Keynes, Art and Aesthetics

Art occupied a very important place in Keynes’s life and thought, more than for any other economist.1 His wife, Lydia Lopokova, was a ballet dancer. His great friend and once lover, Duncan Grant, was a painter. Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, was one of his main confidents. Most of his closest friends were artists, writers, art and literary critics. The majority of them were part, with him, of the Bloomsbury set. Not an artist, which he regretted, Keynes was an eager consumer of art. The first art into which he was initiated, by his parents, was theatre and he would remain attached to it until the end of his life. In 1896 the New Theatre was founded in Cambridge, where the best companies in England would perform. His mother wrote of him: “he thus acquired that love of drama which developed throughout his life and led to his building the Arts Theater as a gift to the Borough of Cambridge” (Scrase and Croft 1983, p. 7). Keynes later turned to ballet, especially on the arrival of Diaghileff’s company in London in 1911. He would rapidly become a passionate amateur of this art bringing together dance, music and painting. He discovered impressionist painting in Paris, where he was travelling with his mother in 1905, and started to buy pictures in 1908. He continued to buy regularly, from his friends and other English painters and, starting from the Degas sale in Paris in 1918, he began acquiring oeuvres from great international masters: Cézanne, Delacroix, Matisse, Picasso, Seurat, Renoir, Derain, Braque and Courbet.