Rollins Museum of Art

Mark your calendar for this exclusive opportunity as Dr. Wendy Hitchmough hops across the pond to dive into details from her new biography Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical. Emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, Dr. Hitchmough presents new scholarship on works in the Rollins Museum of Art Collection by artists Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, centering Bell, as a key figure in the development of modernism. Bell, her sister Virginia Woolf, and Fry were pivotal members of a consortium of painters, novelists, and critics who pioneered a distinctive visual style and a shift in cultural and societal attitudes. They were known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Join us Tuesday, November 18 at 6pm as Rollins Museum of Art hosts Dr. Hitchmough as a Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar corresponding with Portrait of a Movement: A New Approach to the Bloomsbury Group. This exhibition celebrates the U.S. debut of Roger Fry’s Summer in the Garden (1911), a significant portrait of Vanessa Bell, and foregrounds the exchange of ideas, illuminating the group’s dynamic dialogue with European modernism, gender, domesticity, and one another. At its core, Bloomsbury was a conversation—an artistic and intellectual dialogue that blurred the boundaries between painting and literature, criticism and creation.

Attend in person to view works by Bell, her sister Virginia Woolf, artists Duncan Grant and Walter Richard Sickert among others from the Rollins Museum of Art Collection, or participate via livestream then take a stroll through the gallery via our virtual view. There will be a Q & A with Dr. Hitchmough following this lecture.

Learn more about this engaging exhibition