Reassessing mental health through the lens of the Bloomsbury group

Curator Hazel McMichael characterizes the group as a “case study” for examining how psychiatric and psychoanalytic concepts permeated their lives and art. The exhibition embraces the term “mad” as a source of pride and identity, aligning with movements that reclaim stigmatized language. It acknowledges Woolf’s tragic suicide, while questioning the societal perceptions of mental illness.

While Woolf received private care, enabling her to continue working, her peer, artist Helen Coombe, experienced a different fate. After being admitted to the Retreat asylum in York, Coombe’s promising career faltered, ending with her spending the last 26 years of her life institutionalized. Coombe was married to Roger Fry, who championed modern art, notably curating the 1910 exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which was derided by critics as “the output of a lunatic asylum.”

The Charleston exhibition juxtaposes works from that controversial exhibition with previously unseen pieces by Coombe, including stained glass designs and a drawing of Narcissus. Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister, benefited from Coombe’s activism, which advocated for women to study partially draped figures at the Royal Academy. A forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain will explore Bell’s extensive body of work, alongside that of Duncan Grant, her friend, lover, and co-owner of Charleston.

The exhibition also sheds light on the experiences of Mary Elizabeth Wilson, a servant to the Bell family. Bell documented Wilson’s mental disturbance in a comedic piece read aloud at the Memoir Club in 1921, referring to her as “Mad Mary.” Wilson’s story provides a stark contrast to the privileged lives of the Bloomsbury group, who enjoyed access to resources like “a room of one’s own.”

Contemporary art installations further enrich the narrative. The Mad Heritage Collective, a group with lived experience of mental illness, created a piece using excerpts from Bell’s “Mad Mary” essay. Louisa Fairclough’s sound installation, “The World Went Out of Tune With Itself,” recreates her seven-year experience with psychosis through discordant electronic music.

The exhibition also addresses the family history of mental illness within Woolf’s lineage. Only two photographs of her half-sister, Laura Stephen, survive, one taken upon her admittance to Earlswood Asylum in 1893. Laura’s case notes suggest a possible link between her mental state and the sexual abuse suffered by Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

The exhibition confronts the Bloomsbury group’s complex relationship with eugenics, acknowledging that figures like John Maynard Keynes held leadership positions within the Eugenics Society. It also explores the influence of psychoanalysis, noting that Adrian and Karin Stephen, Woolf’s brother and his wife, were prominent practitioners, and that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Freud’s works, with James Strachey translating key terms into clinical jargon.

Finally, the exhibition examines how therapeutic approaches, such as those employed by Roger Vittoz, impacted the creative output of writers like T.S. Eliot, whose “The Waste Land” may have been influenced by Vittoz’s “brain control” techniques.