Omega Flowers and Bloomsbury Modernism

Abstract

Artificial flowers made by Vanessa Bell and others for the Omega Workshops during the war years have received little scholarly commentary compared with the firm’s other products. This article analyzes the flowers as heirs to a Victorian tradition of artificial flower making, as innovative aesthetic objects in their own right, and as works that catalyzed an emancipatory vision of modern living, painterly style, and comparative aesthetics for the Bloomsbury artists. Bell reworked the material culture of her Victorian upbringing in a modernist idiom through the flowers, articulating a new vision of femininity. For Duncan Grant, they were both symbols of sexual nonconformity and vehicles of sensual immersion in private domestic space. And in Roger Fry’s paintings, the flowers often invite formal and conceptual comparisons between the arts of East and West, opening up new forms of cross-cultural pollination and appreciation.