The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (57 page)

 
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Bleyl , Fritz
.

See
BRÜCKE
.

 
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block book
.

A book printed from
woodcut
blocks on which text and illustrations are combined, rather than by means of movable type. Block books were made in China probably as early as the 6th cent. AD, but in Europe the earliest known examples seem to date from around 1450, that is, at very much the same time that Gutenburg introduced printing from movable metal type. (At one time they were thought to predate movable type, but they are now thought to have been introduced very slightly after it.) As the entire text had to be cut letter by letter on wood blocks, the process was extremely laborious and suitable only for short books in continuous popular demand. Very few block books were executed after 1480 and their place in the history of printing is as sterile descendants of the woodcut rather than as ancestors of printing from movable type.

 
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(1564–1651).
Dutch historical and landscape painter and engraver, the son of a sculptor and architect,
Cornelis I Bloemaert
(
c.
1525–
c.
1595). Most of his life was spent in Utrecht, where for many years he was the leading painter and an outstanding teacher.
Both
,
Honthorst
,
Terbrugghen
, and virtually all the Utrecht painters of the period who attained any kind of distinction trained with him. Bloemaert was a good learner as well as a good teacher and rapidly assimilated the new ideas his pupils brought back from Italy. For a time he became a
Caravaggesque
painter and late in his career adopted some aspects of the
classicism
of the
Carracci
. Although his landscape paintings are firmly in the
Mannerist
tradition, his landscape drawings are naturalistic and his most original works. Many of his drawings were etched and published by his son
Frederick
(
c.
1610–69) in a well-known drawing book for the use of art students. Bloemaert had three other painter sons, who like Frederick were his pupils:
Hendrick
(
c.
1601–72),
Cornelis II
(
c.
1603–
c.
1684), and
Adriaen
(1609–66).

 
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(1496–1561).
Netherlandish artist. He entered the Guild of Painters in Bruges in 1519, and also worked as an architect and designed sculpture, tapestries, and pageant decorations. In 1550 he and Jan van
Scorel
were commissioned to restore the van
Eycks'
celebrated Ghent Altarpiece. The
triptych
of
The Martyrdom of SS. Cosmas and Damian
(S. Jacques, Bruges, 1523) is typical of his work as a painter in its profusion of Italianate ornament. By the 16th century Bruges had declined greatly in importance as a trading centre as its port silted up, and Blondeel represents one of the last sparks of its great artistic tradition.

 
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Bloomsbury Group
.

A loosely knit association of writers, artists, and critics which had an important influence on cultural and intellectual life in Britain during the early decades of the 20th cent. The association stemmed from student friendships formed at Cambridge, where many of the group had been ‘Apostles’—members of a semi-secret intellectual club—and took its name from the Bloomsbury district of London, where members frequently met at the houses of Clive and Vanessa
Bell
or of Vanessa's sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. There was no formal membership and the group was unified by no common social or aesthetic ideology; the ‘Bloomsberries’ were linked rather by attitudes and interests which have caused them to be represented as an intellectual élite in revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of Victorian society. In the visual arts, it was during the 1920s and early 1930s that the influence of Bloomsbury was most effective. The persistent propaganda of Roger
Fry
for
Cézanne
and the
Post-Impressionists
converted ridicule and outraged rejection into interest, if not full understanding, heralding the reaction from the anecdotal sentimentalism of 19th-cent. criticism and laying the foundation for a more just appreciation of the aims of contemporary art. Apart from Fry and Bell, the painters associated with the group included Dora Carrington (1893–1932), Duncan
Grant
, and Henry
Lamb
. The group had ceased to exist in its original form by the early 1930s and the suicide of Virginia Woolf in 1941 marked the end of its era. In the 1940s and 1950s the group's aims and achievements fell out of favour and its members were attacked as dilettante and élitist, but since the late 1960s there has been a great revival of interest in all aspects of it.