Anyone familiar with the country houses of the members of the Bloomsbury group can hardly escape the atmosphere of liveliness preserved there. But what of the group’s unusual way of life is preserved in these now musealized rooms? Charleston Farmhouse is celebrated today as a place of spectacular late-Victorian queerness. However, it can also be read as a testament to complex webs of relationships that impacted equally on the form of life and the modes of artistic articulation. The seminar is dedicated to the ideas of dwelling as articulated and realised powerfully by Roger Fry, the constellations of inhabitants and the practices of furnishing. Based on Fry’s theoretical reflections, which he published in British Vogue in 1918, the art of furnishing and the modes of relationship of the circle that are materially reflected in it will be considered using the example of Charleston Farmhouse.

Beate Söntgen is Professor of Art History at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She heads “Cultures of Critique” (funded by DFG) and is PI of “Artistic Way of Life as Intervention” (Sonderforschungsbereich “Intervening Arts”, FU Berlin). Publications on Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Theory and Art Criticism, e.g Why Art Criticism? A Reader (ed., with Julia Voss, 2022).

The talk is part of the Paris-Cambridge-Leiden Seminar on the “Interior as a Space of Display” organized by DFK Paris, ENS Paris and the universities of Cambridge and Leiden. It consists of a series of talks at the respective institutions with the possibility to join the talks and seminar discussions also online.

Zoom-Link:
https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/65262671714?pwd=U3JPNHZya3JUcllyMzljYWY1bCtSdz09
Meeting ID: 652 6267 1714
Password: 076201