(by Luciano Fioramonti) (ANSA) - ROME, OCTOBER 25 - It began with interminable evenings every Thursday in which one could compare in total freedom on art, work, love, politics.
Then that coterie of intellectuals took the form of a commune, in which women and men experimented with new forms of coexistence without oremore ties, creating a scandal in London at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Inventing a different way of living using writing and images, art as an engine of change, breaking with tradition and old social patterns.
"It is an exhibition of culture and freedom", so Nadia Fusini, a great expert of Virginia Woolf, defines the story curated with Luca Scarlin for Palazzo Altemps, which puts the adventure of the English writer and her sister Vanessa, painter, at the center of the scene. artists, poets, thinkers, economists united under the name of the district of London in which they were based.
It is built on an enveloping game of rooms "Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing life", a refined immersion in the cultural climate of those particular years of the turn of the century that the National Roman Museum and Electa, with the collaboration of the National Portrait Gallery in London, propose until next 12 February.
Rooms like the chapters of the story, centered on the house in Gordon Square 26, in an area that at the time did not enjoy a good reputation where the sisters Stephen with the brothers Thoby and Adrian had moved after the death of their father in 1904 leaving the elegant mansion in Kensington .
Modern and emancipated, open to relationships without any sexual choice conditioning, "The Bloomsbury People" dreamed, like Leonard Woolf, of a classless society,
and artists no longer confined to their ivory towers.
Among them was John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized economic thinking and laid the foundations of the welfare state;
the historian Lytton Strachey and, above all, the critic and painter Roger Fry, a central figure in suggesting another point of view on art and on the very way to create it.
From the first section "A room of one's own" as the title of the essay published in 1929 that made Virginia Woolf an icon of the global feminist movement, the path winds through the paintings and portraits of the protagonists of this avant-garde so sui generis, crossing the chapter of the Hogart Press, the publishing house started by setting up a press to print their literary works, essays on politics and psychoanalysis in an elegant dress.
The beautiful catalog punctuates the itinerary, offering itself on the turning points, like the clamor aroused by the exhibition of contemporary painters improperly presented as Post-Impressionists that Roger Fry organized in 1910 by putting together 21 works by Cézanne, 37 by Gauguin, 20 VanGogh, Rouault, Picasso and Matisse.
The exhibition wanted to amaze but the result went further, visitors rose up contesting the value of the paintings, some literally spat on the canvases.
The scandal only produced attention and publicity so much that a few months later Fry replied by presenting a group of post-impressionist English painters and in 1912 a second installment of the shock exhibition.
"Let me be clear - observes Fusini - the Bloomsbury circle was neither a movement with a program, nor a religion with its cult, nor a cell of extremist subversion. In Bloomsbury a new dimension of the spirit was discovered in the community and a miracle took place, that of opening Of the mind".
Bloomsberries are not to be considered an avant-garde like those that raged in the rest of Europe.
"They shared a profound sense of the need for change: there was an urgent need for new intellectual, cultural and political customs ... We had to break with conventions and lead a freer life".
And if one of the objectives of the exhibition is the parallelism with Palazzo Altemps, born as a noble house in the heart of Rome and seated in prestigious literary salons in the nineteenth century, the promoters invite us to consider how much that generation of the Thirties looked to Europe and, in particular, to France, as the highest cultural expression of that period.
To do, to elaborate, to field energies as a sign of the desire to live, this is what they aimed at.
"Everyone had the right to model themselves freely", concludes NadiaFusini.
"Because living is tout court an act of,