The Wild Party

The Omega Workshops, founded in early 20th-century England, blurred the boundaries between visual and decorative art. Now, the guild — and the objects it created — has become totemic for a new generation of designers.

- Nancy Hass

IN 1910, A SHOW opened at London’s Grafton Galleries that shocked the British upper class. In the waning years of uptight Edwardianism, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” introduced works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon, all of whom sharpened the gentle haze of Impressionism to a jagged edge with geometric distortion and unnatural palettes. Their paintings heralded continental Modernism and its abstractions — and the English, who were still in thrall to narrative-driven pastoral scenes, detested them.

Such derision, however, only motivated the man who had curated the show and named the movement:

Roger Fry, the then 44-year-old critic, painter and polymathic member of the Bloomsbury Group, a set of aristocratic bohemian intellectuals whose name derived from the London neighborhood where they lived. “On or about December of 1910, human character changed,” wrote the novelist Virginia Woolf, another Bloomsbury member, of Fry’s show and its aftershocks. Fry continued to write voluminously about Post-Impressionism and curated a second, equally maligned London show on the subject in 1912, but that was not enough for him; he wanted to live it. So, in 1913, with his fellow Bloomsburians, including the artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister), he opened the Omega Workshops, a shortlived but influential craft utopia that created furniture, linens, rugs, ceramics, children’s toys and clothing, all meant to render in three dimensions Post-Impressionism’s unfettered emotion and commitment to the mark of the human hand.