Interviewed by Ally Ferraro & Guilherme Ferrari

In 1916, the painter Vanessa Bell and her friend and lover Duncan Grant moved to Charleston along with Duncan’s partner David Garnett. It was the height of the First World War and, as conscientious objectors, Garnett and Grant needed to find farm work to avoid conscription.

Charleston is something of a hidden treasure – positioned just off the A27 in a fold of East Sussex, the house is tucked behind an excess of foliage and lush trees, its weathered tiles rising among narcissus and dahlias. Reaching it feels like encountering an old friend at a party, or, perhaps, making a new one – whether you’re a frequent visitor or just discovering it for the first time, you instantly feel welcome.

Of course, this should come as no surprise: for much of the early 20th century, Charleston served as a place of escape and conviviality for a revolving cast of effervescent artists, writers and intellectuals, from famed members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster to associated figures including T.S. Eliot, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the composer Benjamin Britten. Though it served as a permanent home for its artist owners Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant from the outbreak of World War II until their respective deaths, its beauty is the result of collective creativity, filled as it is with artworks, murals and mementos that reflect an astounding group of friends and lovers, coming together to write their own shared history.

Untitled © Tim Walker Studio
Set design by Shona Heath

I have great admiration for people that are willing to risk everything for an idea. And this is what the Bloomsbury group seemed to have done. Which year did they start living at the Charleston house and who were they? They were graduates from Cambridge, right?

Yes, Charleston was the home for the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and they moved here in 1916. But Bloomsbury as a group kind of started in Cambridge at the turn of the century, the end of the 19th century. This group of young men that included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and E.M. Forster, were all coming of age just as the old century was dying, as Queen Victoria was dying in 1901.

They wanted to live their lives in a freer way than their parents had. They wanted to get rid of the hypocrisy and the pomposity of the Victorian age and to just explore their own lives and their feelings and to have more freedom. They were all privileged. They all came from wealthy backgrounds. But they still had this sense that there were restrictions on how they could live and what they could believe and on the lives that they wanted to lead.

So, one of these young men at Cambridge was Thoby Stephen, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf's brother. He used to invite his friends over on a Thursday evening, to Gordon Square, the house that he and his siblings lived in. And it was an opportunity for them to just continue the conversations that they'd started at university, but also for Vanessa and Virginia to get involved. They were unmarried at that point, so it was shocking at the time to spend so much time in the company of these young men without chaperones. These two young women hadn’t been allowed to go to university by their parents. So they had this first opportunity to actually talk about things that young women of that period weren't really supposed to be talking about, thinking about new ideas, exploring their thoughts and arguing with the men!

Virginia Woolf in particular found it very liberating because she had this incredibly sharp and inquisitive mind, but also she soon realized that most of the young men in the room were gay, and their interest in her was not as a potential future wife or for what she was wearing or for how pretty she looked. What they were interested in was her brain and for her ideas and for the arguments that she was putting forward. So it was this wonderfully open space where she could say the things she wanted to say and explore these ideas that had been percolating in her brain for years before.

Sadly Thoby died in 1907. Soon afterward, his sister Vanessa married his best friend, Clive Bell. They had two sons together, but by 1916, they were no longer living as a married couple. By then she was very much in love with another painter called Duncan Grant. He was one of these young gay men who visited Gordon Square. At the time he had a boyfriend, a writer called David Garnett. In 1916, at the height of the First World War, conscription was introduced by the government. The Bloomsbury group were very much against any controls imposed by the state on personal freedoms, so the government saying that you had to go and fight was something they strongly objected to and they also objected to the war on principle.

So Duncan Grant and his lover, David Garnett, were both conscientious objectors and they needed to contribute to the war effort or risk being sent to prison. Vanessa Bell found them this house down in Sussex where they could live. And she found them a farmer that would employ them. And so the two men, Vanessa Bell and her two sons moved here in October 1916. After the end of the war they kept the house on and it became a place for all their friends and family to visit, people like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

*Duncan Grant, Untitled Drawing, c.1946-1959, The Charleston Trust © The Estate of Duncan Grant, licensed by DACS 2022. 1117*

I would love to talk about the art exhibition that you curated ‘Very Private?’. I find it very revolutionary…

Yes, it was an exciting opportunity to show some of Duncan Grant’s very erotic, sensual and private works. He was born in 1885, the year of the Labouchere Amendment, which basically criminalized all sex between men, irrespective of any consent in the UK. It was completely outlawed and people were being sent to prison for it. It was the law that was used to imprison Oscar Wilde ten years later. So Duncan Grant spent pretty much his whole life living as a criminal. All his sexual desires were illegal at the time and if the authorities had found his drawings, they would have been considered obscene. Anybody in possession of them could have been sent to prison.

