On the ingratitude of artists receiving a guaranteed income from a benefactor

(“Vanessa Bell in a Deckchair” by Roger Fry)

From Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946, Economist, Philosopher, Statesman:

The autumn of 1925 found Keynes, as usual, complaining of overwork (‘too much to do, no leisure, no peace, too much to think about…’). A substantial commitment was organising the London Artists’ Association, in homage to both art and friendship. The idea was to give the leading Bloomsbury painters and their protégés - a group headed by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry - a guaranteed income, so they could paint without worrying about money. Perhaps Keynes saw it as a way of compensating Duncan for the loss of his inheritance. He persuaded Sam Courtauld and two other businessmen to join him in guaranteeing the members an income of £150 a year. The Association held their first London show, at the Leicester Galleries, in April 1926. It was hailed by their relentless publicist Clive Bell as ‘an event of capital importance … no less than the reassertion of an English school’. By 1929, 7000 works of art, worth £22,000, had been sold.

From the start tensions dogged the Association’s life, which reflected those between Tilton [Keynes’s house] and Charleston [country home of the Bloomsbury’s]. Keynes wanted to bring in non-Bloomsbury painters like Matthew Smith and Paul Nash, partly to strengthen the financial basis; Duncan, Vanessa and Roger Fry objected to his interference. Keynes was right, for many reasons, not least because he foresaw that Duncan and Vanessa would get tired of subsidising the non-earners. But it was a fixed idea at Charleston that Keynes had no artistic judgement: his role should be to pay up and leave artistic policy to them. ‘If one wants to do something’ Vanessa wrote to Roger Fry, ‘[the only way] is not to listen to a word he says, to let him talk, keeping one’s attention firmly fixed to one’s own ideas, & the repeat them regardless of what he’s said.’