Charmed Circle
A new collection of rugs based on their designs proves that for the artists of the Bloomsbury group, the home was a compelling canvas.
In the beginning of the 20th century, the average British home was decorated with heavy brocades, dense floral wallpapers, and ornately carved wood furniture. The painter and critic Roger Fry, an early champion of Post - Impressionism, had an idea: Why not bring the color and innovation of avant - garde art to the domestic sphere?
In 1913, Fry founded the Omega Workshops, an atelier that doubled as a shop in Londons bohemian Bloomsbury neighborhood. He invited artist friends such as Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell to design rugs, ceramics, lampshades, and other home accessories - as well as clothes and toys - with the same free hand they brought to their bright, expressive paintings.
Fry, Grant, and Bell were all members of the Bloomsbury group, an informal circle of writers and artists who helped usher in the age of British modernism. While Bells sister, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster redefined Bloomsburys visual artists looked to continental Europe, particularly France, for inspiration, introducing England to the bold colors and vibrant compositions they found in Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. Meanwhile, the gang turned sexual convention on its ear.
Few of Omegas whimsically geometric rug designs were produced, and few of those rugs survive. Nevertheless, most of the original artwork ended up in the collection of Londons Courtauld Gallery. When Alexandra Gerstein, a curator at the Courtauld, called upon Matthew Bourne, the director of Christopher Farr, to help her decipher some notations on the sketches for an Omega - related exhibition, the idea of Farr is issuing limited editions of rugs based on five Omega designs.
Both Bourne and Gerstein firmly believed that the new versions should keep faith with the original drawings. A founding principle of the Omega philosophy was akin to the Zen tenet "first thought, best thought" - the initial marks the artist made on paper shouldnt be refined. "We made the decision not to straighten lines that had a higgledy - piggledy feel to them," says Bourne.
Fry also believed that Omega products shouldnt be signed, and the designs were marked with the Greek letter from which the workshops took their name, rather than an artists signature. This posed a difficulty for Gerstein and Bourne as they tried to identify which Omega artist made what. The five rugs in Christopher Farrs Omega collection are believed to be by Bell and Grant. Gerstein stresses that these arent strict reproductions but rather "interpretations." The original sketches had faded over the years; for the new rugs, care was taken to select colors that were in keeping with the Omega palette.
A design of lilac, teal, and orange shapes, attributed to Bell, resembles a landscape as seen from the air. Another has an irregular repeat of yellow, red, and black right angles, like a sky full of boomerangs. "The designs all look quite different," says Gerstein, "but they share a vocabulary. Theyre united by an attempt to integrate abstract forms or geometry, but more important, they share a sense of looseness, of being uninhibited by a particular tradition. Nothing is straight and multipliable. Each piece is supposed to look like a one - off."
Bell and Grant continued to marry painterly techniques with the decorative arts, as they filled their rural Sussex home, Charleston, with their murals, textiles, painted furniture, and Omega Workshops pieces. The workshops themselves closed in 1919, but their output influenced generations of British fabric designers. "Whats remarkable about the Omega rugs is that they hold up," says Christopher Farr. "Theres a freshness and freedom that artists in New York after the Second World War had, and even artists today have. You can see theres a grammar in common - the grammar of geometry and color, apart from any naturalistic reference. Thats a language were still speaking."
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