Anything went | Fashionable anti-fashion at Charleston’s new gallery

Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, 1917., oil on canvas. Acquired with the assistance of the national Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund, and the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund. Courtesy of The Charleston Trust.

The economist John Maynard Keynes sits in the garden of Charleston Farmhouse in the summer of 1917, painted by his host, friend and former lover Duncan Grant. At the time Keynes was working for the Treasury, designing the terms of credit with Britain’s wartime allies: legend has it that while sitting for the portrait he was drafting a telegram ‘to ensure the economic survival of the United Kingdom’.

The painting is in the collection of the Charleston Trust, and is in the inaugural exhibition in their new gallery in Lewes, East Sussex, which opened with a sumptuous private view this week, attended by around 500 guests. The gallery is situated in the building which was, until the early summer, used by the Lewes District Council as their main HQ: it has been a remarkable feat to convert it in such a short time into an art venue.

The show is titled Bring No Clothes, and it examines the Charleston group’s liberal attitude to clothing, and the enduring influence this has had on the fashion industry, up to the present day, with brands such as Dior, Fendi, Burberry, Comme des Garçons and Erdem acknowledging inspiration from the radical group’s designs and philosophies. Vanessa Bell and co eschewed and subverted the formal restrictions of Victorian and Edwardian fashion, and this is reflected in the clothes they wore – or didn’t wear – recorded in the photographs and portraits they took and painted of one another, many of which adorn the walls of this show, alongside Charleston-inspired items of clothing. The title of the piece is taken from Bell’s stated dress code for parties and weekends at Charleston, also attended by the likes of her sister Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and Lyton Strachey; another mantra was ‘don’t trouble to dress’.

Keynes is wearing a colourful hat and no tie, but as the caption points out, ‘even though [he] is in the privacy of Charleston, where anything goes, he still wore tailoring’. Other paintings in the show, notably a self portrait of Grant wearing nothing but a turban, and another Grant portrait of his long-term lover Paul Roche louchely reclining on a divan draped in green satin shorts and gown, show that other guests were even less formal in their attire. Again, the caption is worth quoting: ‘Roche is in recline, but the alertness of his body suggests he is ready for, or recovering from, action.’ Racy stuff: much is made of Grant’s ‘Queer gaze’.

There are two gallery spaces in Charleston’s new Lewes venue: upstairs you can see an exuberant exhibition of the work of contemporary Kent-based artist Jonathan Baldock. Baldock works across installation, performance and sculpture, creating colourful large-scale works, in fabric and ceramics, which are theatrically camp and humorous, with dark, macabre undertones. It is full of faces, flowers, hands and tentacles. The show concludes with a four-poster double bed, covered by a Charleston-influenced bedspread, on which visitors are invited to recline. One imagines Duncan Grant would have approved.