Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIn so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,\u201d wrote the art critic Kenneth Clark. Fry \u2014 prolific art critic and writer, and a painter himself \u2014 was a passionate champion of the latest work coming from France in the early 20th century, and determined to convert the English-speaking world to his way of thinking.\u00a0He was also a central figure in the circle of thinkers, writers and artists dubbed the Bloomsbury Group (for the London district in which many of them lived), and of whom Dorothy Parker later quipped \u201cthey lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles\u201d. One of those triangles \u2014 Virginia Woolf\u2019s sister Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett \u2014 moved to a spartan farmhouse between Brighton and Eastbourne during the first world war, because Grant and Garnett, as conscientious objectors, were required to work on the land.\u00a0How much of that they did is unclear, but that Sussex farmhouse, called Charleston \u2014 richly decorated by Grant and Bell with exuberant paintings on doors, walls and furniture, and hung throughout with works by those artists and their friends \u2014 became home to the group\u2019s intellectual heart, regularly visited by Fry, the Woolfs, Vanessa\u2019s husband Clive Bell, and dozens of others. In the outlying barns now expertly converted into galleries, a new exhibition, Inventing Post-Impressionism, helps to explain how Britain finally came to accept the best western art of the early 20th century, and Bloomsbury\u2019s part in that.\u00a0The works here \u2014 few but very fine \u2014 come on loan from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, a superb art deco building currently closed for an up-do. There, during the 1930s and \u201940s, its inspired founding director, Thomas Bodkin, put together one of the outstanding collections of art assembled in Britain in the 20th century.\u00a0The show opens with a couple of core impressionist pieces \u2014 just to orientate us \u2014 including a glorious, tranquil \u201cThe Pond at Montfoucault\u201d (1875), sparkling with light, by Camille Pissarro, a central impressionist figure and, appropriately, something of a mentor to younger artists including C\u00e9zanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat. Next we can see how that new generation \u2014 dubbed post-impressionists \u2014 wanted to move away into works of more emotional intensity: Van Gogh\u2019s \u201cA Peasant Woman Digging\u201d (1885), made only 10 years after Pissarro\u2019s dreamy bucolic vision, could hardly be more of a contrast in depicting the lot of the rural poor, using sombre, almost threatening earthy colours for its stark portrait of a woman bent double, her face hidden in relentless labour.\u00a0In the same room, a snappy portrait by Andr\u00e9 Derain (later a member of the fauve group), a quasi-traditional landscape by Gauguin and a \u201cComposition with Fruit\u201d by Fernand L\u00e9ger \u2014 already embracing cubism \u2014 show the range of styles and techniques that sit under the loose portmanteau of post-impressionism. A small gem is an intimate portrayal of the artist\u2019s mother (1900) by \u00c9douard Vuillard: dressing her hair at a mirror, her face averted, her patterned dress almost blending her into rather fussy domestic surrounds, its then-radical skewed composition shows the influence of Japonisme, the craze for works emerging from Japan at the time.A very mixed bag, therefore, but each a choice piece, and showing many of the artists that so excited Roger Fry. In November 1910, Fry had organised in London an exhibition entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists. He\u2019d struggled, according to Charleston\u2019s exhibition, to come up with the term; he apparently said to a colleague: \u201cOh, let\u2019s just call them post-impressionists. At any rate, they came after the impressionists . . .\u201d\u00a0The post-impressionists, therefore, were never a self-conscious grouping. But they were united in seeing their artistic predecessors the impressionists as limited in endlessly seeking to relay the effects of light, water, sky, shadows: theirs was a quest for more interior feeling and more symbolic impact.\u00a0The post-impressionists saw the impressionists as limited. Their quest was for more interior feeling and more symbolic impactFry\u2019s exhibition was a thunderclap, introducing the British public for the first time to C\u00e9zanne, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and others. Of course, it was roundly trashed. Fry\u2019s reputation as an art critic took a nosedive and he was branded everything from a subverter of morals to an unscrupulous self-advertiser. Two years later, 1912 saw a second post-impressionist show organised by the undeterred Fry, which included fresh names, including Russians and some avant-garde British artists: Duncan Grant; Fry himself, Eric Gill, Wyndham Lewis. By now, the term Fry had hastily invented was established, and the international reception of these artists too.There\u2019s a comic element in the show, for light relief: a very funny series of watercolour cartoons by Henry Tonks, made around 1922, entitled \u201cThe Conversion of St Roger\u201d. It shows Fry as a messianic evangelist preaching the gospel of the new art. In one frame, he is ludicrously holding up a dead cat and haranguing a bemused audience of fellow artists while the small, pudgy figure of Clive Bell shouts \u201cC\u00e9zannah! C\u00e9zannah!\u201d (a play on \u201cHosannah\u201d).\u00a0The best is last. The undisputed star of this gorgeous show is a small, glowing still life by C\u00e9zanne, no bigger than a laptop screen, a simple depiction of seven apples on a table. It\u2019s something of a homecoming for a Bloomsbury legend, \u201cthe C\u00e9zanne in the hedge\u201d.\u00a0In 1918, Fry told the economist John Maynard Keynes \u2014 avid art lover and Bloomsbury insider (he was Duncan Grant\u2019s former lover and lifelong friend) \u2014 about a significant sale in Paris of works owned by Edgar Degas. Keynes, who advised the government on art as much else, persuaded the then director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Holmes, to make the trip across the Channel with him \u2014 with a useful \u00a320,000 (about \u00a31.4mn today) of government funds in his pocket.\u00a0With the war still raging in France, buyers were few and prices low. Holmes acquired impressive treasures for the National Gallery \u2014 by Manet, Delacroix, Corot, Ingres, even Gauguin. Yet, despite Keynes at his side and Fry urging him on from afar, he felt C\u00e9zanne was a step too far \u2014 so Keynes bought the \u201cStill Life with Apples\u201d (1877-78) for himself, for just \u00a3500 (roughly \u00a336,000 today).\u00a0But getting it home was a task. The muddy track from the main road up to Charleston farmhouse, where he by then had a bedroom of his own, was impassable to vehicles and Keynes had to walk. Overladen with packages and luggage, he simply stuffed the C\u00e9zanne into the hedge on the quiet country road, to be collected later.\u00a0Keynes always kept the C\u00e9zanne apples over his bed at Charleston where, on a small plain table, gazing out at the tranquil pond, in 1919 he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace. On his death in 1946 he bequeathed the picture to King\u2019s College, Cambridge; today it hangs in Cambridge\u2019s Fitzwilliam Museum. Now on loan \u201cback home\u201d at Charleston, it seems more than itself: it tells an eloquent story of how the lives of this group of talented people, centred around a smallish country farmhouse, touched so many aspects of the wider world, in politics, economics, literature, art history and more. This, beyond their individual talents, was probably the Bloomsbury group\u2019s real significance.\u00a0To November 2; charleston.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIn so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,\u201d wrote the art critic Kenneth Clark. Fry \u2014 prolific art critic and writer, and a painter himself \u2014 was a passionate champion of the latest work coming<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-255797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255799,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255797\/revisions\/255799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}