Grant had this incredibly passionate and generous nature and was very charming and had all sorts of different sexual experiences whilst at the same time being outside of the law, being a sort of a queer criminal. The drawings in the exhibition all come from the 1940s and 50s, when Grant was in his 50s and 60s. This lifetime of queer sexual experiences comes out in these drawings. And he made a lot of them. We've got 422 in this collection that were given to Charleston in 2020. But he did hundreds and hundreds, and there were little batches of them all over the place. A lot of them were probably destroyed, but thankfully many have survived.

I’ve selected about 30 of the drawings for this exhibition, that represents the wider collection and that give a sense of the different types of things Grant was interested in and the different approaches he took. Some are copies from physique magazines, bodybuilding magazines. Others are from his memory, from his imagination. And they all cover not only his sexual and erotic interests, but also his different artistic ways of working and ways of expression. You can see how he has considered the arrangement of the bodies and the limbs and the composition within the paper. They're definitely the work of an artist.

With the exhibition I wanted to show some of the works, give people the first opportunity to see them. But we also wanted the exhibition to engage with lots of different people, and we thought it was an excellent opportunity to commission a group of artists to make responses to those works and to broaden its appeal and increase the amount of voices within the room.

You worked with many artists?

We've been working with Ajamu X, who’s a Black British photographer. He's very interested in Black queer bodies and placing those bodies within institutional and archival spaces where they've been previously lacking or lost. He was really interested in Grant’s works that included interracial couples and groupings. Grant had a lot of Black lovers and friends.

Ajamu’s models echo the poses of Grant’s subjects across 12 really massive photographs. He was imagining what would happen when Grant is absent, when these Black friends are together, what would they be doing, who would they be loving? So there are groups of figures in wonderfully tender and very sensual poses. All of the models faces either hidden or lost in the composition, they are anonymous figures, reflecting the way that these figures are kind of anonymous in history, that it's quite difficult to find the actual material, the evidence of them being there, but they were there. They are the first thing you see when you go into the gallery, these 12 massive photographs in black and white that fill this whole wall and a real strong statement of placing Black queer sexuality right at the forefront of the exhibition.

Another artist we have been working with is Tim Walker. He knew Charleston already. He did a really wonderful photoshoot in 2016 for Italian Vogue. He also knew the history of the house and Duncan Grant, and he was really interested when he found out about the drawings. So he came and looked at those and he recreated certain scenarios from the drawings within his studio. He used quite a small studio and the photographs feel quite claustrophobic.
But he was also fascinated by one of the drawings in particular. Duncan Grant would draw on any paper that would come to hand. So there were sketchbooks. There's also the backs of letters, and one of them is on the back of a shopping list. So a list of things, food he needed to buy. And so he’s taken this idea of that intersection between the artistic and the erotic with the mundane and everyday. So he created in his studio these scenarios, which were very domestic but very sensual and very erotic. And he's taken those photos and then he stuck them onto these big, big boxes. So we have a pile of five wooden boxes with the photographs all the way round. You get this sort of fractured, kaleidoscopic feel. You can't actually quite see all photos all at once. You see bits of the photos, kind of like when you're flicking through 400 drawings and you think, oh is that a leg or an arm or whatever? It's reflecting that experience.

We also commissioned Kadie Salmon. She uses old fashioned film and she will take repeat exposures using herself as the model, and then she will hand color the prints afterwards. And it creates this kind of almost ethereal and very dreamlike response. She made two images at Charleston, one in the Studio in the house, and one in the garden. Within each photograph you see her captured three times. She's sort of interacting with herself in a very sensual way.

The artists Somaya Critchlow, Harold Offeh and Alison Wilding also created works in response which are featured in ‘Very Private?’.

*Duncan Grant, Untitled Drawing, c.1946-1959, The Charleston Trust © The Estate of Duncan Grant, licensed by DACS 2022. 1295*

Kim Jones featured works by Ducan Grant on his Summer 2023 collection for Dior menswear, can you tell how that came about?

Kim has loved Bloomsbury for a long time. He visited Charleston when he was a teenager and fell in love with it and the Bloomsbury group. It’s a real source of inspiration for him. His recent collection is specifically inspired by Duncan Grant and Charleston. When you come to Charleston you visit this very physical place, full of the artists’ work, their textiles, their ceramics etc, but you also get a place full of ideas.

I think what appeals to Kim is not only the revolutionary way that people led their lives but also the juxtaposition of ideas and objects within the house, which is really refreshing and always sparking new interests and new conversations. He's an avid collector of Bloomsbury works and has a wonderful library of books, as well as paintings and furniture. And he always wants to support Charleston in any way possible. I think one of the things we do at Charleston is looking to see how the work that the Bloomsbury group was doing 100 years ago is relevant now. The issues they were dealing with are still very contemporary.

Darren Clarke, The Charleston Trust Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions, for French Fries #6 The Traveller

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