GLR May June

dealer Harry Lunn, gallerists Charles Cowles and Klaus Kertess, artists Judy Linn and Lynne David, and British heiresses Cather- ine Guinness and Caterine Milinaire. Diane von Furstenberg brought the young Arnold Schwarzenegger along. One chronicler of the age had a particular take on the spec- tacle: “Fran Lebowitz, then a writer for Andy Warhol’s Inter- view , respected the pursuit of art as something pure and true. She had known Mapplethorpe as a struggling artist in the back room of Max’s Kansas City and considered the occasion not as the beginning of his legitimacy, but as the end: “‘I thought the party was a joke,’ she said, likening Robert in that context to a once rebellious girl ‘showing you her big diamond ring and telling you she’s marrying a rich doctor and moving to Green- wich, Connecticut.’” Today, Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe might have cashed in as a cable reality show. After the sale of his collection to the Getty, and before his

slow withering fromAIDS, Wagstaff moved on to a new area of collecting and market-building: “æsthetic silver” from England, the Continent, and the U.S., including serving pieces like cof- fee pots, butter dishes, napkin rings, a Tiffany tray. Gefter ar- gues that Wagstaff was moved to recognize early and deeply these sparkling artisanal works otherwise languishing in the ob- scurity of the arcane, theorizing that his homosexuality is what drove his desire to retrieve the “unconventional and unexplored ... to invent a parallel universe of symbols and meanings—such as camp, for example—in a society that had for so long rejected his kind.” But we may also wonder if there’s something pecu- liarly “gay” in this need to acquire and collect anything at all. I cannot escape the ghoulish sense that all this acquisitiveness was Wagstaff’s race against time, as if he might escape the final reckoning since, after all, there was always yet one more object out there to be admired, studied, and catalogued.

Loving in Triangles

T HE DESCENDANTS of the original members of the Bloomsbury Group—a name taken from the neighborhood in which they lived, not coined until the 1960s—are very much among us. Earlier this year, Van Gogh: A Power Seething , by Julian Bell, a painter and writer who’s the grandson of

Bell, and Leonard Woolf. They held weekly salons to discuss art, literature, and politics. At first, the sisters were the only women invited. They would frequently meet outside their salon, in various per- mutations, sometimes traveling together, sometimes forming passionate, platonic— or even romantic— friendships, regardless

M ARTHA E. S TONE

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar Ballantine Books. 350 pages, $26.

Vanessa Bell (and great-nephew of Virginia Woolf), received front-page coverage in The New York Times Book Review . Vanessa and her younger sister Virginia are the eponymous title characters of a wonderfully appealing and compulsively read- able novel by Priya Parmar. It’s told with style and authority by a writer with just one previous book to her credit, a historical novel about actress Nell Gwynn. Parmar’s narrative relies for the most part on an imagined

of gender or assumed sexual orientation. Strachey is quoted (in the fictional diary) as saying: “We all love in triangles.” The diary frequently veers off into extensive dialog that few diarists would ever be able to replicate exactly. There’s much tragedy, too, in Thoby’s 1906 death (from typhoid, contracted in Greece). “Did you wake up in time to see your last morning?” Vanessa’s diary entry wondered on the day he died. Parmar creates tremendous tension around the many emo-

diary kept by Vanessa Bell from 1905 to 1912. Before her marriage to Clive Bell, Vanessa had been, in real life, a student of John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy School and an admirer of Whistler’s works. In an almost throwaway comment on the pitfalls of fictionalizing such a well-docu- mented group of people, Parmar writes in an introductory note: “For me the difficulty came in finding enough room for invention in the negative spaces they left behind.” To say that she channeled Vanessa Bell would be facile, but her depth of scholarship and obvious deep regard for the members of the Bloomsbury Group are apparent. In 1905, Virginia and Vanessa’s beloved brother Thoby Stephen, along with friends he had met at Trinity College, Cambridge, moved back to London. Among them were Lytton Strachey, Clive

tional illnesses that Virginia Woolf en- dured: “A few years ago, Virginia talked for three days without stopping for food or sleep or a bath. ... [Her] words unraveled into elemental sounds: quick, gruff, gut- tural vowels that snapped and broke over anyone who tried to reach her. Her fea- tures foxed with anger growing sly and sharp. ... [She] spent a month in the nurs- ing home recovering.” Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, and Virginia may or may not have had an affair. (Strachey was quite sure there was nothing going on. “It is your attention she’s after, not his,” he told Vanessa.) Soon, Vanessa found herself in- volved with the British artist and critic Roger Fry, whose wife was permanently institutionalized for mental illness. Fry, who “galvanized Bloomsbury,” in the words of Richard Shone, author of Art of

Vanessa Bell, 1910

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