A challenge for anyone confronting the art of the Bloomsbury Group is the way the magnetic chaos of their interpersonal drama can overpower the art. At Pallant House, the curators strike a tenuous balance between the two. Though Dora Carrington, who preferred to be known simply as Carrington, wasn’t part of Bloomsbury’s inner circle, she enthusiastically lived their ethos.
Bisexual and fond of nudity, she was infatuated with Lytton Strachey, who was gay. She lived in a menage a trois with Strachey and Ralph Partridge, and all three had regular affairs with people of various genders. She was an enchanting person, by all accounts – the sort of captivating personality it is impossible to forget. Although her life echoed the imbalanced love triangles of Vanessa Bell, Carrington was less able to flourish: her art was never appreciated and barely exhibited in her lifetime, and she had far less agency in her relationships.
This exhibition pitches Carrington’s bohemian life as utopian. But there was a darkness to it, too. Strachey manipulated Carrington’s infatuation with him throughout their relationship, keeping her close but never really giving her what she wanted. She killed herself two months after his death. The other men and women she had relationships with had their own issues, especially Partridge, whom she married in an effort to keep the trio together but who was never really committed to her. A swirl of people in her orbit were obsessed with her, notably the artist Mark Gertler, but none of them seemed to fulfil her needs. Radically modern, perhaps, but also dysfunctional.
That darkness is not addressed by this exhibition, nor the other undercurrent of Bloomsbury stories: class. How could Carrington live this apparently idyllic life in the countryside? How could she afford to make art that she never exhibited? She, Strachey and Partridge all came from families whose wealth was made during British rule in India. The class and colonial element of their story is perhaps assumed by viewers, but without explicit engagement in it, the narrative is lacking in complexity.
Some of Carrington’s work is exceptional. Her funky landscapes, characterised by strangely high horizons that make the viewer feel very small, are beautifully painted. Her figurative works are clearly in conversation with the other figures of British Modernism painting in the same style, especially Gertler, and her early nudes made while a student at The Slade School of Fine Art are stunning. Then there are her “tinsel paintings”, made of foil candy wrappers pressed against glass in a unique process that is distinctly Victorian. They are totally kitsch – and fascinating in their weirdness.
Yet the exhibition fails to really make the case for why we should treat this work as seriously as Gertler’s or Bell’s. The intimacy of Carrington’s paintings, and the adjacence to craft of her tinsel works, mean they need to be hung in spaces that suit them, treated with the distinction they deserve. Carrington’s work is unmistakably domestic. It is small in scale and depicts places and people she loved, as the curators point out. But it’s hung in big galleries that draw attention to its smallness as if it is a fault.
Carrington’s story is both fascinating and relevant to the history of British Modernism. It deserves to be told. But here, the tension between a glossy retelling of her life and an unsympathetic hanging of her work makes it hard to fully appreciate its value.
• Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is at Pallant House, Chichester, from 9 November to 27 April
