Design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group
Plate with an Omega design33 Fitzroy Square, London (from 1929 to 2003 the London Foot Hospital)
The Omega Workshops Ltd. was a design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group and established in July 1913.[1] It was located at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, and was founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos.[2] The Workshops were also closely associated with the Hogarth Press and the artist and critic Roger Fry, who was the principal figure behind the project, believed that artists could design, produce and sell their own works, and that writers could also be their own printers and publishers.[3] The Directors of the firm were Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.[1]
Fry aimed to remove what he considered to be the false divisions between the decorative and fine arts, and to give his artist friends an additional income opportunity in designing furniture, textiles and other household accessories. Fry was keen to encourage a Post-Impressionist influence in designs produced for Omega. However, Cubist and Fauvist influences are also apparent, particularly in many of the textile designs.
To ensure items were bought only for the quality of the work, and not the reputation of the artist, Fry insisted works be shown anonymously, marked only with the letter omega. The products were in general expensive, and aimed at an exclusive market.
Designers and manufacturers
Furniture created by Roger Fry for the Omega Workshops, on display in 2009.Nina Hamnett painted by Roger Fry, 1917, in a dress designed by Vanessa Bell and made at the Omega. The shoes may also be from Omega and the cushion on the chair is covered with 'Maud' linen, also by Bell.
In addition to offering a wide range of individual products, such as painted furniture, painted murals, mosaics, stained glass, and textiles, Omega Workshops offered interior design themes for various living spaces. A commission was taken to decorate a room for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, and an illustrated catalogue, including text written by Fry, was published in autumn 1914.
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant produced designs for Omega, and Wyndham Lewis was initially part of the operation. Lewis, however, split off at an early stage, taking with him several other participants to start the rival decorative workshop Rebel Art Centre after accusing Fry of misappropriating a commission to decorate a room at the Ideal Home Exhibition in the autumn of 1913. In October 1913, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth and Cuthbert Hamilton announced their resignation from Omega in a letter, known as the 'Round Robin', to its shareholders and patrons. This letter contained accusations particularly against Fry, criticising the workshop's products and ideology. This split led to the formation not only of the Rebel Art Centre, but also of the Vorticist movement.
Most manufacturing for Omega was outsourced to professional craftsmen, such as J. Kallenborn & Sons of Stanhope Street, London, for marquetry furniture and Dryad Limited of Leicester for tall cane-seat chairs.[4] A company in France was used to manufacture early printed linens.
In the autumn of 1913 Fry, who also created the designs for Omega's tall cane-seat chairs, started designing and making pottery. After he considered book design and publishing in July 1915, the superintendent of printing at Central School of Arts and Crafts collaborated with Omega in designing four books that were later outsourced for printing. The management of the Omega Workshop was passed to Winifred Gill from 1914 as the men started to become involved in the First World War.[5]
The range of products continued to increase throughout Omega Workshops' six-year existence, and in April 1915 Vanessa Bell began using Omega fabrics in dress design, after which dressmaking became a successful part of the business.
Edward Wolfe worked at the Omega Workshops, hand-painting candle-shades and trays, and decorating furniture. Wolfe, who died in 1982, was one of the last of the Bloomsbury painters.
In January 1918, Omega were commissioned to design sets and costumes in the Israel Zangwill play Too Much Money.
Closure and legacy
Omega closed in 1919, after a clearance sale, and was officially liquidated on 24 July 1920. A series of poor financial decisions and internal conflicts all contributed to its decline. At the time of its closure, Fry was the only remaining original member working regularly at the workshop. Despite this, Omega became influential in interior design in the 1920s.
A revival of interest in Omega designs in the 1980s led to a reassessment of the place of the Bloomsbury Group in visual arts.
The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Percy Wyndham Lewis was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.
Vorticism was a London-based modernist art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. The movement was partially inspired by Cubism and was introduced to the public by means of the publication of the Vorticist manifesto in Blast magazine. Familiar forms of representational art were rejected in favour of a geometric style that tended towards a hard-edged abstraction. Lewis proved unable to harness the talents of his disparate group of avant-garde artists; however, for a brief period Vorticism proved to be an exciting intervention and an artistic riposte to Marinetti's Futurism and the post-impressionism of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops.
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets, and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ...In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
The Ideal Home Show is an annual event in London, England, held at Olympia. The show was devised by the Daily Mail newspaper in 1908 and continued to be run by the Daily Mail until 2009. It was then sold to events and publishing company Media 10.
Charleston, in East Sussex, is a property associated with the Bloomsbury group, that is open to the public. It was the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is an example of their decorative style within a domestic context, representing the fruition of more than sixty years of artistic creativity. In addition to the house and artists' garden, Charleston hosts a year-round programme of Bloomsbury and contemporary exhibitions in a suite of galleries designed by Jamie Fobert Architects which opened in September 2018. Two restored barns are home to The Threshing Barn café and The Hay Barn where events and workshops are held throughout the year. The outer studio at Charleston hosts a permanent display of Bell and Grant's Famous Women Dinner Service, and there is also a shop selling Bloomsbury-inspired art, homeware fabrics, fashion, books and stationery.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov was a Russian avant-garde painter who worked with radical exhibitors and pioneered the first approach to abstract Russian art. His lifelong partner was fellow avant-garde artist, Natalia Goncharova.
Events from the year 1913 in art.
Angelica Vanessa Garnett, was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness (1984), an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
Álvaro Guevara Reimers was a Chilean-born painter, based in London and loosely associated with the Bloomsbury set.
Edward McKnight Kauffer was an American artist and graphic designer who lived for much of his life in the United Kingdom. He worked mainly in poster art, but was also active as a painter, book illustrator and theatre designer.
Cuthbert Hamilton (1885–1959) was a British artist associated with the Vorticist movement and later with Group X. He was one of the pioneers of abstract art in Britain.
Richard Shone is a British art historian and art critic specializing in British modern art, and from 2003–15 was the editor of The Burlington Magazine.
Winifred Gill 1891–1981, artist, social reformer and craftswoman. Her extensive correspondence is an important source of information about the Omega Workshop, 1913–1919, set up by Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group.
33 Fitzroy Square is a townhouse and former hospital on Fitzroy Square in the Fitzrovia district of London, England. It is most famous for having been the location of Omega Workshops, but it also housed the London Foot Hospital and School of Podiatric Medicine from 1929 to 2003, before being converted back into a single house. It is now used primarily as an events venue.
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