Duncan Grant British, 1885-1978

In his preface to ‘Omega and After’, Howard Grey writes, ‘At Charleston. one looks past the paintings on the walls to the walls themselves.’ It is the work which Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell produced specifically to live with, to be surrounded with on a daily basis, which he singled out as of special importance and of a ‘remarkable talent’.

In 1913, Grant, Bell and Roger Fry had set up the Omega Workshops which introduced a new air of bright colour, spontaneity and abstract form into the world of British design. The workshops closed a few years later but the spirit of Omega was recaptured in an exhibition in 1932 at the Alex Reid and Lefevre gallery entitled ‘Music Room’, with Grant and Bell. It was to be a show of their own particular taste.

Describing the opening party, funded by Virgina Woolf, Cyril Connolly, the celebrated writer and critic wrote,’ the surrounding patterns of flowers and falling leaves in a rare union of intellect and imagination, colour and sound, which produced in the listener a momentary apprehension of the life of the spirit, that lovely and un-English credo’(!)

Painted for the 1932 exhibition, the present work hung next to a painted screen by Vanessa Bell depicting music making nudes, which was acquired by Virginia Woolf.