Virginia Woolf exhibition, London

Woolf Exhibition

            And then there is “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Frances Spalding. The exhibition catalogue had already been gifted us by a friend, but because of the dates for our London trip, we wouldn’t receive it till we returned home. So the show’s careful planning, the choices made for it, were discovered firsthand, except for some comments by previous viewers which we discovered beforehand, online and off.

            The conscientious organization of the material is welcome given the very full life it attempts to put on display. Then—more than life it is a question of lives, a question of visions plural. For Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell (both nées Stephen) were the prime movers of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, so that any reference to them quickly generates views of their extensive circles. Born in 1882, Woolf’s is one of those remarkable lives that link the Victorian age with the Modernist. Think postmodernist is also modernist—the Bloomsbury group of artists is also postmodernistic.

            In terms of poetry, in terms of vision, “Painting and writing have much to tell each other,” Virginia Woolf tells painting and writing. It isn’t exactly that such a connection was previously unknown. But I think the realist aspects of her fiction grow out of ideas like this. Art and science have much to tell each other, she might easily have said, given the highly allusive nature of her texts. Her references are like those I wrote about here in regard to Julio Cortázar’s “The lines of the hand” (5 March 2014). For that matter, Cortázar’s fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges translated Woolf’s Orlando into Spanish. The growing Woolfian palimpsest.

“Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision” shows the chronological development of Woolf’s art, her life, her vision, as they first touch those hazy lines between modernism/postmodernism. The National Portrait Gallery website includes a recording of Frances Spalding talking through parts of it—well worth the time, oh yes.