Duncan Grant’s sensual art brings Bloomsbury Group queerness out of the closet

“Queer-bashing Bloomsbury remains a legitimate national pastime,” said author Simon Watney in 2005. He was referring to scorn at the complicated pansexual relationships between members of the early 20th-century artistic-intellectual Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

Seventeen years later, the tides of opinion could not have turned more decisively. Tate Britain’s 2017 Queer British Art show, commemorating 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales, featured “Bathing”, a 1911 work by the Bloomsbury Group’s Duncan Grant (1885-1978), celebrating lithe, naked young men straining against the pressing rhythmical lines of a lake’s waters.

“Bathing”, however scandalous contemporaries found it, was for public display. The portfolio of Duncan’s sexually explicit drawings now on show at Charleston, the house near the south coast of England where Grant lived with Vanessa Bell and, sometimes, David Garnett — both his lovers — was purely for private consumption. “Very private”, in fact, Grant wrote on the folder of drawings he gave to fellow artist Edward Le Bas in 1959. With this exhibition, the cobwebs have definitively, proudly been blown out of Charleston’s closet.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say Charleston ever had a closet: it was intended as a haven of sexual, emotional and artistic freedom. Grant and Bell decorated most of Charleston’s interior surfaces, from the dining room’s block-printed charcoal walls to tables, chests and bedsteads. Everywhere Grant’s style is visible — simplified forms, flat planes, bold colours — whether in two statuesque naked women holding a trompe l’oeil mirror above the fireplace or an acrobat on a door panel tumbling through space.

Still, even in this liberal context the drawings, mainly of male pairs from the late 1940s and 1950s, made on shopping lists, cigarette packets and bank letters, are explicit — mostly unreproducibly so for a newspaper. There are swift pen drawings of a coupling, the active partner raising a bent knee for leverage; fetish gear from bathing caps to fishnet stockings; satyrs, intersex figures and what can only be described as a sexual conga line. They are athletic, sure, but also curious and tender. They are not unaccomplished either, sharing the fluid flatness of Grant’s public works (with a heavy dose of Matisse circa “The Dance”), figures neatly tinted in colour washes, faces not blank but convincingly characterised.

The virtue of showing these works is that they prevent the Bloomsbury Group from fading into bloodless figures, genteel aesthetic types who painted the headboards of their single beds in Charleston but rarely got around to making them rock. Bloomsbury queerness tends to be typified by Forster’s elegiac novel Maurice, published only posthumously and far more decorous than any of his or his fellow Bloomsburies’ actual affairs; Grant’s drawings give them their life back.

Desire is a powerful driver of art, and who gets to be desired and how are not nugatory questions. For example, Grant often depicts black men in his erotic drawings, but they tend to be faceless or subservient. That may reflect contemporary power dynamics and social structures, but it doesn’t need to be the last word either. That is why Charleston has commissioned a diverse range of contemporary artists to respond to Grant’s pictures, on show alongside them.

Ajamu X, a photographer who celebrates black queer bodies and desire, seeing this as a political celebration, has translated Grant into his own language, redressing the racial stereotyping. Grant’s pair of lovers, one with cocked leg, reappear as black men in a black and white photo, light gleaming off buttocks and thighs, assertive and also a little ironic. (It might somewhat undermine Ajamu’s emphasis on pride that all his models avert their faces.)

Similar to Ajamu, photographer Tim Walker — best known for his fashion images — starts with Grant’s surfaces, but takes them in an uncannier direction. Some of Grant’s white figures have relatively plain Caucasian skin tones, but others tend to pale pink and orange, while his black men can end up shades of purple; Walker has dyed his nude young men, in their complex conjunctions and chains of limbs, with these shades. It would be a purely brash statement if Walker had not taken it further into the surreal: inspired by one of Grant’s drawings occupying a shopping list, he has placed these men inside that list, with eggs and oranges, chocolate and cornflakes scattered around, sometimes at disproportionate scale or rendered as 2D images. An empty milk bottle in the foreground distorts a couple having sex in the rear.

The show’s curation can over-reach itself. Somaya Critchlow has contributed light, sensuous watercolours of black female nudes, all the more alive for their delicacy; the tenderness is more refined, less raw than in Grant’s drawings. But to speak, as the catalogue does, of Critchlow “reclaiming a place for female Black bodies” among Grant’s drawings seems like an error: not everyone needs to be present in every artwork.

These contemporary responses will grab most of the visitors’ attention — there’s more nakedness than a Danish nudist colony’s AGM — but it is the pictures in a small gallery across the entrance hall that subtly illuminate the heart of Grant’s work and their enduring value. Portraits of five men describe the drawings’ provenance: Grant gave them to Le Bas, son of a steel magnate, who left them to gallerist Eardley Knollys, who gave them to his friend Mattei Radev, a Bulgarian refugee, who bequeathed them to his civil partner, Norman Coates; Coates gave them to Charleston in 2020.

It’s more than a chain of custody: it’s a history of homosexuality in 20th-century Britain, an Alan Hollinghurst novel in five portraits. These elisions across class, culture and country, the trust and the lineage of a logical, not biological, family are defining features of that era’s gay substructure and safety net. Grant’s drawings are not ephemeral pornography: they embody the secretive society gay men needed and shaped for their own survival when their lives were illegal. The shock value of these pictures is not in the penises and the penetration; it is in the tenderness and the trust that allowed them to endure into an era where they can be seen without shame.

To March 2023, charleston.org.uk

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