Dora Carrington was, and remains, an enigma. A rebel who shunned the public gaze, an outsider who immersed herself in the Bloomsbury Group, an artist who seldom showed her work, an exhibitionist who happily posed nude yet so self-effacing that she disowned part of her name. Dora, she said, wasn’t her. Carrington was enough.
Dorothy Parker’s quip about the Bloomsbury Group, “lived in squares, painted in circles, loved in triangles”, applied to Carrington in spades. In love with Lytton Strachey, she married Ralph Partridge, who was in love with her, because Strachey was in love with Partridge. Together, they settled into what Carrington called her triangle of happiness, initially at Tidmarsh Mill near Reading and later at Ham Spray House near Hungerford, two pretty country houses within easy reach of Garsington, Bloomsbury’s Oxfordshire home from home.
The polygonic structure of Bloomsbury’s relationships added complicating side affairs, but Carrington remained atomically bonded to Strachey. When he died in 1932, she killed herself, aged 38. Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, at Pallant House in Chichester, seeks to bring her back to life and into the public gaze she avoided.
More than 100 paintings by Carrington, her friends, and her lovers, together with photos, letters, objects, and archival materials, map her passage from prize-winning Slade student to Bloomsbury portraitist, post-impressionist landscape painter and maker of kitschy “tinsel pictures”—her nod to handicraft commercialism.
The show’s co-curators, biographer Ariane Bankes and literary editor Anne Chisolm, aim to “reposition Carrington in the history of modern British art and demonstrate the relevance of her remarkable life and work today.”
They convincingly present a talented and well-trained painter, able to hold her own in a brilliant Slade cohort that included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, and her close friend and admirer Mark Gertler, several of whose works are included in the show. Early paintings of her father and a pencil drawing of a domestic interior scene – father in a bath chair, brother playing the violin, mother stiff-backed and prim at the piano, show a sensibility to character and family dynamics. Fine figure studies and painterly portraits, mainly of Bloomsbury friends and lovers — E.M Forster, Partridge, Bunny Garnett, an etiolated Strachey reclining with the book — are proof of a sensitive eye. An English landscape reminiscent of Der Blaue Reiter and a Spanish landscape fitting somewhere between Henri Rousseau and Georgia O’Keefe speaks to an acquaintance with the wider post-impressionist world.
None of this convincingly justifies the title of the show—no evidence of development beyond the cosy British middle-class naughtiness of the Bloomsbury world. Cubism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, and all the bubbling ferment of European culture in cultural chaos seem to have passed her by. One of the liveliest pieces in the show, an insouciant self-portrait, dates from 1913, her Slade student days. As for her current relevance, that seems to rest more on resonance with today’s LGBTQ agenda than on her artistic legacy.
But she died so tragically young. She might have turned out differently if she had had enough time.
Words/Top Photo: Brian Childs Detail Dora Carrington self-portrait 1913
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until April 27, 2025