s The Ass - Hull Museums Collections

The Ass

A highly innovative artist, Duncan Grant was partly responsible, along with others of the Bloomsbury Group, for introducing the radical ideas of French Post Impressionism into a firmly traditional Britain. The ‘Bloomsberries’ as they were nicknamed, centred around Roger Fry (1866-1934), Clive (1881-1964) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and her sister Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). It was Roger Fry who had arranged the highly influential Post Impressionist exhibitions in London of 1910 and 1912, which included work by both Picasso (1881-1973) and Matisse (1869-1954), who Grant particularly admired. The Ass, the second of two versions of the same subject, shows Grant using Picasso’s style of a violent flattening of space.