into such pleasure was not cheap. Omega objects were aimed at arbiters of fashion and taste, such as EM Forster and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, arrives at Oxford with an Omega screen.
The range of items on show here conveys a sense of what it must have been like to step inside the Omega showrooms. Everything was embellished – from furniture and fire screens to cushions and carpets, the patterns of which could have sprung from paintings by Matisse or Russian constructivists. Most strikingly beautiful are the textiles, their repetitive patterns not so far removed from Art Nouveau or Art Deco, or the Futurists’ capturing of motion. A plain chest is transformed by paintings of flowers on its drawers; designs for a wooden toy rhino gives a taste of the Omega version of a child’s nursery.
Minaret-like candlesticks and painted vases show the influence of North Africa on the Omega stylists, while beautifully inlaid marquetry trays by Gaudier-Brzeska have a touch of the Edwardian storybook illustration about them. Duncan Grant’s 1915 signboard for the Omega Workshops vibrates with Expressionistic lines reminiscent of Kokoschka or Munch.
Fry’s own ceramics, ironically for a man keen to have fun, are plain and functional. His simple cane-backed chairs, however, anticipate the pared-back modernism to come.
Charleston’s impressive new galleries have been painted in the favoured Bloomsbury hues of deep navy and pink, vivid orange and lime. Yet despite Fry’s admiration for PostImpressionist painters, the Omega palette occasionally errs towards the earthy. Perhaps in the end they couldn’t quite shake off the English light and weather.
And, for all their graphic bravado, there’s sometimes a domestic gentility about the Bloomsburys’ work, typified by the ubiquitous white jug, cut flowers or black cat that crop up in so many paintings of the period. Perhaps it’s all become so familiar that it’s hard to discern just how radical these motifs were in their day.
Shutting up shop after six years, Fry declared Omega a failure, saying: “I think it would have succeeded in any other European country but England.” Despite his disappointment, Omega did at least give interior design a long-denied artistic credibility in Britain. It would take the Bauhaus that opened in 1919, the year Omega Workshops closed, to have a more startling impact on design worldwide. Nevertheless, this is a timely, absorbing exhibition of a brief, creative outburst from a small English elite, a century ago.