Reconciling Bloomsbury's Aesthetics of Formalism with the Politics of Anti-Imperialism: Roger Fry's and Clive Bell's Interpretations of Chinese Art

This essay studies the Bloomsbury School's opposition to British imperial power and World War I, and how this opposition found expression in their views on art, Chinese art in particular. Roger Fry's troubled sense of cultural and class identity, as well as his clash with the reigning cultural orthodoxy caused him to see Chinese art, in its historical development and potentiality, as a welcome antidote to the Western model of domination. The Bloomsbury school's appropriation of Chinese art, while suggesting an alternate genealogy for British Modernism, also puts into question the use made of Chinese art by Fry.