Omega workshops
Omega Workshops Ltd. was an experimental interior design workshop founded in 1913 by Roger Fry - a member of the Bloomsbury Group - in London . The workshop was closed for financial reasons after the First World War in 1919.
history
The painter and art critic Roger Fry organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at Grafton Galleries, London. The London audience was shocked and felt provoked; the press also published negative reviews. Despite the negative reactions, there was a second post-impressionist exhibition by Fry in 1912, in which, in addition to contemporary English painting, mainly works by Henri Matisse , the Fauves as well as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were exhibited. The term post-impressionism was coined by Fry.
In July 1913, with the help of his friends and co-directors Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and financial support from art lovers such as George Bernard Shaw , Fry founded the interior design workshop in an elegant townhouse designed by Robert Adam at 33 Fitzroy Square in London. Its aim was to transfer modern art to interior design and furnishing as well as book design . The design workshop consisted of an exhibition room and studios. For example, murals, glass windows, painted furniture, ceramics, fabrics, books and much more were offered for sale there. In autumn 1914 the Omega Workshops Descriptive Catalog appeared with texts by Fry.
Unlike his predecessors William Morris and the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement , Fry had no intention of achieving social reform, nor did he want to protest against the machine-making of handicrafts . His only concern was to abolish what he saw as the wrong separation between “fine and decorative arts”, that is, the fine arts and the applied arts . A model was the workshop Les Ateliers de Martine founded in Paris in 1911 by fashion designer Paul Poiret .
In addition to members of the Bloomsbury Group Fry, Grant and Bell, the young artists working for the Omega workshops included, for a short time, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the British painter Percy Wyndham Lewis . Lewis left Omega with three other employees in a dispute in October 1913, opened the Rebel Art Center in London and became a co-founder of Vorticism . Other members of the Omega workshop were Dora Carrington , Henri Doucet , Winifred Gill and Nina Hamnett . The participating artists did not sign their works with their names, but with the Greek letter Ω . They worked for Omega three and a half days a week, and their earnings were 30 shillings . This income was rather small, but reliable and important for the rather unpopular artists, as they could devote the remaining time to their art.
The buyers of the exclusive products included Maud Cunard, the mother of Nancy Cunard , Mechtilde Lichnowsky , Lady Ottoline Morrell and friends from the Bloomsbury Group Virginia Woolf , EM Forster and Clive Bell . Virginia Woolf was inspired by the Omega workshops and founded the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Sidney Woolf in 1917 , whose publications they initially set by hand and printed on a platen press . Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell designed envelopes for the publisher. In 1940 Virginia Woolf wrote a biography about Roger Fry.
Since there were too few buyers for the objects made with expensive materials, influenced by Fauvism , Cubism and Post-Impressionism, also due to the outbreak of World War I, the Omega Workshops project had to be discontinued in 1919 for financial reasons. Fry last worked alone in the Fitzroy Square workshop after Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to their Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex in 1916 .
The British government agency English Heritage honored Roger Fry and Omega Workshops in 2010 with a blue plaque that was placed at 33 Fitzroy Square.
Exhibitions
A collection of furniture and other works from the Omega workshops is on display at the Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, the former country home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. In 2009 an exhibition was held at the Courtauld Gallery in London entitled: Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19 .
literature
- Isabelle Anscombe: Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts , Thames & Hudson, London 1981
- Judith Collins: The Omega Workshops , Secker & Warburg, London 1984
- Richard Shone: The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant , Princeton University Press 2000, ISBN 0-691-04993-9
- Frances Spalding: Roger Fry, art and life . University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, ISBN 0-520-04126-7 ( partially online )
Web links
- Omega Workshops on the website of the Tate Gallery , London (English)
- The great art lexicon by PW Hartmann
- Book cover of Lucretius on Death , designed in 1917 by Roger Fry, executed by Dora Carrington
Individual evidence
- ^ Francis Spalding: Love and Colors . In: Christine Frick-Gerke (ed.): Inspiration Bloomsbury. The Virginia Woolf Circle . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 78 ff.
- ↑ Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Hrsg.): The art of the exhibition. A documentation of thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century , Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1991, p. 56
- ↑ Omega Workshops, accessed December 12, 2011
- ↑ a b Isabelle Anscombe: Arts & Crafts Style , London 1996, p. 219.
- ↑ Omega Lives: The Omega Workshops & the Hogarth Press ( Memento from June 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.3 MB), chapin.williams.edu, accessed on December 12, 2011
- ^ Tate Gallery: Bloomsbury , www.tate.org, accessed December 11, 2011
- ↑ Fry, Roger (1866–1934) , english-heritage.org.uk, accessed February 4, 2016
- ↑ Quoted from Weblink Omega Workshops
- ↑ Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19 , accessed December 12, 2011
Coordinates: 51 ° 31 ′ 20.7 ″ N , 0 ° 8 ′ 24 ″ W.