Duncan Grant: A Biography - Softcover

Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and critic. Her acclaimed book, Roger Fry: Art and Life, was followed by a biography of Vanessa Bell, which led to an invitation ten years later to write on Duncan Grant. In between she wrote British Art since 1900, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography and Dance Till the Stars Come Down: A Life of John Minton. She is currently editor of Charleston Magazine.

A full-bodied but strangely affectless biography of the minor English painter and decorative artist. As the Bloomsbury industry continues to expand, its rapidly running up against the law of diminishing returns. With superior, if not definitive, b iographies already in place for all the major figures, only the secondary and tertiary characters are leftthough as second-raters go, Grant is near the top of the pile. But his mild artistic abilities will always be overshadowed by whom he knew and whom h e slept with. Having already written a biography of Grants fellow painter and lover, Virginia Woolfs sister, Vanessa Bell (1983), Spalding is well qualified to delve into the emotional complexities of Grants life. Drawing on letters and diaries, she detai ls his affairs with the leading men of Bloomsbury, from Maynard Keynes to Lytton Strachey to Vanessa Bells brother Adrian Stephen, but the love of his life was Bell. Despite his homosexuality and ongoing affairs and her marriage, they set up house togethe r and had a daughterwho eventually went on to marry one of Grants former lovers, David Garnett. Such polymorphousness has long attracted biographers to Bloomsbury, but Spalding also spends a judicious amount of time on Grants art. She believes that log-ro lling praise from intimates such as Roger Fry and Kenneth Clark, paradoxically, was largely responsible for Grants reputation plummeting in his later years. Unquestionably, Grant was a decent copyist and a reasonable colorist with a good sense of line and form, but his style tended to ebb and flow with whatever was in vogue at the time, so that it is hard to pin down anything in his work as definitively ``Duncan Grant.'' Spaldings biography suffers from a similar problem. Though she has all the facts, she is never quite able to capture the essence of the man. The only thing missing from these hundreds of exhaustively researched pages is Duncan Grant. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.