Viva Brighton Issue #80 October 2019

ART
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Opening room of the Omega Workshops, 33 Fitzroy Square, London. © The Charleston Trust.
Post-Impressionist Living
The Omega Workshops
It is one hundred years since the Omega
Workshops closed their doors at 33 Fitzroy
Square, in London – just six years after the
pioneering design enterprise had opened.
Their bright, bold colours, abstract patterns,
Cubist-style lampstands and Fauvist-inspired
textiles were perhaps a little too avant-garde
for the mainstream audience. But a major new
exhibition at Charleston – featuring around
200 Omega objects – explores the workshop’s
lasting influence as well as its radical
beginnings.
The Omega Workshops were founded in
1913 by the painter and influential art critic
Roger Fry. He had been instrumental in the
introduction of modern art to England in
the early years of the twentieth century and,
in 1910, had organised an exhibition that
included works by Cézanne, Matisse, Seurat,
Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso – all of them
largely unknown in the UK at that time.
The exhibition shocked and outraged the
establishment, but it energised younger artists
– Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant among them
– and changed the way they painted.
As well as Fine Art, Fry was also interested
in domestic design, but was frustrated by the
British tendency to constantly reference the
past. “He wanted to get that Post-Impressionist
aesthetic into the home,” explains Dr Darren
Clarke, Head of Collections at Charleston and
curator of the exhibition.
To that end, Fry set up the Omega Workshops,
bringing this new sensibility to the decorative
arts. “It was seen as quite a novelty but there
was an excitement to it,” explains Darren. “In
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