Omega Workshops
Omega Workshops Ltd. was one of Roger Fry - a member of the Bloomsbury Group - Established in 1913, experimental workshop for interior designers in London. The workshop was concluded after the First World War in 1919 for financial reasons.
History
The painter and art critic Roger Fry organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post- Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries, London. The London audience was shocked and felt provoked; the press also published negative reviews. Despite the negative reactions, there was a second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912 by Fry, in addition to contemporary English painting mainly works by Henri Matisse, the Fauves as well as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were issued. The term post-impressionism was coined by Fry.
In July 1913 Fry founded with the help of his friends and co-directors Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and financial support of art lovers like George Bernard Shaw in an elegant, created by Robert Adam town house at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, the workshop for interiors. She had to be transferred to the target, the modern art on interior design and decoration, and book design. The design workshop consisted of an exhibition room and studios. It was there, for example murals, offered glass windows, painted furniture, ceramics, fabrics, books and much more for sale. In the autumn of 1914 appeared the Omega Workshops Descriptive catalog with texts by Fry.
Unlike its predecessors, William Morris and the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement Fry did not intend to achieve social reforms, and he also wanted to not insert a protest against the mechanical production of handicraft products. He was concerned only about the abolition of the wrong in his view, the separation of "fine and decorative arts", so the fine arts and the applied arts. An example was the workshop, founded in Paris in 1911 Les Ateliers de Martine of the fashion designer Paul Poiret.
To working for the Omega Workshops for young artists included except the members of the Bloomsbury Group Fry, Grant and Bell, for example, for a brief period, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier- Brzeska and the British painter Percy Wyndham Lewis. Lewis left in October 1913 with three other employees, Omega in the dispute, opened the Rebel Art Centre in London, and was co-founder of Vorticism. Other members of the Omega Workshops were Dora Carrington, Henri Doucet, Winifred Gill and Nina Hamnett. The participating artists did not sign their works with their name, but by the Greek letter Ω. They worked three and a half days a week for Omega, their merit was 30 shillings. This income was rather small, but reliable and important for the rather unpopular artists because they could devote themselves in the remaining time of their art.
Among the buyers of exclusive products included, among others Maud Cunard, the mother of Nancy Cunard, Mechtilde Lichnowsky, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Friends of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and Clive Bell. Virginia Woolf was inspired by the Omega Workshops and founded with her husband Leonard Sidney Woolf 1917, the Hogarth Press, whose publications they initially translated and printed by hand on a platen press. Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell designed envelopes for the publisher. 1940 Virginia Woolf wrote a biography of Roger Fry.
Since affected in the long term for the Fauvism, Cubism, and from post-Impressionism, objects made with expensive materials were too few buyers, partly due to the outbreak of the First World War, the Omega Workshops project had to be set in 1919 for financial reasons. Fry recently worked alone in the shop at Fitzroy Square, as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were drawn in 1916 in her country house Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex.
The British government body English Heritage praised Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops in 2010 with a blue plaque that was attached to the house Fitzroy Square 33.
Exhibitions
A collection of furniture and other works from the Omega Workshops will be on display in Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, the former country house of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. In 2009, an exhibition was held at the Courtauld Gallery in London entitled: Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19.