Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury, or the Bloomsbury Group, was a circle of intellectuals, writers, and artists who lived in the Bloomsbury district near the centre of London roughly between 1904 and 1940. The group had no formal programme and was held together by friendship, shared aesthetic and ethical views, and a disdain for Victorian propriety. Its members included the writer Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, the critic and art theorist Roger Fry, the painter Duncan Grant, the art critic Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the writer Lytton Strachey. In the visual arts the leading role was played by Roger Fry, who in 1910 organised in London the exhibition that introduced the British public to the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin; he also, together with Bell and Grant, founded the decorative Omega Workshops. Bloomsbury championed the theory of "significant form" and aesthetic experience and had a substantial influence on the development of modernism in British literature, painting, and design.