| Popis: |
This chapter explores the Bloomsbury group’s celebration of intimacy as a fundamental human good and its promotion of sexual freedom as a means of individual, social and political betterment. Avery focuses on the world of late Bloomsbury, where an intimate relation developed between Duncan Grant and Paul Roche (a young writer and for a time a Catholic priest) – a relation which sheds new light on Bloomsbury’s private, artistic, ethical, political and spiritual commitment to intimacy from the regions of domestic space to non-heteronormative erotic relations. Grant took Roche as the model for two portraits: as Narcissus in an unfinished and still unpublished novella, and as the compassionate Jesus in a Lincoln Cathedral mural – ‘artistic Bloomsbury’s grandest public representation of queer Christian intimacy’ – that together embody a productive tension between physical desire and spiritual ambition, sensuousness and religiosity, paganism and Christianity. The chapter shows that in the Bloomsbury painters’ church murals of the 1940s and ’50s, in Grant and Roche’s friendship and love, in Grant’s pictorial and literary representations of Roche, and in Roche’s own writing, ‘Bloomsbury’s commitment to intimacy achieved a particularly sacred intensity’. |
