Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913–19
Courtauld Institute, until 20 September
‘It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics,’ proclaimed Roger Fry in 1913. ‘We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.’ To this end he led a band of like-minded artists in the hand-production of decorative items for the home, operating from a three-storey townhouse at 33 Fitzroy Square that was both workshop and showroom. Among the clients were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. Among the artists working for Fry were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis and Frederick Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska and Winifred Gill. Fry insisted on anonymity, and it is now often difficult to disentangle who did what. The Courtauld has made a stimulating selection from its large and distinguished collection of Omega designs, exhibiting them where possible with examples of the actual textiles.
There are many fine things here, including a rug (probably by Royal Wilton) designed by Vanessa Bell for Lady Ian Hamilton in bold fractured lines, much more dynamic than some of the prevailing block and stripe ideas. One of the most beautiful is another rug design in greens, blue-greys and tan, attributed to Bell. Etchells was also a very satisfying designer, with a feeling for line and space that led him towards a career in architecture. Omega aimed to impose a sense of harmony on the muddle of the English interior. (That old debate: the homely versus the aesthetic.) Its chief ambition was to provide — in the words of the prospectus — ‘real artistic invention in the things of daily life’.
This enjoyable show concentrates on textiles and their designs, but there are also a number of objects on view, including one of the fabled Omega tea trays. This features marquetry wrestlers by Gaudier, who also contributes a series of terracotta cats, each differently glazed. There’s also a tea service, lamp stands, bowls and soup plates and a lot of pretty feeble stuff by Duncan Grant, except his lurid Lily Pond design on a table and screen, and rather an intriguing backcloth design for Twelfth Night. Much tougher is Wyndham Lewis’s bright design of ‘Figures in a Circus’ for a folding screen. But Lewis was too original and abrasive, and he soon quarrelled with Fry and left to form the Rebel Art Centre.
Paul Nash in Room and Book (1932) commented on the peculiar character of Omega work. ‘Nothing of the sort had been seen before, and it made a considerable impression. In ideals and principles it represented the Morris movement over again with this somewhat melancholy difference — Morris and his workers were both artists and craftsmen; Mr Fry and his workmen were just artists and painters.The result was that everything, except the textiles that were printed in France or woven in the Midlands, was painted. Chairs, tables, bowls, stools, candlesticks and couches all were animated by a fluid calligraphy of Post-Impressionist design and then varnished or glazed. But painting did not stop there…[it] invaded not only the furniture but the walls and even the ceilings of the house.’ Nash concludes that ‘the whole expression must be regarded as a temporary phase which was not altogether happy in its after-effects’. He himself was involved in the Omega Workshop, working there for four months in 1914. ‘It is very pleasant at the Omega,’ he wrote to Dora Carrington, ‘and I think I shall learn a great deal.’ He later designed his own hand-printed textiles, though these were not to see the light of day until the 1920s.
Roger Fry was high-handed, pontificating and condemnatory, and as a result was not well liked. The war artist Richard Seddon tells in his memoir, A Hand Uplifted (1963), how Margaret Nash, Paul’s wife, effectively pricked the balloon of Fry’s conceit. She took against him when he attacked her husband’s work and claimed that no good artists were ever war artists. (Nash’s first world war paintings are terrifying masterpieces: beautiful images of death and devastation.) When Fry went off on holiday to Italy he arranged for his work for the New English Art Club to be collected from his flat. By chance, Margaret Nash was able to select Fry’s submission and included ‘a ludicrous attempt at a war picture…absurd, outdated and jingoistic’. It made Fry a laughing stock among the very people he’d been criticising. So are pompous self-appointed arbiters deflated.
An additional display in Room 12 of prints and toy designs by Winifred Gill (1891–1981) pays effective tribute to the unsung heroine of the Omega Workshops who was both designer and business manager. Gill’s hand-coloured linocuts — such as the prints of flowers and the one of Glastonbury — are the best things in this display, bold in design and execution. Omega may have been a laboratory of radical design, but it was short-lived and never widely popular or profitable. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating moment in art and design history and the Courtauld covers it well.
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