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It's class time on a characteristically hot afternoon in early September, and Craufurd Goodwin, now in his forty-sixth year on the Duke faculty, is musing about themes that, to most of his economist colleagues, would seem uncharacteristically eclectic. He tells his students that history and sociology reveal certain qualities in creative communities. A creative community needs a founding document. It needs a lightning-rod personality. And it needs to coalesce around an event that's a little rebellious, a little dangerous.
For Goodwin Ph.D. '58, James B. Duke Professor of economics, that offbeat interest is both personal and professional. As a scholar, a teacher, and a collector of art, he's become drawn more and more into the particular creative community of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal association of friends in post-Victorian Britain. A half-century ago, one of his faculty forebears made a similar scholarly shift to Bloomsbury. That was longtime Duke English professor Charles Richard Sanders—Goodwin's father-in-law.
Cutting across creative fields, the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster in literature; John Maynard Keynes in economics; Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, in political science; G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica mocked the idea of humans as rational calculating machines and gave the group its founding document, in philosophy; and Clive Bell, in art criticism. A remarkably outlandish personality in a circle of outlandish personalities, Bell never even earned a high-school diploma, was a serial seducer of women, and filled the role, as Goodwin sees him, as the group's lightning rod of criticism and controversy.
Geographically, the group's members were clustered in the London district of Bloomsbury, in the ever-widening shadow of the British Museum, that signature of civilization. Philosophically, they valued personal relations, aesthetic appreciation, and social morality—a stance that led many of them to conscientious objection in World War I. The British Empire was fraying around the edges, while British society at its core offered a wide embrace to utilitarian thinking, along with minimal regard for aesthetic innovation.
There were several artists in the group, including Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Duncan Grant. Then there was Roger Fry, an art historian and organizer of the two Post-Impressionist art exhibitions in London, in 1910 and 1912, that introduced Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, and other "radical" painters to the English-speaking world. It was the signal of aesthetic rebelliousness that became a rallying point for the group. As chief curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Fry worked closely with business tycoon J.P. Morgan, the trustee chairman. Fry accompanied Morgan as an adviser on an art-purchasing trip to Europe; it ended badly as they disputed whether the art should find a home at the museum or in Morgan's personal library.
If they embraced Fry's high-minded aesthetic theory, the Bloomsburys, as Goodwin calls them, had as well a hard-headed, entrepreneurial dimension. They set up the Omega Workshops, allowing them to produce and sell their own paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture, and textiles. All of those works carried the collective "Omega" stamp rather than being individually signed. They also operated the Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf as a repudiation of traditional publishing standards. Hogarth published some of the earliest works on psychoanalysis along with works by the Woolfs.
Bloomsbury is the basis for a winter exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art, accompanied by a year's worth of programs—including what Goodwin believes to be the most important gathering on Bloomsbury in the U.S. Scholars of Bloomsbury will explore Bloomsbury and Keynesian economics, gender and sexuality, notions of empire, and circles of creativity. Other parts of the program will offer a theater production, a film series, and an online book chat. Goodwin is one of the key organizers. With his wife, Nancy Sanders Goodwin '58, he is also the lead lender of art to the exhibition.
The Bloomsbury artists would often paint together, says Nancy Green, the organizing curator, who is based at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. (The exhibition travels to Cornell after Duke.) "They would set up a still life or they would set up a model, and they would all sit together and paint the same theme. And you get completely different interpretations."
The Bloomsburys didn't just explore their subjects with fierce originality; they also experimented across artistic media. "They painted everything," Green says. "Nothing was sacred. I mean, they would buy furniture and paint it. They would paint the walls, paint the ceiling—everything was a potential work of art. It was almost an obsession about living with art and about enjoying art. And they didn't just paint; they didn't just make pottery. They tried everything, and if they didn't know how to do it, they taught themselves to do it. They worked on books in conjunction with writers, and the designs they came up with were revolutionary. They were creative in every aspect of their lives."
One of the early American enthusiasts for the art was Sanders, who was recruited in 1937 to supervise freshman instruction in the English department and taught at Duke for almost forty-five years. A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature, he would go on to write articles on "Coleridge as a Champion of Liberty" and, in the thick of World War II, "Freshman English for War and Peace." Toward the end of his career, he helped launch a monumental edition of the correspondence of Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian Thomas Carlyle.
In the war years, Sanders embarked on a scholarly diversion. It would lead him to plunge into the curious currents of the Bloomsbury Group.
His focus was the Strachey family, which produced two Bloomsburys: Lytton, a biographer and the oldest member of the group, and his younger brother James, who translated Sigmund Freud's writings into English. Echoing a common refrain of the Bloomsburys, Sanders saw biography as broadly revealing of humanity. Beyond that, there was an undeniable attraction, as he put it in The Strachey Family, to "talented or eccentric individuals," to the "picturesque and influential groups" in which they gathered, and to the peculiar episodes that they were immersed in, like the monument erected in India at the death of a family member's (and colonial administrator's) favorite dog, Glancer.
Sanders was notably impressed with what he saw as the deeply humanist strain in Lytton Strachey and his circle. "He and his friends at Cambridge consciously sought for what was truly important, which, for them, meant what was truly interesting," he wrote. "So far as they could, they excluded the rest. Significantly, intensity and passion are two of Strachey's favorite words. The objects to be chosen—the objects of highest value—were always those which possessed the power to intensify and impassion the mind and emotions."
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